Update CXXIII: Alternative Viewpoints
JB CXXIII: Alternative Viewpoints

The door swings open, and a small team of identical men and women in neat black and white enter the lair of the Residents. They're all wearing mirrored sunglasses, despite the gloom of their lavish environments, and from the way they tilt their heads, they're listening in to their earpieces. The Residents are quite aware of what these things are. Unlike them, they're... pawns. Tools. Assets belonging to an erstwhile ally. But while the Residents truly understand their own value - and the value of everything around them - the Agency considers most of its assets to be mutually exchangeable. Its total value remains constant, but the allocation of such things is entirely mutable.

"What. Is it?" a Resident wearing a female form says, running its tongue over its lips. The gold of her rings catches the dim light. "We are occupied. What do your masters want?"

"Gentlemen. Ladies." One of the men steps forwards, adjusting his dark green tie. The executives are aware that the five of them are interchangable. It's just that the Agency likes fives. "Our agency has sent us here to inform you - as a pleasantry - that we have begun a systematic policy of censorship of mass media produced by the film industry. There are too many dangerous ideas existing within that field of human endeavor. We wish for there to be no conflict between us in this necessary containment of a field which has gone too long without proper government oversight. Ms. Peach, if you will?"

"Certainly, Mr. Telephone," says one of the identical women. She steps forwards, opening her briefcase, and deposits a pile of paperwork - one taller than her slimline briefcase - on the table. "Mr. Telephone, this should be the transcript of the regulations which permit these actions."

"Thank you, Ms. Peach," the man says, stepping back. "Gentlemen, ladies, please initial and date each clause and subclause of this documentation. Your compliance is appreciated. We shall pursue the Timetable on schedule if you cooperate. This is necessary."

"That's our territory," one of the executives snarls, chewing on his cigar. He exhales a cloud of smoke. "We have an arrangement!"

"Gentlemen. Ladies. We am sorry, but our agency wishes to inform you that we had an arrangement. We permitted you to self-regulate. You told us that you could keep things under control, that industry bodies could maintain order and proper proceedings and that we did not have to bring the force of the law to bear." He shakes his head sadly. "Ms. Peach, would you say that they have successfully kept things under control."

"They have not done so, Mr. Telephone," says Ms. Peach. "Although I may be mistaken. What do you think, Mr. Wheelbarrow?"

"I would have to agree that they have failed to keep things under control," another of the men says. "Do you have anything to contribute to this discussion, Mr. Hat or Ms. Piano."

"I do not," says the final man.

"I would raise the question of whether the Syndicate's attention was really in self-regulation," Ms. Piano says. "We have long suspected that the Syndicate is more interested in maintaining profitability than furthering the Timetable. I look around, and what do I see?" The woman spreads her hands. "I see the same corporate executives who've let Hollywood become a place of... of moral degradation and filth. I see the same executives who've failed to stop the spread of subversive memes."

"Disgraceful," says Ms. Peach. "The memes must be controlled. Self-regulation does not work. Regulation must be imposed from without to bring an end to the present disgraceful state of affairs. We have begun to enforce previously neglected regulations and have begun a widespread campaign utilizing correct ideas to counter subversive memes."

"Counter the subversive memes," the other four agents echo in unison.

"You're overssssstepping your boundaries," snaps an executive, exhaling a cloud of smoke.

"No," Mr. Hat - unless it was Mr. Telephone - says. "Our agency has verified that our actions are within regulations. And part of the terms of the conditions which let you maintain your own self-regulation was that you would properly regulate. You have not done so." A sneer crosses the five faces together. "Moral filth. Implications of sexual impropriety. Disruptive memes passed to the populace. We will regulate this."

"Too much violence has been permitted in movies," Ms. Peach says. "We will prevent it from being shown. It will obstruct the spread of subversive ideas."

"We understand subversive elements positively depict non-heteronormative sexualities," Mr. Wheelbarrow says. "We can target these subversive elements through the proper tailoring of our targeted messages. This will be made easier if you comply."

"We will not comply!" hisses a Resident through sharp teeth, leaping to their feet and slamming their hands into the table, leaving dents. "Your regulations have no jurisdiction here! I own the Senator! Your laws have no power! They have not been passed! You arrogant pups will bow to us, or we will have your agency's funding cut."

One of the other Residents rests a hand on the first's shoulders. "We understand that this recent period has been... disruptive," its says in an oily tone. "Rasssssh government action will serve no one... and will be quite... expensive to enforce. You wouldn't want foreign powers to get a competitive advantage here, would you? Otherwise we may have to move our labor overseas. Aid... other endeavors." It exhales, blowing smoke towards the agents. "Have a cigar," it says, proffering the box.

"We do not smoke," the five Agents say in unison.

The cigars vanish up the Resident's sleeves. "Well, no matter," the Resident says. "Wouldn't you prefer us to be... cooperative? We will of course comply fully with the letter of the regulations, but there is compliance and there is compliance. At the very least, I will not acknowledge such regulations until my legal team has vetted them fully. In extensive details."

"Deliberately obstructing the Timetable is a wrong," Ms. Piano says, in a tone like ice. "And as it is a wrong against Control, it becomes a sin. You are not sinners, are you?"

The Resident smiles. "But I do not know if it is in the Timetable until my lawyers have inspected it, and it would be imprudent to accept these regulations until we have vetted them for impact against the Timetable. It is for the good of the Union." Its smile grows wider. "And when we mention the good of the Union, I am sure I would be better convinced of your good intentions and faith if you would look at the other problem which has got in the way of the self-regulation regime which has held up perfectly well until now. I speak, of course, of Iteration X," he says to Mr. Telephone.

The pale man's knuckles whiten around his briefcase. "Gentlemen. Ladies. I reassure you, Iteration X will face due punishment for its quite shocking incompetence in this - and other recent - matters. Gentlemen, ladies, I reassure you of this. Iteration X appears to have forgotten the necessity of the Timetable. It has overtly displayed technology beyond the permitted level of development on Earth. It acts without the proper consultations with my parent agency. Corrective measures will be taken against it. Regulations state that my agency is entrusted with internal regulation of the Technocratic Union, and Iteration X is in dire need of extensive regulation. But, gentlemen and ladies, that is not the topic under discussion."

The Resident smiles a smile which reaches from ear to ear. "Oh, no doubt, no doubt," it says. It gestures to the long table, which is suddenly longer than it was and has five more seats. "Please, please, sit," it says. "Let us liaise. Scratch our back and we will scratch yours. I am sure that we will have a mutually profitable transaction."

***​

Elsa pulses her mapping scanner, getting a readout of the area. "This way!" she says. "We head towards that building! It's got thick walls and I'm not getting any signs from it! We can cut through this alley and..."

"What alley?" Jazmin asks, covering the rear.

Elsa looks up. There's a thick brick wall blocking it. It looks old, but... she pulses the mapping tool again. Now there's no alleyway there. "This way instead!" she orders. It's a nervous, tense attempt to cross the open ground, picking their way between parked cars. And little details aren't matching. Cars change brands. Cars change color. Buildings change appearances. By the time they reach the plaza - which hadn't been on her map - all the cars on the street are black, and half of them are Cadillacs.

Jazmin has noticed it too. "The world's changing," she says.

"Dimensional instability," Elsa says. That's what it should be. But maybe it isn't. Maybe someone's fucking with them. But no, Threat Null shouldn't have any Reality Hackers. And they're not in the Digital Web, so this shouldn't be happening. She looks up at the nice-and-secure entrance to the bank. It's tough. Armored. And there's no one inside. She's scanned it for spirits. This time she's keeping her scanner active, though.

And because she's doing that, she sees them appear from nowhere all around them as the bank vanishes and the plaza doubles in size. There are even more fucking Damons. There are grey IFVs. There are black helicopters. There are lots and lots of police. There are federal agents with guns. No actual military, Elsa thinks, but lots of paramilitary sorts. And she might be bulletproof-but she doesn't want to risk it. Jazmin definitely isn't, for all that her suit is armor-weave.

"We have you surrounded!" comes a booming voice from the loudspeakers. "Lay down your weapons! This is an order! If you do not lay down your weapons, we will fire!"

Elsa thinks fast. Very fast. And she's very glad for her cognitive augs.

"Hold me!" she shouts at Jazmin, her hair blowing in the downdraft from the helicopters.

"What?"

"You need to be in close! I'm going to try a VE thing! Trust me!"

"You have five seconds to comply!" comes the booming voice. "Five. Four. Three. Two..."

Jazmin all but throws herself at Elsa, wrapping her arms around her. The cyborg can only regret that now isn't the time to enjoy it. Jazmin really is adorably petite. Elsa can see the expressions of scorn and contempt and hate on all the surrounding soldiers. They're the same ones from various people in Moscow who didn't really approve of some of her life 'choices.'

Elsa slaps her chest. "Beam me up, Scotty!" she shouts, engaging her dimensional jump module. Normally it'd only work on Earth, but she got data on whatever Nichols had done. She thinks with the right signal, she can shift subdimensions here using the standard hardware. The world fades to white. It's so much more pleasant doing this without the Dimensional Anomaly in the way, Elsa decides. There's no stabbing pains at all. Then the world fades back in, and luckily they're not surrounded by an entire army.

"Who's Scotty?" Jazmin asks warily, looking around.

"Void Engineer joke," Elsa says, tension in her voice. They're in a dusty backroom. There's a few severs in here, between filing cabinets and racks of old-style film reels. They look like they've basically been crammed in wherever they'd fit. The floor is black and white tiling, and the walls are an institutional green. The air smells of paper and copper. "Wait... you haven't seen Star Trek? First season was from the Sixties."

"I'm... still working on the English," Jazmin admits. "Six months ago, I couldn't speak it at all. A lot of people in the Order make references to things I haven't seen. Where are we?"

"Are you familiar with the Digital Web?" Elsa asks her.

"I've... heard of it? A little? It's an Iteration X thing, right?" Jazmin says.

"Kinda. The Void Engineers do things with it too. That psychic realm - when things started changing, I realized that it wasn't exactly real. Like, it was physical, but it was also simulated. I... I think this is the place the simulation is being run from. Which means I think they can't change the world on us when we're in here," Elsa says.

"It felt real," Jazmin points out, looking around with more interest and less wariness. "This looks sort of Union-like. I think that..." Then she gasps, making a retching noise.

The coppery smell in the air is because there's a dead body here, just outside the door. In life, he was a man in a black suit and white shirt. Now he's a corpse, head almost severed from an axe impact. The man's flesh is shriveled and grey, parchment-like skin clinging to his bones. Someone - something - has drained all the fluid from his body. She scans him. That wasn't a man. It was a spirit. And it's dead now. Something killed this man in this... this bureau.

"Okay, new plan," Elsa says intensely. "This place isn't safe." Jazmin nods at that. "We keep quiet. We don't engage anything if we can avoid it. I'll see if I can find a place where we get in contact with my ship. And we keep the fuck away from whatever killed that man." She pulls a scanner out of her pocket and makes a show of looking at it. "This isn't a real Union place," she says. "It's a mockery. Remember, don't trust the things here. They're pretending to be people, but they're not. And any of them could be what did this in disguise."

"D-do you know what?" Jazmin stammers.

"No," Elsa says. She doesn't know. She has a horrible sneaking suspicion that it's something to do with... with that thing which tore itself out of the Autopolitan vessel, but... that's a moon-sized alien thing. Not anything which could use a hatchet. And how would an Autopolitan get into this place, anyway? They almost never entered psychic or noetic dimensions.

On the other hand, even if it wasn't related to that thing, it was still an axe-murdering vampire thing. Best avoided. She leads Jazmin by the hand as they sneak through the crowded archives. There are a lot of black-suited men there, with earpieces and looking the very spitting image of government agents, overseeing people who look like clerks. Her augmentations feel a little sluggish here, and her diagnostics say that they've downclocked to prevent damage in a hostile subdimensional environment. That's not good-but it also means that the enemies here aren't going to be nearly as dangerous as they could have been in Hollywood, or in space.

She dodges a handful of EDEs which look like police, and sees more black-suited men and women telling clerks and secretaries what to redact from and what to add to documents. Her eyes zoom in-and she notices that they're scripts. Movie scripts. It's something she keeps in mind as they creep through the crowded archives.

Someone screams. There is the sound of wild gunfire, then some more screams. Then a meaty sound of metal meeting flesh, then silence, interrupted by wild ranting. "It's their fault and they're going to pay for it. Not my fault! Not mine! None of it was!" There's sobbing. "Mommy..." she cries.

Elsa carefully leans out to take a look. The source of the ranting looks like... Henriette. A orange-haired girl with a similar face, covered in blood. Her clothes have been stained red by the crimson liquid, with only splashes of pink to mark their original color. In her hands is a bloodstained machete, made out of a strange black metal. Her teeth are sharp, like a shark's, and there is a crazed look on her face. "I'll find you sister. I'll find you and I'm going to make you suffer and everything you did is going to be for nothing. I'm going to grind your friends up in front of you and crush everything you love."

Elsa can sense just how powerful the being is. Even here, with most of its powers locked away by the nature of the realm, it is powerful. Powerful enough to have slain a dozen armed guards and be hunting down the agents and their lackeys one by one. She runs a filter on her hearing to listen to it, to track it-no, her. Henriette, Elsa decides, is going to have to explain in very great detail why the MUSCOVITE commander looks almost identical to her. If they survive.

***
In the void, Henriette duels her sister. She pushes the Trinity Titan into overdrive, and is surprised that it can even fight the Mark V on an even level. Henrietta has become... different. She's not as creative as before, executing her attacks and blocks with mechanical sub-micron precision, the precision of a machine. But even so, she can sense the seething rage that is behind the mechanical precision. She can sense how the Mark V is fighting differently than if it wanted a quick kill-how Henrietta wants to tear her out of the atomic war machine and torment her for eternity. And she can sense the core. The hateful core of this god-machine, hiding behind meters of armor and undying flesh. A hateful beating heart and mind that seeks only to destroy everything she loves and holds dear.

There is no room for mercy or care in this situation. She has to fight, ignoring the damage. Weapons hammer on the Trinity Titan's thick armor, and her repair microbots, optimized for this high-energy environment, work overtime to fix the real damage done by their attacks. She keeps trying to force her way past the Mark V-but it's incredibly fast and agile and keeps blocking her path. The BioVARG cores are crawling out, grabbing hissing biomechanical weapons that throw disgusting projectiles at her.

So-how to beat her sister, Henriette thinks. She's focused on her, an all-consuming monomaniacal focus that has become her nature. She needs a distraction and then-she checks. She has one stealth drone remaining and there's a nuclear grenade dispenser. Yes, this might work.
***
Elsa and Jazmin are interrupted in their desperate attempts to avoid both the Agency and the deranged avatar of a god-machine in the media archives by a sudden communique from another dimension.

"Hey ladies, I just noticed that both of you are in another subdimension which affects this one I'm in. I'd like a bit of help." Kessler says.

"I-" Elsa stammers. She can't speak for a moment. "Nobody could have survived that. That dragon was a Prime Threat! The kind of EDE you use warships to neutralize and keeps coming back no matter what."

"Maybe," Jazmin whispers, "that's not him?"

Elsa thinks. That sounds plausible. "So prove it. Why should we trust you."

"Good point." Kessler says, musing. "I don't know why you should. Things here are very good at lying. Look, I need you to burn some movie scripts for me. I'm-" he moves his viewpoint, and Elsa can see an army of Americans from various eras and times and films being shot at by other soldiers of different nationalities, from science fiction stormtroopers and rebels to Nazis and Confederates to Russians and other historical enemies. Both sides are being attacked by squid-robots and flying robotic gunships and other machine weapons. Supersonic planes and WWII fighters duel in the background, as artillery booms and blasts everywhere. Superman floats above the fray, heat-visioning a group of Kessler's soldiers, but more and more come. "-kind of leading an accidental rebellion against the rulers of this place and I'm a little busy. I need you to help me with this issue."

Elsa looks at him as if he's crazy. "I'll think about it. Naryshkin, out." She closes the communications link and hears something behind her, turns around. It's the girl she saw-the orange-haired blood-soaked girl with a black carbon machete-coming at her with full force. Elsa fires at her, but her shots go wild and her gun jams. She instinctively knows that the girl is somehow at fault-her sheer strength in this realm is making her a deadly foe, even if she might not be as dangerous as she would be in either of the other realm forms. She dodges aside but too slowly, and the monster gets its hands on her. It slams her head into the tile hard enough with furious inhuman strength, hard enough to shatter tile and throw up impact warnings and then, all of a sudden-

The blood-soaked teenage girl-monster screams in pain and collapses before she can raise her machete to attack. Elsa takes that chance to run as fast as she can, following Jazmin. She's not fighting something like this. Not here.

"What was that thing?" Jazmin asks. "I tried to shoot it when it was on top of you but my gun jammed."

"It's some sort of... powerful EDE. Don't antagonize it. I don't think we have the power to kill it easily."

"What if we laid some sort of trap?" Jazmin suggests.

"Maybe." Elsa thinks. "Maybe." If it was affected by outside events-and Elsa thinks that happened because of something in either Planet Hollywood or the Realm of Hollywood-maybe if she hurts it here, it'll be easier to fight it outside.
***
Henriette yells in frustration as her multitasking renders her slightly vulnerable and the Mark V manages to catch one of her Titan's atomic rocket launchers with a directed gravity beam, crumpling the missiles and launcher as if they were tin cans. She realizes that she's thinking of this Etherite piece-of-shit as her machine now and that it's mildly distressing, but it at least means her attention is away from the stealth drone creeping towards the core.

"So, sister." Henrietta sneers. "Do you have any last words?" The Mark V grabs her, pins her onto one of the walls. It feels disgustingly soft. The BioVARGs are crawling over her.

"Yes." Henriette says. "Detonate."

"You bitch." Henrietta snarls, and the stealth drone explodes flush with the core of her being and she screams, stunned in pain.

Henriette uses the opportunity to thrust off of the wall, pushing the Mark V away as it reverts to less capable self-preservation programming, scoring a gash over its clean black armor plate that it regenerates. The BioVARGs are insane, feral, tearing at each other without her ex-sister's control. Good. That buys her some more time. So nuclear weapons can hurt the core. Good. Just... she needs more. She checks the weapons that the Trinity Titan has.

[GAMMA GATLING LASER-ON/LINE]
[ATOMIC MICROROCKET LAUNCHER-L UNIT OFF/LINE | R UNIT ON/LINE]
[CROCKETT GRENADES-ON/LINE]
[FISSION AXE-ON/LINE]
[GAMMA OCULAR BLASTERS-ON/LINE]
[ORION KNUCKLE-ON/LINE]
[VISHNU SPIKE CANNON-EMPTY]
[SELF DESTRUCT CHARGE (TEN MEGATON THERMONUKE)-ON/LINE]

Grenades, the axe, one rocket pod, and the self-destruct charge. It'll be hard but doable.

Her sister starts to recover, the BioVARGs and the Core Defender stilling their movements and coming back under central control. A temporary impact. "You'll pay for that."

___________________________________

The Henriettas on all three realms are linked, by the way. Hurting her army hurts her in realspace to some extent, hurting her in realspace hurts her army, and hurting her in the Censor realm hurts her in realspace. This lets Elsa and Jazmin actually do some damage here, although she is still an incredibly powerful creature. Henrietta's attributes in the Archives are human-scale but she gets some very interesting benefits from her Incarna status.

Someone needs to roll Elsa's 10d10e7 Perception + Awareness + Cybereyes to analyze her.

Jazmin can also attempt a 5d10e7 Perception + Awareness roll because she has Entropy and can sense weakpoints.

Kessler's Army:
[ ] (0.8x) Abandon the army, get back to 'real space.' This isn't your task.
[ ] viva la revolution! Take out or stymie the Resident control here and they lose a massive source of Prime Energy income. The Void Engineers need to come back to retake it, but until then...​
[ ] (-0.2x) You'll want to call the Void Engineers up. They might actually be necessary for the revolution.​
[ ] Attempt to prioritize the Henrietta-parts instead of the Residents.
[ ] Write-In.

Henrietta: Isolation:
What's Elsa and Jazmin's plan?
[ ] (1.25x) Sneak around Henrietta and assist Kessler by taking out some of those censors editing the movies for him.
[ ] (1.5x) Don't just take out the censors, do some more direct help.
[ ] (0.75x) Find a way to trap and hurt Henrietta.
[ ] Write-in.

Henriette's War:
[ ] (1.25x) Keep aggressively fighting.
[ ] Try to figure out a way to deal with the BioVARGs.
[ ] Try to take out the Mark V somehow.
[ ] (0.5x) Retreat, this isn't working.
[ ] Write-In.​
 
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Henrietta's Traits
So you may ask, what are Henrietta's powers in the archives?

1. Any attack made with her with a ranged weapon has a chance to botch. Yes, no matter how many successes there are.
2. She takes no more than 1 level of damage, whatever the form, from any attack that deals damage. You could hit her with a bazooka in the Archives, and this would cause her 1 level of damage.
3. She has 10 health levels, takes no wound penalties, and is only inconvenienced if she loses all of them to aggravated damage. That means you have to successfully hit her at least 20 times with attacks that can penetrate her soak to stop her.
4. She soaks bashing/lethal/aggravated roughly as well as a Security HITMark (so somewhere around 7 soak) and soaks aggravated with that full value. Because this realm is weird, it will represent itself as shots that were solid hits becoming grazes or nothing else.
5. She ignores all soak when attacking with her machete. If she deals more than 3 HLs in a single blow, you are instantly killed unless you counter this with Entropy countermagic (each success on an Arete + Entropy roll lets you survive with 1 remaining HL). Her damage pool is 10L.
6. When grappling, she effectively ignores your strength and your defenses, and rolls against either a fixed target number or your successes, whichever is lower.
7. She always gets to go first in a combat round. You cannot contest this without Time 4.

Cyborg enhancements? Superhuman abilities? Wired reflexes? Henrietta don't give a fuck.
 
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Hollywood Subdimensions
Okay, quick summary of the subdimensions in play at the moment.

Planet Hollywood
  • A space opera station run by megacorps in orbit around a gas giant
  • Local paradigm is "space opera"
  • Only symbolically linked to Hollywood - things that happen in it naturally become a metaphor for the entertainment business. The big companies control the broadcasting and the advertising which means their things get seen - the smaller guys are in more trouble. There are corporate wars between the companies when new films to head-to-head in the cinemas. And so on.
  • The Autopolitan view of things, and probably the evil Space Ghost Void Engineer one too. Maybe the Transhuman one too, we don't know.

Hollywoodtown
  • A giant weird spirit realm city made up of every movie ever made, except a lot of the movies are made on sets in Hollywoodtown. Basically, it's Toontown from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but for Hollywood as a whole. That means all the characters exist in it, but are also actors who play their roles and do their own stunts. The existence of the Damons is a sign that the Agency is changing things, because normally all the characters would be played by one guy - the Agency doesn't really get Hollywoodtown and its cheerfully free market attitude to things (which is how it has cafes with people from series who flopped working in them, dreaming of their next big role).
  • Local paradigm is a mess - it cares about your personal "genre". That means that Donald could totally drop a piano on someone's head because he's a comic relief guy most of the time as long as he made it into a joke, but Henriette couldn't (because she's a hotshot mecha pilot).
  • Directly linked to Hollywood - the spirits film the films they're in here on-set.
  • The Resident view of things - they treat IP as things they can own as slaves, and since they're executives they can interfere with the films because they're paying these people's wages and the director just need to suck it up.

The Hollywood Bureau (the Bureau of Telephotographic and Cinematic Regulation)
  • A government office responsible for archiving all films ever made. Also responsible for government censorship and standards.
  • Local paradigm is, as MJ said, a slightly more controlled version of modern Earth. Quite similar to an out-of-date NWO construct.
  • Treats Hollywood as a thing to regulate and control - Hollywood is just the films it makes for this place. You change the films by... changing the films. This is the central archive - changes when filed properly update all other copies.
  • The Agency view of things (although they can see Hollywoodtown, they're not very at home with it unless the Agents are in disguise mode, pretending to be a native).

Don't treat the Hollywood Bureau like it's Hollywoodtown - Hollywoodtown is where acting like you're in a film pays off. The Hollywood Bureau rewards acting like you're on Earth.
 
Update CXXIV: Engine of Extinction
JB CXXIV: Engine of Extinction

The two women run, and then run a bit more. Elsa is keeping an eye on the motion tracker on her HUD for EDEs, but there are so damn many of them in this place that she can't be sure. Between the natives, the Agents and the psycho MUSCOVITE, she can't actually be sure what moving blob is what.

... and shit, when did she start thinking about Threat Null as the MUSCOVITEs? As a somewhat proud native of Moscow herself, it's vaguely insulting to associate Autopolitan invaders with her former home.

"Who's the sister she's talking about?" Jazmin asks, gasping for breath as she leans against a wall and tries to clear the jam in her gun with shaking hands. She swallows. "I think... I think I prefer being in the Order. I haven't been chased by a madwoman with a machete once. Is this a common thing in the Void Engineers?"

"I was chased by a few hemophages with axes... well, meat-cleavers when I was back in Moscow," Elsa says without thinking. "But they just burn when you load up some incendiary rounds." She pauses, thinking to herself. Hmm. So, assume that the Autopolitan is either Pilot Langley's sister or fork or something. After all, Langley is an exceptionally good pilot. Maybe they stole one of her backups to make their pilot for the invasion, so she would...

... Henriette knows there's some tie, Elsa realises. Yes. She has to. She went and pushed its buttons deliberately. Maybe it let it slip when they were fighting in Moscow. And - heh, Langley is quite prickly at times. She has a lot of buttons to press. So if Elsa assumes that the Autopolitans made their pilot or pilots from her mindstate... yes, that makes sense. And the earthside Technocracy knows the so-called MUSCOVITEs are using a lot of Iteration X gear, so... hmm. That bears looking into.

But later. Right now, the Autopolitan is really fucking dangerous, and really hates Henriette. And it's attacking the Agents and the natives as well as them. It's basically attacking everything. So if it's attacking the not-them things, it's not attacking them.

Elsa grins. Fuck it, it's worth a try. And if it pays off, the horrific Autopolitan murder machine won't be murdering them, and will instead be murdering Agents. And might be shot a few times. She notices Jazmin is eyeing her up.

"Are you feeling alright?" Jazmin asks cautiously. "She did hit you quite hard."

"I'll be okay with some workshop time," Elsa says, feeling vaguely touched at the concern in the shorter woman's voice. "I've had worse. One of the costs of having a lighter Engineer model of body. I don't fall through so many floors, but I'm not as solid as an ItX exojock." She winces. "But I really, really don't want to get that close to her again."

"So what are you going to do?" Jazmin says. "I think he was telling the truth - or at least believed what he said," she corrects herself. "But you said they'd compromised comms and..."

Elsa raises a hand. "Yeah, I don't trust him," she says. "But at the very least... we can pick our own targets. If this is the simulation source of the place we just were... yeah. Keep quiet." She takes Jazmin by the hand, pulling her as she follows an internal map of the place, working her way through side rooms and avoiding the EDEs she gets on the motion tracker.

She finds what she's looking for in a room full of soundtracks. It's empty here - the censors don't care so much about the backing tracks, it seems. Sorting through the shelves, she picks out a bulky tape player which looks like it's from the Sixties.

"Close the door," she whispers to Jazmin as she sorts through her memories, thinking of conversations she's had with Henriette. Her voicebox is just another machine, so she can manage playback functionality.

"What are you, stupid?" she begins, in a voice which isn't her own.

Jazmin waits patiently as Elsa records the message, covering the door with a gun which is only shaking a little bit. They both know that this won't do much if that Autopolitan thing comes in, but it's something which gives one a feeling of control over one's own life. Elsa finishes, and picks up the recorder.

"That sounded like her," Jazmin says.

"Yeah, it did. I'm not sure what's going on, but I think I know the person who she thinks is her sister," Elsa says as they move out. "I'm thinking the sound of her voice might distract her. And... ah ha, jackpot."

There's a trolley laden down with shrink-wrapped manuscripts. That'll do. That'll do nicely. "See if you can find any glue," she whispers to Jazmin, who immediately produces a small tube of superglue from a pocket.

"A well-prepared Operative always carries adhesive with them," Jazmin whispers back, her tone indicating she's reciting something. Probably some kind of NWO book like The 101 Habits Of Well-Prepared Operatives.

"Thanks," Elsa says. "Now, you think you can bluff one of the faceless local EDEs into taking this to..." she checks her internal map of the area, "Editing Hall 2c?" She's built up a 3-d map of the area relative to the signs on the walls, and her EDE-detecting hardware is telling her that that room is filled with lots and lots of EDEs.

Jazmin nods. "I'm... quite good at bluffing," she says, in a proud little voice.

"Don't get seen by any of the things pretending to be agents," Elsa says intensely. "But you need to pass as one of them. The rest should work, but you'll need to lose the headscarf. It'll stand out too much."

Jazmin hesitates, and then sighs. "It still doesn't feel right," she mutters, unwrapping it to reveal jaw-length black hair. She folds it up and then tucks it into a pocket, and then pulls mirrorshades out of another pocket and puts them on. "I don't feel comfortable like this."

"Hey, you've got great hair," Elsa says. She's not saying it to flirt. Oh, no. Not one bit. She just needs Jazmin to feel confident. That's the only reason. "Hey, when this is over, we can head to the showers and wash out all this sweat, and then trade tips. How do you keep it so glossy?"

She gets a flat stare from behind mirrorshades. "You're a cyborg. Do you sweat?"

"Yeah. Synthskin has to stay cool and hydrated, just like real skin. You probably spend less time taking care of your skin than me. Moisturiser is a godsend."

Jazmin tilts her head, obviously fascinated. "Interesting. I'd never thought of it like that before, but that makes sense." She takes a deep breath, and mutters something - a prayer, perhaps - to herself in Arabic, then starts pushing the trolley of scripts - now with the recording device stuck to its underside. A recording device which has had its volume turned up to max.

Elsa trails behind her, but she didn't really need to. Jazmin simply marches up to one of the local workers, orders them to deliver the scripts for necessary censorship, and makes a vague allusion to the regulations which permit such a thing.

"Good job," she whispers to Jazmin as she steps around the corner and takes a deep breath.

Jazmin nods. "What now?"

"Now we get the hell away that place before the timer kicks in and the tape starts playing." Elsa squats down by a ventilation shaft, rummaging for her Alanson quick-release kit, before finding a screwdriver placed in her hand.

"Let me guess. A well-prepared Operative always has a screwdriver?" she asks, getting started on unfastening the vent covering.

Jazmin nods. "It was in the manual," she says, looking around nervously.

"Sounds like a useful book."

"It really is," Jazmin says. She seems to be trying to distract herself, and she's talking more rapidly. "I really want to be good at this. The Union's been really good to me. Professor Blanc s-said he wanted me as an assistant, but I've... I've spent most of the time just learning things." She laughs weakly. "I don't want things to end here in space. It'd be such a waste when I'm actually getting to go to school and... and getting paid well and..."

The two of them hear the scream of rage. It echoes ominously. Apparently despite only looking like a teenage girl, that... that thing has a powerful set of lungs on it. "I'LL KILL YOU! KILL YOU ALL! EVERYONE OF YOU WHO DARED TO INSULT ME!"

"... I think we got her attention," Jazmin says, swallowing hard.

"That was the plan," Elsa says, with more confidence than she really feels. "Now, c'mon. Into the vents, and we should be away from that thing and be able to work our way to where the film we want is stored." She lets Jazmin go first, and then boosts herself into the vents. It's a tight fit-but it's just barely doable in her armor. She crawls as the echoes of screams and gunfire ring in the ventilation. Then a brief moment of silence, and then more screams.

"YOU TRIED TO TRICK ME! YOU'RE ALL IN LEAGUE WITH EACH OTHER, AREN'T YOU?! YOU'RE ALL..." she pauses, as if what is coming next is some kind of unforgivable slur, "...REALITY DEVIANTS! YOU'RE ALL RDS!" Henrietta shouts. There is some muffled mumbling, and Elsa runs it through a program to analyze it. "I guess, then, I'm just going to have to purge all the Reality Deviants," the crazy girl starts. "Yes, purge them all."

Elsa can smell smoke and fire as scripts and celluloid start to burn.

"Wait," Jazmin said quietly as they exit the latest vent. She points at the door just across the hall from them. "We can use that."

"Use what?" Elsa focuses on the door. She'd disregarded it-it had no exits, no obvious paths, and no obvious tools. The sign on the door reads "Janitorial."

"A well-prepared Operative is never disarmed. They can always create weapons from any available material," Jazmin recites, opening the door and dragging Elsa inside behind her. "There's likely to be something I can use in here to make some good traps and devices."

It certainly smelled like a chemical plant, Elsa conceded. Chlorine, ammonia, soap flakes, hydrogen peroxide, methyl alcohol… a whole array of smells that would be almost overpowering on their own and are even worse combined bombard her.

Jazmin didn't seem to notice, already pulling bottles and cans off the shelves and starting to mix powders and liquids in a set of empty cleaning spray bottles from a lower rack. "Alright, I've got a handful of low-order explosives and firebombs, blinding traps, and a few things that generate toxic gases. We should be able to start placing these ahead of her or any place we think she might try to access." She carefully places them in trash bags and hoisted the lot up over her shoulder. "We can get back into the vents after editing the film, and place them wherever we think might be useful."

Elsa wants to respond with encouragement for the good idea, but is interrupted by both Nichols and Kessler calling. She answers Nichols first.

"You made the robot god mad again, didn't you?" Nichols asks accusingly. The grouchy old woman looks even more grouchy. "The last time it just caused her to undergo apotheosis. What in God's name possessed you to make her angry again?"

"We were trying to get her to fight the Residents and Agents." Elsa hisses back. Jazmin is there-but she won't have any of the context to put together the words Elsa is saying. "We were stuck in this higher noetic realm with no other options. She was roaming the halls and I wouldn't have bet on my chances against her."

"So you should have avoided her. Things are not going well. She's decided that consumption of the station and the noetic realm was inefficient when she did it one by one, so she's planning to burn the place and just drain it for resources when it's a lifeless cinder." Nichols responds. "Talk to Kessler. He can tell you his situation, and then get back to me. It's clear that you need supervision before you hurt yourself."

"Yes, mom." Elsa grouses.

"For all her faults, Belltower at least have thought of a plan which wouldn't have involved angering the robot demigod twice in a row."

***
John Kessler has been many things in his life. He's been an athlete, a student, a soldier, a cyborg shock trooper, a survivalist, a shaman, and now a general. A general of a spirit army made up of the celluloid representations of the United States Armed Forces. Even belonging to the armed forces of no nation, he still had enough residual nationalism to do that. And he's embraced what he is now-Reality Deviant and Enlightened Scientist, cyborg and shaman, two sides of the same coin. His motley army slowly grinds through the defenses, made up of hordes and hordes of squid-robots and metallic skeletons wielding plasma rifles and other war machines, from flying humanoid drones to unmanned aircraft. Artillery goes off around him as he leads his charge, walking alongside an armored division without fear. Soldiers with M1 Garands and rifled muskets trade shots with plasma-gun armed Terminators and military-grade tactical robots and other mechanical war machines.

His forces are being funneled into the machines by enemy action, he knows. But nevertheless, it's not a problem he can fix here and now-and he can sense that this enemy is just as powerful, and far more immediately dangerous, than anything the spirit masters of this realm have in store. His tanks grind over Terminator skeletons and humanoid robots and the wrecked remnants of floating robot squid-things and other drones as he finally lays siege to the fortress that contains much of the alien god-thing's strength. His artillery crashes down on the foes like metal rain, his infantry erode the last defensive lines like a tidal wave. His air power is busy killing and killing and dying against enemy unmanned fighters and drones, filling the sky with orange and black. It looks like hell, Kessler thinks. But it's not. There's a tangible sense of progress against an implacable foe of civilization and humanity, even as the sky turns black with shrapnel and flak and the ground becomes a cratered moonscape.

It's an impractical fortress in reality-but here where physics have no real sway, an ominous dark fortress bristling with guns is excellent at keeping things out. Kessler thinks for a moment, starts looking for commandos and gets a variety of soldiers. Some futuristic marines with pulse rifles and smartguns, a handful of men and women in crude exoskeletons, Rangers from World War II, a handful of Civil War soldiers, and various special forces from eras he's familiar with, SEALs and Deltas and Green Berets and Marine Force Recon. It'll be an infiltration operation, leaving most of his forces behind. The walls are too thick with hate and rage to breach-but the same terrible strength that makes the godling a force to be reckoned with gives it blind spots. Places he and his allies can operate.

Which is a good thing as well, because the fortress splits open and starts to spew nuclear missiles into the sky. Kessler can see in the background the white lines of ICBMs following suit. Something is happening.

"KILL YOU ALL!" a young woman's voice echoes from the sky. "ALL OF YOU! You're all going to be purged."

He looks at this problem and thinks that he needs some more help. He activates his commlink, demands it activate its transdimensional sending function. He knows that function didn't exist until literally a second ago, yet he does not care.

"Elsa," Kessler sends. "Elsa. Pick up. I need your help." Kessler manages. "Right now."

She finally does. "What is it?"

"Whatever the alien threat is-it just launched. Multiple nuclear weapons. It's trying to burn the entire place down. What happens then?" He suspects he knows what happens then-but he wants her to understand how important this is. How important it is that he knows anything that might be able to help.

"If that happens-the entire noetic realm collapses. The effects-I don't think anyone studies them but-"

"The effects," Harlan says, interrupting them, "mean that you wound an entire concept. Ever want to watch a movie? In a theater? Kiss that goodbye. And maybe a bit of collateral damage too. You know how the Reality Deviants say we're flying around killing creativity and rendering Creation a dull gray prison? That's exactly what this is going to do. Cut a little of that creative spark out. Much as Hollywood is full of derivative trash, this is still part of the collective unconscious that governs creativity. Destroy it, and the main body suffers, much as cutting off a finger or a toe lessens the whole." Kessler doesn't flinch as an artillery shell explodes next to him, punctuating Harlan's statement.

"Who invited you?" Elsa asks.

"Nichols." Harlan says. "This is beyond petty rivalries now when you have a Nephandic godling running around trying to destroy everything."
Kessler thinks. Yes, he supposed that if that thing from Moscow is now trying to destroy everything, it's pretty Nephandic. It might have been corrupted by some sort of taint from the infernalist hemophages it was eating like popcorn, and now it's unconsciously tapped into the same dark things which empower them. Certainly, its angry, petty rages seem to be reminiscent of hemophage activity. Its mindless quest for destruction reminds him of the unclassified documents about Code Ragnarok. It's an assumption that won't hurt.

"We can deal with recriminations and who should have told us something or other later." Kessler says, taking up a mantle of leadership. "Right now, we need to stop this from happening. Can we get a simultaneous conference call working?"

"Yes." Harlan says. "Working on it... done. Networking it through the QUEST to keep it active, and its partially psionic medium means that it should be uninterceptible by our foes."

***
Henriette Langley is a pilot, and as an Iteration X pilot she has learned to multitask very well. She's had to keep track of a half-dozen enemy combatants in Moscow, after all, and that went pretty well. She has, however, never had to do a teleconference while fighting for her life inside the decaying undying god-body of her little sister in an Etherite giant robot.

"I'm a little busy here!" She yells at Harlan, who's initiated the conference.

"Shut up and accept the invitation." Nichols says archly. "It's important. Both for your education and for your tactical situation." The Trinity Titan barely deflects the Mark V's phase blade with its fission axe, and radioactive fragments fly everywhere from the self-sharpening self-repairing edge of the weapon. Henriette fires a barrage of atomic micro-rockets at the BioVARG horde, and although they try to network their bio-energistic fields together to provide a shield, the sheer nuclear fury overwhelms another dozen of them and burns them from existence. They turn to ash when they die, Henriette notices. That shouldn't be happening. BioVARG biology should be stable, not metastable.

"Fine." Henriette complains. "If I die because I get distracted-"

"Then don't." Nichols says. "Do or do not, grasshopper squared. There is no try. Now, I'm calling you all together because we have a slight problem. We all exist in different dimensional phase spaces. I, alongside Mister Aristide and Miss Langley, exist in realspace, where the enemy machine-god is currently heading full speed at the station while firing all its mass-depopulation weapons. Miss Naryshkin and Miss Belltower, who is incapacitated, are in a transcendent noetic realm, and Mister Kessler is in a noetic realm. All of these are connected. All of these are important, because the enemy has a presence in all of them. We need to coordinate our actions to hurt her. Unlike most gods, our target is smart."

"She's raging incoherently at everything." Henriette responds.

"Yes, she's raging incoherently at everything in a very smart way. Smart people can be very dumb, as demonstrated by how you all decided that poking the newborn godling, twice, was a good idea." Nichols says. "I was planning on quietly distracting the mothership and hitting it with a chronal torpedo. But instead, now we're here. Anyways, she's unconsciously distributing her core functions in a way which means that she exists, in some way, on each of these levels. You need to defeat her on all of them to bring her down. The good news is that it weakens her on every level and it means that each action you take in your own environment can hurt or stun her in all of the other ones. It means her mental fortress has gaps-that her transcendent body is vulnerable, and that her core is protected by a lot less than it could be."​

"So, objectives. I need Kessler to penetrate the fortress and blow up the core. Looking at the explosion is optional but recommended-I want to make sure that the core and the fortress are, in fact, in pieces. Part two. Naryshkin, you need to find a way to kill her in the Archives. Part three, grasshopper-squared needs to beat a god-killing giant robot and also a god. Should be a piece of cake." Nichols says. "Oh yeah, before I forget, we need to do this before she turns everything into ash, and we need to keep enough firepower around to kill the other combatant." She thinks.

"So first step. Aristide. You have two chronal torpedoes. I need you to do an assassination on both of them while they're distracted. The torpedoes themselves are phase-shift capable. Get close enough and they can't intercept. I can give you the weak points on the Hunter-Killer. If you do this, she'll probably be wounded enough that we can make real progress."

"I'm a commando, not a-"

"Yes, yes. You also have a half-dozen brains in that ship of yours if the one in your skull doesn't pass muster. Make use of them. That should stun the enemy long enough. After that, we improvise madly."

______________________________________________________________

Space Backstabs in Space:
Nichols has started creating a plan. She just needs Aristide to do something nigh-suicidal. She plans to make that possible by:
[ ] She's not telling the full truth. One of the parties is actually a sacrificial pawn here.
[ ] Elsa
[ ] Kessler
[ ] Henriette
[ ] Aristide​
[ ] Sacrificing the Oppenheimer as a decoy. They can hijack a new ship from the station afterwards.
[ ] Expending most of the Oppenheimer's ammunition in an alpha-strike and warping out ASAP.
[ ] Giving Aristide the exact timing to avoid both Henrietta and the H/K's attention.
[ ] Write-in

Note that the more you sacrifice, the higher your chances of the plan working and the lower your chances of a TPK. If you kill off a PC, for example, you're guaranteed success.

To Catch A Predator:

The main problem here is that you have a very angry and moderately wounded Henrietta who does not give a single fuck, not one, running around the archives. Which she has started to set on fire. This is the worst time to find out that although she looks human she does not have human needs like 'oxygen.' Oh yeah, and Nichols, that smug bitch, wants you to kill her somehow. That's right, manage to hit her successfully about a dozen times. Elsa and Jazmin's plan to do this is...
[ ] Dragging Henrietta into more Agent fights.
[ ] Making a deal with the Residents, because they want her dead as much as she does.
[ ] Finding a way to disarm her of that machete.
[ ] Finding a way to lock her in a room and burn her to death.
[-] (0.0x) Any plan which involves angering Henrietta further as a primary objective.
[ ] Write-In.
 
The Hollywood Multiplex WHAT'S ON?, Part 1
The Hollywood Multiplex WHAT'S ON?, Part 1

Steelhead: Conspiracy - 15
Rating: The Thinking Man's Big Explosions

Do you remember when Steelhead movies were big dumb movies full of explosions and one-liners and face-crushing evil wizards? So do I. And I'm left feeling a bit nostalgic for those days, as I watch the latest installment in the Steelhead franchise - and I really shouldn't be, because it's a much better movie than it has any right to be.

Conspiracy builds off the consistently strong reboot which started with the VCOM movie - bringing back the old character from the stale Dragon Planet movies and putting him in a future that left him behind - and builds off the strong basis of The Belltower Conspiracy and its Moscow-based shenanigans. Now John Kessler has the lead role again, and the director really has reinterpreted the character to produce a movie which manages to have heart as well as brawn.

It's written with self-awareness and much more emotion than any of its predecessors. The eponymous Steelhead, John Kessler (still played by Arnold Stallone), might look like the same cliche-spouting stereotype he has his origins as, but he's revealed to be surprisingly complex and deep in a way which feels organic to the character. Surprisingly, it acknowledges the Dragon Planet movies, and in fact makes them core to his character growth - which is pretty amusing when you're talking about films which were an excuse to have a cyborg punching cyberdragons.

And talking about punching dragons... ho boy. No. I'm not going to say anything more. Suffice to say, fans of the old Kessler ultraviolence will have something special for them. Steelhead: Conspiracy may be far smarter than it has any right to be, but it knows when to bring out the explosions.

But there are a few things holding it back from perfection. I feel it's lost some of its sense of fun by getting too tied into the long-running Belltower franchise - hell, I'm enough of a Steelhead fan to feel vaguely annoyed that these two franchises which went head-to-head in the eighties are now so closely fused. It's not as mindlessly enjoyable as some of the earlier bits of the franchise, and there's a particularly spiteful bit early-on which recasts some of John Kessler's early actions. The director obviously doesn't like some of the more mindlessly patriotic bits of the earlier movies, but there's something wrong about seeing other people scared of him acting like an action hero.

If you can get over those flaws, though, it's a lot of fun and it's a pleasure to see this new, smarter Kessler taking centre stage. And then there's That Scene. You'll know what I mean when you see it.



Psi-Agent IX - 15
Rating: Two Thirds of an Excellent Movie

Does anyone actually remember Psi-Agent VIII? Genuine question here. I don't. I think it might have gone straight to video or something. Either way, this movie sees Harlan Aristide's (Gene Wade) first appearance in many years. It's ironic that this comes off the back of the success of the Belltower movies, because Gene Wade's career mimics the success of his character. In fact, it seems to have been deliberate, considering his well-known struggles with alcoholism and lack of any major roles in decades. I detected some genuine bitterness at co-star Illiyeen al-Hallaq (playing of course Jamelia Belltower).

Psi-Agent IX is strongest when he's channeling those feelings. Gene Wade has always been a brilliant method actor, and his portrayal of an old drunk fighting an apathetic bureaucracy which considers him an embarrassment is truly heart-wrenching at times. The first half of the movie is shot brilliantly and scripted - his purgatory in rural Ohio is soul-crushing, the Yellowfields facility is deliciously creepy, and the third act reintroduction to a Technocracy which needs him once again brilliantly sets up a nice contrast and the frailty of his new position.

The space sequence, though, shows the problems with tying this movie so closely into the Belltower movies. Thematically, it doesn't really work for the deeply personal tale of alcoholism, isolation and misused loyalty which the film sets up, and the character is misused. Worse, despite - or perhaps because of - the tension between Wade and al-Hallaq, some of the strongest scenes are when the two of them are together, but she's mostly absent for the space sequence and you can't help but feel that Julia Ayanami (playing Henriette Langley) feels too much like al-Hallaq's understudy in-as-well-as-out of character.
 
The Hollywood Multiplex WHAT'S ON?, Part 2
Hey, this "Let It All Go" movie sounds amazing and did not get a quick review :(

The Hollywood Multiplex WHAT'S ON?, Part 2

Let It All Go - 18
Rating: Good, But Sadly Lacking In Vampires

The third installment in the hyper-violent Eastern European animated movie series based on the Ice And Satin novel series, Let It All Go is a substantial departure from its predecessors in contents - though less so in tone, political satire, amounts of blood or gratuitous sexuality.

This movie already split the fanbase, even before its release. At the end of Unbothered By Cold, Elsa Naryshkin (voiced by Anna Romanov in the dub, who also voiced her in the original Russian which is a nice touch) defected from the Traditions to the Technocracy. In a case of life imitating art, this produced claims of 'selling out', especially with the character's redesigned appearance ('upgraded body' is their excuse). But does it live up to the accusations?

Well, a little bit. The switch from cynical Russian cyberpunk fighting vampires to a more classical space setting means it's lost some of its distinctive nature. Fortunately, the worst fears of the naysayers - that Elsa would lost most of her personality and become another mass-produced space marine character - haven't proven true. The series is controversial to say the least in its native Russia for its criticism of government authority and depiction of politicians as greedy bloodsuckers and this third installment only widens the targets of satire to the global financial system, censorship, and Hollywood itself.

Artistically, the budget is clearly even higher than Unbothered By Cold, and leaves Do You Want To Build A Cyborg in the dust. The space sequences are gorgeous, and the animators clearly took full advantage of their medium to do things which would cost vastly more to do in live action. The action scenes live up to the standards of their predecessors, and there's a nailbiting endgame sequence which more than lives up to the Digital Web assault sequence in the first movie.

So do I like it? I sound like I like it. It's just… there's just something soulless about it. It's not obvious, but… maybe it's the lack of the original cast. Elsa is pretty much the only character carried over from the first movie and a lot of the great character dynamics are lost. Things are almost a little easy for Elsa, and I know that sounds ridiculous, but she can still trust her own side not to backstab her way more than in previous ones. Maybe I just liked this series for watching cyberpunks fighting vampires in Moscow, and I want to see more of that. I guess we'll see where the series goes after this, and whether it goes back to what I most liked about it.

It's like I've just been served a steak and new potatoes, and a glass of wine. It's a good steak, and the wine is okay. It's just right now I felt like borsch and vodka, followed by a good staking of some undead predator.
 
Update CXXV: A Goddess Revealed
JB CXXV: A Goddess Revealed

"What is going on? Why is everything on fire?! What is that thing! Why is everything... why?" The corridors are thick with smoke. Elsa and Jazmin are barely outrunning it. Jazmin has her headscarf tied over her mouth and nose. The heat is nearly unbearable, and the acrid smell of burning film and smoke is overpowering.

"I'll explain later," Elsa says. She tests a door, confirms it's not hot on the other side, kicks it open, and pulls Jazmin along.

Jazmin squirms free. "No! I... I don't understand anything and I can't even be sure what I'm doing is the right thing! Who are all these people and why are they trying to kill me and... and... what was that girl and..."

"You want the truth?" Elsa begins, and catches herself before she says 'you can't handle the truth'. Even though Jazmin probably can't handle the truth, saying things like that never ends well. For one, she needs Jazmin on side and compliant, because she can't knock her out and stick her in a locker.

Wait. Maybe she can.

No, hmm, probably she can't. She's not sure what effects a blow to the head would have on a psychic mental construct like Jazmin. She might die if she loses consciousness. Not good. Fuck. Well. If this is a past intersplice whatever of Director Belltower, she probably won't remember whatever Elsa tells her when she returns to normal. After all, Jazmin doesn't remember anything she did with Illiyeen. So Jamelia shouldn't remember anything she tells Jazmin.

"I'd quite like the truth," Jazmin says tensely, fingers tightening slightly around her gun.

"Those EDEs out there? The things which look sort of like Unionists. They used to be human," Elsa says, ready to act if Jazmin reacts badly. "They used to be people. Or maybe Men in Black... I'm not sure. There was a big accident fifteen years ago, and people got lost off world - and in space, if you don't have safe conditions, you slowly become an insane EDE that isn't human any more. Void Engineer ships are safe, Unionist facilities are safe, RDs keep their own safe spaces, but space isn't safe."

Jazmin turns a beige-ish shade of grey. "You... you mean they... they used to be Unionists," she says, hands shaking. "But... but we're not in a safe place and..." She stares at her hands, as if she'll see herself turning into an alien here and now.

"It takes months usually," Elsa tells her. "But listen to me, Jazmin. They're not human. No matter what they act like. They're not human. Look at this." She flips out the scope of her rifle, and lets Jazmin peer through it, seeing the blips of EDE presences it highlights on the tracker. "And because they used to be with the Union, they have tricks they can use against anyone who isn't a Void Engineer who's had the special training and mental preparation we get put through. You're vulnerable to them. And they're after you."

"Why?" The words are sudden and sharp and cutting and... and Belltower-ish. That's the only way she can describe them - but there's real anger and emotion in there. The sound of a woman pushed to her limits. "Why me? Why me in particular?"

Elsa remembers too late that even six-month trained NWO Operatives are not to be underestimated. "They think you're Director Belltower," she says, in an act of supreme blatancy.

"Am I?" And there's the same tone again.

"No." Elsa isn't lying. Jazmin Black isn't Jamelia Belltower. Maybe she'll become her, but - dammit, Elsa likes Jazmin. She's fun. She's cute - in a kind of nerdy, bookish way. She'd do well as a recruit for the earthside VEs. She'd even genuinely like to buy her a drink in a bar and see if she might be interested in swinging that way. "No, you're not."

Jazmin takes a deep breath, and sighs. "Well, if... if they're going after me, that's something we can use," she says, shoulders hunched. "I don't want to, but... if everyone's out to kill me because of someone I'm not... apparently I don't get much say in what happens." She swallows. "We'll need a security office," she says, looking at the speakers on the wall.

***​

The loudspeakers in the complex crackle to life. "Someone send help!" a man shouts into the speakers. "There's two women, they're not meant to be here and they've got guns and-"

Then there's a loud burst of assault rifle fire.

"They're down," says an Arabic-accented female voice. "Cut the speakers. We have to get this done before-" The PA system turns itself off.

Mr. Green tilts his head, listening to his earpiece.

"It's her," he says.

"The renegade," says Ms. Lemon. "Security Office 12."

"Do we proceed? We have taken losses."

"Yes. She is-"

"-still-"

"-only human."

"And what about the-"

"-rogue Iterator malfunction? It will approach the noise. It is-"

"-not human. It is predictable. It will act in the manner we have predicted it to. We will be ready."

"It is to be sanctioned for its actions-"

"-as a secondary objective, yes."

"Recruit the locals. Their security is inadequate, but for our purposes they will be-"

"Entirely usable. They will serve as-"

"-point assets. Yes."

The two of them tilt their heads, adjust their ties, and move out.

***​

Blue eyes wide, dribbling blood from her fanged mouth, the extrusion of the being which was once Henrietta Mari Langley lets out a laugh-sob at the sound of the voice on the PA system.

"Belltower," she weeps, tears bubbling down her face. They hiss and boil in the heat, drying where they emerge. "Belltower. She likes her. She likes her." Yes. Someone had told her that. Someone she can't remember right now had told her that her sister liked her superior and that made her happy. So she'd be willing to kill her, even if... if Belltower was the one they told her who had made her sister stand up to her! Made her use cheating Agency tricks to beat her! Not fair! Not fair at all.

Her knuckles whiten around her machete. The Agency. Allies. Hardly. To think she'd trusted them. They were meant to be working for Control, but they weren't! They weren't loyal! They didn't care! They just wanted power. Because if they cared, if they were loyal, they'd have done their job. No one should have stood up to her.

The fire crackles and roars around her, thick fumes veiling her.

And they want to kill Belltower too and she won't let them because she needs to kill her so she can show it to her sister so she'll suffer so she has to be the one who kills Belltower and then she can kill her in front of her sister and then she'll know how it feels. She'll know how it feels!

"Mama," the monster cries. "Papa. I miss you so much."

***​

Elsa lets go of the button. "See," she tells Jazmin. "That wasn't so bad."

"I'm going against the book," moans Jazmin. "Highly effective Operatives don't make themselves a target for everyone on both sides."

"... is that really in the book?" Elsa asks, eyebrows raised.

"Yes!"

"I'm running an oracle hack right now. We have two minutes and thirteen seconds until they show up," Elsa says. She looks around the smoke-filled security office, pulling a strange-looking device from a pouch, one-half satchel charge and one-half high-tech gizmo.

Jazmin takes a look at it and the strange label. It says "MUNITION, VE-52 SELECTIVE SPATIAL DISTORTION DEVICE." Some sort of teleportation weapon? She's read of these, but she's never seen one in action anywhere. She knows from what she's been through that she'll probably never get a chance to see one of these. She tries to pretend that she isn't interested while scanning the rest of the room for places to emplace IEDs.

Elsa hides it up on a surface, and then links it up to a small camera. "Get as much of this stuff set up, and then we'll have to head back into the vents. Neither of us are going to die here, okay? We are too damn pretty to die! We're going to go out and getting drunk together!"

"I don't drink," Jazmin retorts, strapping her improvised explosive device to the battery cabinet holding the reserve power supply for this security office.

"Come on. You can relax for once," Elsa says.

Jazmin glares at her for a moment, before returning to her explosive-setting.

"Fine," Elsa concedes. "You can have orange juice, and I'll have your share of the vodka."

***
Inside the Oppenheimer's Light, the lights are the red of danger. The ship's PA system has been set to automatic repeat. "Warning. All non-expendable crew abandon ship. Warning. All non-expendable crew abandon ship. This vessel is preparing to engage in a suicide attack on an enemy vessel. All non-expendable crew abandon ship." The half-dozen people who qualify as non-expendable, and their White Tower escorts, are keeping that in mind. Stopwatches or implanted timing devices are ticking down the seconds until the point of no return as they engage in preparations for the ship's final defiant flight. Most of them have already gotten into the shuttle, but Hamilton is different. He's a lot more technically minded, and he has a job to do here. A job that involves striking back at the Computer. The Computer which has gone insane.

He gives orders to the Bobs manning main fire control. They're the 'expendable' crew. They don't seem to mind or care-Bobs have always been oblivious enough that they never really noticed their impending deaths, something a lot of people confuse for quiet dignity in the face of imminent danger. It wasn't that, Hamilton knows. They were just very fortunately oblivious to everything. What a way to go through life-ignorant of everything but what was in front of you, just quietly obeying everything you've been told.

Next to hm, another old-timer, Michael Parker, is also working on calibrating the fire control instructions. His job is to double-check the math, print out the instructions and give them to the Bobs. He sighs. "Be nice if we could go back, isn't it? Just back to the way it was, without space aliens or Reality Deviants or any of this nonsense? Just like these guys and their total lack of self-awareness." He gestures at the Bobs.

"Just pretend the Earth is all that exists and there's nothing out there? No conspiracies, nothing?" Hamilton asks. "Maybe. But it'd be immoral." The Bobs ignore them, oblivious.

"Really?"

"What if you knew that you could change the world, make the world a better place, and decided to not do it?" Hamilton says. "Wouldn't that mean you're at least somewhat to blame for the world being as shitty as it is?"

"Maybe." Parker concedes. "But who's to say what making the world better means the same thing for everyone? Or that it actually does? Maybe it's just good policy to keep your head down."

"I don't see it. If someone was being mugged in front of you, you'd help, right?"

"Sure. But that's entirely different. It's a lot smaller and more personal than trying to make the world a better place."

"No, I don't think so. I think everyone tries to make the world a better place, it's just a question of how far people are willing to go."

"And if you have to kill millions to make utopia?" Parker asks, handing the last page of instructions to the Bobs.

"Like it or not, that's what we do." Hamilton finishes. "We kill people because we've got an image of a better world. I don't think that's an inherently bad thing, we just have to be careful." He activates the intercom. "Fire Control ready. Heading for the shuttle."​

***​

The cockpit of the Oppenheimer is empty of human life. There's something which looks like a crash test dummy sitting in the seat, with Elsa's captain hat on it at a jaunty angle. The Oppenheimer has been flying away from the conflict, and now it's turned around. The engines are flaring as it uses the distance to build up speed for its final run.

Down in Fire Control, Catherine Nichols finishes inputting her final commands to the fire computers. All the remaining drones are already set up to be dropped behind the vessel, as are the missiles. She's transferred everyone else on board off onto one of the smaller, more intact stations in the Hollywood Belt. There's a ship there, so they might be able to seize it.

They have a better chance there than they do here, anyway, and that's as much as she can give them.

Nichols shakes her head, and glares at the wall behind her. "Damn you, Hollywood," she says directly to it. "I forgot to account for your influence. You always want a spectacle. Always want to escalate for that big show-stopper finale. Well, here we have a nuclear ethership at ramming speed trailing all its warheads. Pretty big spectacle. Of course, it won't kill them. I'm not asking for that. I know it has to be a character-based drama here, and that means it can't just be a clever trick which beats the monster. I won't ask that of you, but I will say that the sacrifice of such a vessel in such a stylish manner will look pretty good, eh? And it's a sign that the heroes are desperate and that the movie's coming to an end." She pauses "Think about it."

The wall doesn't say anything.

"I can't blame them for being nudged towards such stupid plans," she adds. "I can blame them for picking them, because they are very, very stupid. But whatever they'd have done, you'd have nudged things towards an escalation. And now I have to try to save you, because you didn't let a perfectly reasonable FTL-drive malfunction kill that thing out there. Are you trying to get destroyed?"

The wall continues to not respond.

Nichols shakes her head, pinches the brow of her nose, and then steps through the fourth wall and out of the silver screen. She looks over at the audience of faceless spirits. It's dark in here, and they're watching with rapt attention. There's a munch of popcorn and the occasional slurp of a drink.

"Down in front!" someone shouts at her, and she ducks, dodging the attention of the ushers and edging into an empty seat. Up on screen, the camera pans across the conflict, showing the flashes of exotic weaponsfire and the glow of the engines. The drone launchers fire, so engineless drones with attached nuclear warheads are now trailing behind the still-accelerating Oppenheimer, invisible and silent.

She hopes Hollywood listened to her and accepted the sacrifice, at least.

Rummaging through a pocket of her tan coat, she pulls out a phone, and scrolls down, looking at her updates.

One of the faceless spirits glares at her. "Turn that phone off!" it snaps at her.

Nichols sighs and gets up from the seat she's only just taken. "Asshole," she mutters, wandering towards the exit. Stepping out into the slightly-sticky corridor, she looks up at the door.

Last Flight of the Oppenheimer - 15 she reads.

"Yeah, pretty much," she says, swiping a guide from a rack. She flicks through the Now Showing section.

"Hmm. So we've got The Belltower Rivalry in Screen 101, Let It All Go in Screen 2501, Psi-Agent IX in Screen XII, Steelhead: Conspiracy in Screen 800..."

She finds what she's looking for, and starts reading the reviews while she makes her way there, trying to see if she can find any spoilers.

***
Harlan Aristide floats in the inertial dampening gel of the QUEST's 'cockpit,' watching as the Oppenheimer's Light suddenly appears out of stealth and salvoes nuclear shell after nuclear shell at both combatants, still too distracted in their orgy of mutual destruction to see the vessel's approach. The QUEST's voice, its cybernetic gestalt mind, talks to it, tells it that the firing pattern is a deliberately designed time on target pattern so that the first shells will only impact when the last have left the barrel. It's surrounded by a halo of rockets and shells, a slowly expanding hemisphere of atomic death. He doesn't see any of this in the normal sense, of course. His eyes are closed. Instead, the ship is feeding information directly to his brain, creating a rich false-color cosmos that he can sense with all five senses. He can feel the cosmic radiation, taste the solar wind, see the battlezone in false colors that emphasize the lesions in space-time that the weapons systems of both combatants have left.

He sympathizes with the Oppenheimer's Light. It's a Reality Deviant vessel, but in a way it's closer to what he understands than anything else. He gives it a rare smile. "We're almost alike, aren't we. Both old warhorses from a bygone age. You'd have been a perfect Void Engineer ship back in the 30s or 40s." He doesn't get a response, but he doesn't need one. He knows it's true. Despite what the NWO is doing, it's not going to win the political argument here. The Syndicate won't let them, and the Progenitors and Iteration X have gained a lot more power. There's not going to be a mass psychic program going on-at most a limited run, psychic supersoldiers.

He's not fooling himself that his position is ironclad. But nevertheless-it's something to live for. A year ago, if he was in a position like this, he'd have done it. Ended it all. Died for something worth dying for. "But there's a difference here." He says to himself. "I've got something to live for. I've finally got some hope." Maybe students. Maybe friends. Maybe old colleagues. And maybe getting Jamelia Belltower and asking her what exactly possessed her to start looking into a past which had been erased with the thoroughness that Control tends to do. Without her typical discreetness, either. Almost... as if she was blind.

The revelation stuns him. The little things his photographic memory puts together. How she looked at the picture of her daughter and didn't seem to understand he was asking about deciding to forget her. She didn't know. The Yellowfields incident and her mention of 1979 as her first mission. She didn't know. A lot of the hints he gave about her regrets. She didn't remember. They were so disappointed by her failure that they even took that away from her. Some mistakes are not worth remembering. Some regrets aren't worth suffering.

The QUEST's computer messages him, telling him he's in range for the chronal torpedoes stuffed in its missile racks, and he empties both magazines. There's no reason to save any ammunition, and he knows that point defense can be saturated. He's worked with mundane artillery in Helmetshrike ops, he understands the concepts just enough to try to cross-apply them, using the QUEST itself as a second opinion. The chronal torpedoes are fired randomly in the missile launch sequence. He doesn't even know where they are-just in case the H/K or the MUSCOVITE turns their powerful electromagnetic effectors onto him and tries to rip it out of the QUEST's gestalt mind. The QUEST doesn't know, their place carefully decided by the random decay of a radioactive isotope.

The Chronal torpedoes and the nuclear shells hit nearly as one, and both the H/K and the MUSCOVITE reel. They shudder, systems shattering, autonomous weapons bits failing, armor breaking. They ripple and fade, and then reappear, wounded, almost mortally. The MUSCOVITE recovers first, and it turns its weapons on the Oppenheimer's Light. Harlan can't describe what happened. One moment, the Etherite atomic rocket space-cruiser is there. The next, it's gone, leaving only a painful afterimage.

Harlan understands that Henriette can't win against both the dying MUSCOVITE and the H/K. He pushes the Redemption towards the H/K, and his eye tracks onto it.

[GODFINGER FUSION LANCE ARMED]

The H/K, mortally wounded, at a fraction of its capacity, aims at the Redemption. He pushes it at maximum maneuverability, feeling the strain of the acceleration under even the acceleration dampener and through the cushioning of the inertial gel. His vision is filled with false-color trails of incoming coherent-gravity weapons, plasma cannons, guided plasmoid weapons, vectored ion beams, brilliant pebbles, weak nuclear force field suppressors and electromagnetic dampeners. He understands that he's been targeted by electromagnetic effector weaponry and he uses his psychic powers to shield himself from the H/K's attempts to shut down his mind while the QUEST dodges. It feels... familiar, like he was back in the 80s. Back to back with Prowling Wolf, fighting hand to hand against a hit-team of Akashic ninjas. Having someone backing him up, even if that 'someone' is a nonsapient gestalt of a half-dozen vitrified minds connected to a solid-state supercomputer.

The Redemption rocks as a swarm of flockers hits it, tearing at its stealth coating and thick armor plates. They're tiny weapons, the Harlan/Redemption gestalt knows. Barely 10 millimeters wide and five times that in length, you could fire them out of small arms, but these self-organizing kinetic kill vehicles can tear apart warships in sufficient number, and carry both a plasma charge and nanoviral payloads. They dispense anti-nanoplague countermeasures and keep heading down.

A plasma beam hits and the Redemption's superconducting layers race towards burnout. It glows white hot, a delta-winged angel of death screaming down at wounded prey. They project a psychokinetic field, and the beam's coherence breaks. Temperatures on the Redemption start to tick downwards, as does the firing solution.

[GODFINGER FIRING SOLUTION CALCULATED.]

Burn, you monstrosity. Buuuuuurn. Harlan thinks, and the weapons react. Two fusion beams, their temperature so intense as to be invisible to the naked eye, lance towards the damaged, crippled core of the last Autopolitan Hunter/Killer, and pierce its heart. But it still lives. The servants of the Autopolitans are not so fragile as to die from merely being pierced in their heart. They downclock, shutting down unstable theotechnology in favor of simpler backups. Fusion cells flicker to life to replace the power gained from a hyperspatial tap. Zero-width wormhole connections deactivate as the processing power needed to maintain them becomes insufficient, being replaced with more primitive electormagnetic communications. Weapons reconfigure themselves, exotic weapons remotely ejecting as they detonate from their internal instabilities. The Hunter/Killer recovers, crippled to a fraction of its ability, but still more than lethal.

And the Redemption's assault rams pierce its computer systems and end its life once and for all.
***
Elsa watches as the redhaired girl enters the security office, and then the telemetric shear goes off. Her machete flickers and vanishes, disappearing to who-knows-where-"anywhere but here" was the effective gist of her programming. The monster looks at her empty right hand, dumbly, uncomprehending, and the explosive goes off. Clothing singed, skin soot-blackened, blood dried, she looks almost pitiful. The look in her eyes as she stares dumbly at the hand which had held the machete isn't the look of a monster. It's the look of a young girl who's found out their birthday present is empty, or perhaps been rejected by their first date. They run for the exits as Elsa watches the monster. Jazmin is looking at it too, seeing the tearful god-monster as a scared little girl for a moment, one who's been abandoned by everything and everyone she knows. "A sister and a mortal enemy, two worlds together-a tiger and a child." Jazmin says quietly. Elsa knows she's quoting something, but not quite what.

"You can't sympathize with her. She's here to kill us."

"I know." Jazmin says quietly. "I know, and yet I can't help but pity her. She didn't choose this. She was put on this path."

Elsa can't disagree with that, try as she might to. In a way, the girl was an innocent, killing because she didn't know what to do about anything else. Then the security come in, and Henrietta is back to her usual violent self, biting and kicking and gouging with nails that have elongated into almost claws and sharp bloody teeth. She's fast, and strong, and very very deadly, but by the time the Agents show up, she is bruised mess, and she fights with the ferocity of a wounded, cornered animal as Elsa and Jazmin run to the exit and back to somewhere else.

In the end, one of them stands there, amidst the bodies of his comrades, amidst the cooling corpses of the facility's security, run ragged by the Agency's demands. "Goodbye, Miss Langley." He says, holding a pistol to her body as she lies there, bruised and struggling to get up. He fires. Once. Blood erupts from her chest in sickly black strings. She still tries to stand. Twice. Her legs wobble as she manages to get to her knees. Three times. Her arms force her upwards. Four times. She cries out in pain, crying and gurgling blood, but she still manages to almost get up. Five times. She struggles to take a step forward, and the Agent steps backward with practiced precision. Six times. His gun jams, and he clears it with mechanical, inhuman speed. She steps forward again, and Elsa can see from the hacked security cameras how her face is streaked with tears. Seven times. She keeps staggering towards the Agent now. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. She falls, her legs too weak to support her. Twelve. Thirteen. Her chest is pockmarked with more than a dozen bullet holes, and yet she still crawls towards the Agent, trailing black rotten blood behind her. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Ninteen. Twenty. Reload. She collapses. Her cries are no more than a whisper, but Elsa can hear them.

"Mommy. Daddy. I... I'm sorry. I wasn't good enough. I'm sorry. I failed you. Twice."

"Henrietta Mari Langley. Your employment with the Union has been terminated." Twenty-one. A shot to the head, and the Autopolitan god-monster's representation stops moving. "Your actions constituted treason. There is only one punishment for treason. Your sentence has been carried out."

And despite how Elsa knows that she should feel like she's won a great victory today for the Void Engineers and for all mankind, she feels like the villain here.

"The exit's close." Jazmin says, clearly feeling much the same way, but knowing that Elsa needs a distraction. "Come on. We're almost there." They round the corner to the exit, and there's a quartet of security guards with pistols and nightsticks.

"Hey! You're not authorized to be in here!" They shout, and three of them start to writhe in agony as if something seeks to burst out from their skins. Elsa fires without thinking, dropping two. Jazmin fires at the third and fourth but she's stressed and nervous misses the third one. A woman in a neat black suit, wearing black mirrorshades and with an earpiece, stands there, looking disdainfully at Jazmin. "As we suspected. The Adversary is here."

***
Henriette is barely holding her own against the Core Guardian, against her sister's corpse. The Trinity Titan's servomotors and nuclear turbines strain against the impacts, its armor plates buckle. The Theological Dominance Platform Mk-V is just too lethal, a perfect machine piloted by an inhuman god-monster. "You thought you were the better pilot, sister?" Henrietta snarls with vitriol. "Well too bad! I upgraded! I'm better than you! I'm faster! I'm smarter! I'm stronger!"

Henriette swings her fission axe at Henrietta's war machine, and misses as the black machine vanishes in a teleport. Henriette dodges on wings of atomic fire, and a blow which would have split her in half merely lands on the reactive armor shield that she's deployed, blowing them backwards. The arm reports more servo damage, and it's down to 72% strength, despite the best efforts of the nanomachinery. Henriette keeps her sister's machine at bay via careful use of the gamma ray ocular lasers, blazing away at the reflective armor of the Mark V. Her atomic rockets are repurposed into flamethrowers, burning away BioVARGs as they seek to swarm her. She knows she can't win like this, but she knows that other people are fighting to give her a chance. And they do.

Her sister screams in agony, and then surprise. The Mark V's lines blink yellow, then blue for a moment, and it vanishes. Henriette doesn't know where, can't track it. It's just teleported away from the battle. Perhaps Autochthon's taken control of it. Perhaps something else has happened. She doesn't know. She only knows this is the time to attack the core while her sister is stunned, insensate, distracted. Automated defenses keep attacking her, and the BioVARGs still try to swarm Henriette, but they're ineffectual as she thrusts towards the core and starts hacking away. She manages blow after blow after blow, the armored casing cracking and warping.

The world-body of Henrietta shakes and shudders. The core chamber cracks as the Oppenheimer hits her, and the entire battlefield warps and distorts as the chronal torpedo wreaks havoc. Henriette shoves a nuclear grenade into the cracks and thrusts away, facing the Titan away from the explosion. There is a bright flash, reflected off the walls, and she doubles back to grab the tiny core that was her sister. It's like a pearl in her hands, a self-contained armored cognitive core. She starts to squeeze. Her sister screams. The walls implode onto her. She is surrounded by rot and wrongness. She knows it's crushing her, and she manages to move her machine's hand to activate one of the Crockett grenades. There is a bright flash and Henriette is knocked unconscious by the sudden acceleration despite her implants.

When she regains consciousness minutes later, she checks the damage of the Titan. Many of its gauges are in the red from the impromptu Orion drive improvisation. It's missing a hand, its left arm is wrecked scrap metal. Its armor has been damaged and is flaking off in plates. One of its eyes is cracked and although she can still see out of it, its gamma ray laser no longer works. One of the three fission turbines in the Trinity Titan has been scrammed due to meltdown risk. Several of its thrusters have been crushed. Then Henriette looks at what's outside.

She sees what her sister has become, a twisted demonic thing that she imagines were the creatures the Void Engineers in her bedtime stories fought. An eldritch horror, an outer god, something terrible and awe-inspiring. Its wing-tendrils twitch, its body is a patchwork of undying BioVARG flesh and repurposed warship hull. She can see the weld lines where BioVARGs have fused together, where their flesh has become material for a patchwork demon-goddess to create her chosen avatar for one final battle. It glares at her, and it lets out a roar. Despite how it's space, she can feel it. It looks like a fallen angel, its wings made out of floating, unconnected segments which were originally part of Henrietta's weapons halo. Its 'horns' are similar, floating around its head which has too many bionic eyes and too many rows of sharp teeth. One of its legs and one of its arms are artificial, asymmetric twistings of Autochthonian technology into body horror.

"She's weakened." Nichols says. "She's barely hanging on. She's running out of power and out of tricks."

"She doesn't look weakened to me!" Henriette shouts back. "She's the size of a battleship!"

"Pshaw. Compared to the gigantic god-body she had, a giant monster the size of a battleship is weak. She's only five times as tall as you are. And this is all that's left of her. You can do it. Chin up." Nichols says. Henriette doesn't know if she's being sarcastic or not. "If Kessler pulls through you can kill something like this just fine."​


"I've seen an agent punch through a concrete wall; men have emptied entire clips at them and hit nothing but air;"
So. Jazmin and Elsa face off against Ms. Lemon. This is a relatively minor vote-it's just an opportunity for people to do write-ins. If nobody does anything, you can be fairly safe in assuming Jazmin and Elsa escape. If nobody does anything, I'll probably just gloss over it.
[ ] Write-In: How do they get out of the Archives?

Kessler: Infiltration
Kessler is planning to disable Henrietta in the Hollywood realm now that the Agents have been largely stymied by the majority of them having been kicked out of the Archives by...
[ ] Sneaking commando teams into the core...​
[ ] And detonating a nuclear weapon.
[ ] And hacking the main computer.
[ ] And overloading the main reactor.​
[ ] Disabling the defenses by a commando strike and calling down the might of the UNITED STATES AIR FORCE (insert crying eagle here)​
Any votes for this will be disqualified if your post does not have a crying eagle in it.​
[ ] A tragic story where his soldiers die one by one until he fights the big bad one-on-one, bare handed and bare-chested, and beats it.
[ ] Write-In.
It Has To Be This Way:
Henrietta has unleashed her final form, and Harlan's not going to get back into range to save you. Henriette's plan is to:
[ ] (1.5x) She can't win against a vampire god of this magnitude. The Trinity Titan is failing. All systems offline. Wait wait why is Henrietta's Core Guardian contacting her? And why does the contact look like her sister? On Earth?​
[ ] Yeah, that's right. Mari and Henriette versus the vampire god-demon that was originally Henrietta.​
[ ] Hey, Autochthon gave the Core-MkV to Henrietta, and Mari's technically Henrietta, right?
[ ] "I'm sorry, sister. But you've been given a second chance here. I'll make sure this time, I'll protect you."​
 
Last edited:
Details on Henrietta
So, I'm still curious, what allowed Henrietta to have an apotheosis? The Apocalypse Canceller was made out of god and was the hope of a major city and being stuffed with Prime Energy.

Om nom nom tasty Autopolitan mothership filled with Primal Energy, combined with personal thematics which - due to the vampire influence - means she gets Spirit Charms to steal essence from other spirits.

In slightly longer terms, entirely appropriately she did it iteratively. The initial upgrades, done with things close to hand, left her inhuman enough that she lost her Avatar and became a spirit. That got her a whole bunch of Spirit Charms, and due to her personal thematics (rage, technological supremacy, self improvement, vampirism, being the ultimate predator), she got the power to a) ignore mental influence from things she's angry at, b) control other bits of technology, and c) eat things for essence.

And there was an entire Autopolitan mothership she was hooked into the core of, with access to a bunch of systems and power flows and whatever. All of it was edible.

So she chowed down on an an amount of essence which bluntly put the Apocalypse Canceller's amount to shame. Wastefully and inefficiently, with far less constructive Resonance, but with enough essence and the right themes she could make use of it. So then she ate or subverted everything on the mothership, and moved onto Planet Hollywood.

Also, prior to her apotheosis, did Henrietta have a "normal" body? During Moscow I got the impression that she was a big-honking-mainframe that had parts and a mind that were once human.

As I always saw it - yes, although even she didn't really know it.

Basically, as a timeline, Henrietta was an accident[1]. Yui found out she was pregnant, decided to keep it, and then the Dimensional Anomaly happened before she could get back home and have it moved to an artificial womb and put through the standard Progenitor tweaks. She gets captured, her suicide charge doesn't go off properly, and as part of the "reclamation" process the Computer harvests all the foetuses from any women it processes for later experimentation and because it's aware that some of its subordinates are losing their Genius, so it needs to make better ones. From scratch.

Every single one of those extracted foetuses, apart from Henrietta, then pretty quickly experiences Void Adaptation (because babies aren't known for their high willpower). Henrietta doesn't, because her Twin Soul merit linking her to Henriette means that she's still technically on Earth. That means she becomes a highly valued, unique resource - and doubly so when she Awakens at the age of a few weeks, because back on Earth Henriette has Awakened the evening after her parents' empty-coffin funeral. However, the Computer's aims are quickly thwarted when it finds that her Genius-potential swiftly declines when she's enhanced significantly and it's forced to undo things (because the Avatar can impose up to a -5 penalty on magic rolls, and Henrietta's Avatar really doesn't appreciate being fucked with, because it damn well knows what it should be like because it has Henriette to compare to).

So it winds up building a complex array of things heuristically and empirically found to keep its fucking annoyingly irreplaceable asset working. It even tried cloning her and it didn't work. And by the time enough time has gone by and it's only occasional bits of Earth primal energy stolen from the Void Engineers and her ties to Henriette keeping Henrietta human, it's even more pedantic - not only does she have to be basically baseline human, she also has to be kept in a similar-ish state to Henriette.

So that's the "real" her - the thing which the core used to be. A life support pod containing a scarred, emaciated partially vivisected girl, all her nerves wired into systems, living her life at first puppeting a body which lives in play-acting realms with the cyberised, brain-tape-restored mindless puppets of her parents, and later puppeting various other bodies. The Computer essentially made her into an Enlightened component of a greater Henrietta-complex, with mind-forks running other systems, merging and forking and remerging constantly, sometimes using advanced Mind techniques to fork off fragments of her Genius into external-operation bodies, all designed to eke out as much use as possible from that single, Genius-posessing irreplaceable resource and keep it in its unreliable, erratic state of existence.

Then Serafina went "I HAVE CAREGIVER, I FEEL SORRY FOR HER, LET'S DECONDITION ONE OF THE FRAGMENT BODIES" and basically stole it. And not only did that make Henrietta more erratic, but that also introduced another reference source because now her and Henriette now had two Twin Souls and Henrietta had Shattered Avatar on top of that. Add that to the vitae addiction from eating all those vampires, the fact that the ghosts of her parents had told her that they loved her, but she was wrong and needed to be stopped, and the fact that her sister had beaten her, and Henrietta wasn't in a good mental state at all.

Oh, and then I went, "Hey, MJ, it'd be hilarious if you rolled her Willpower to see how she responds to the trolling" and he went "Oh. Six successes. Well. That's a thing," and I went "OH NO I SUCCEEDED TOO WELL".

[1] Elissa: "Oh. Join the club. We have t-shirts. They say 'Our Technocrat mothers had Genius but still failed at using contraceptives'."

Jamelia: "I didn't fail! They failed me! I was using them; they just stopped working because I was in... possibly rural Borneo."

Donald: "So basically, you're saying you got screwed over by non-Consensual sex? Badoom-tish!"

Jamelia: *glare*

Elissa: *glare*

Donald: "Donald away!"
 
Update CXXVI: Deicide
JB CXXVI: Deicide
For all that this dream-realm is unfamiliar, Kessler thinks, there are some things that don't change. He's infiltrated fortresses before, wearing a chameleon suit and photoreactive stealth paint, crawling for hours to keep from being noticed, setting up for that one perfect shot. Plenty of people think that just because he's an Iterator he can't do anything but smash walls in with his head. He's corrected several of them. Many of these people did not survive the correction. He's led commando strikes.

His soldiers are a diverse lot here, and were a much larger team than he's used to. Hundreds of commandos-WWII Army Rangers, Delta Force, Navy SEALs, Marine Force Reconaissance, even skirmishers from the Civil War era and Revolutionary War-era guerillas have volunteered for this operation. All he had to do was tell them the truth-that this operation could very well decide the fate of the United States-and they flocked to him in droves. The echoes of combat are faint but he knows that his soldiers are engaged in combat against the robotic defenders of this citadel, through the twisting corridors and the defenses of the immensely powerful MUSCOVITE citadel.

He's left most of his soldiers behind in various forms of injury or incapacitation-and for all that they're EDE-mockeries of real people, it still hurts when they die from plasma guns or laser traps or hidden proximity mines or various forms of biological and chemical weapon. He started with several platoons-now he's lost most of those men. His objective is close-tantalizingly so, each meter of distance paid for by blood and tears, and his soldiers move to breach the armored door. They're a varied lot of survivors now, and their faces are screwed up in determination.

"The air defense computers are behind this door." Kessler says. "Blow it." His team nods, stacks up on the door, and it explodes inwards. His remaining troops throw flashbangs in, and Kessler moves forward, machine-gun up, tracking the automated defenses inside the massive room housing the hardened military-grade supercomputer. Kessler can recognize parts of it from an old movie. "War Operation Plan Response" is written on the front, which looks like smooth 80s computers technology before it assimilates into high-tech Autochthonian nanosystems. Terminators fire back with their plasma-guns and he responds with hypervelocity armor piercing rounds. The defenses here are unlike Hollywood-whereas before he was facing Terminators and other movie robots, he's facing real HITMarks here and he knows it. Their fire is too accurate for the robotic mooks he's been facing, their armor too hardened. Rifle rounds bounce off of their primium plate while several of his commandos go down from IX-22 headshots. His helmet reactively deploys in response to being hit in the forehead with an IX-22, and the suit tells him that minor biological damage is being compensated for by the distributed processing network of the power armor. Something that would have made him flinch, stunned him for a split-second, is ridden through by high-end Iteration X cognitive prosthetics.

One of the HITMarks is hit by a bazooka, fired implausibly in a confined space, and it goes down. Two HITMarks focus their fire on the Ranger who did it, 20mm cannon switching to proximity airburst rounds and making a mockery of cover and flesh. Another is hit by a 40mm grenade and falls, losing its leg but extracting vengeance on the SEAL who crippled it before another 40mm kills it with a headshot. "Focus on the computer!" Kessler shouts. He'll take out the HITMarks. He's got a body at least the equal of any of them, and a lot more experience to boot. Despite the chaos, they hear his order and respond at once.

[ENEMY ARMORED INFANTRY DETECTED. WEAPONS SYSTEMS INADEQUATE.] The N2 notes. [ESTIMATED LOSS OF UNAUGMENTED SOLDIERS: ONE HUNDRED PERCENT.]

The HITMarks are smarter than the horde of Hollywood robots, far smarter, using the shifting room and its defenses to keep themselves out of danger. Cover deploys from the floor to protect them in fixed response, and weapons which would have killed them are absorbed by the terrain. One of his soldiers slips out of cover as the floor suddenly turns frictionless, and is shot to bits by multiple Terminators. Another one is ambushed by a squidlike robot which darts in from a brief hole created in the roof. It's like fighting in a RD chantry, Kessler thinks. The very building is trying to stop them.

A lucky hit blasts the computer into scrap metal, and Kessler gives the order to retreat. They fall back, burning ammunition at a furious rate, as they run through changed corridors and altered killzones. This isn't going to be one of those movies where everyone lives in the end, Kessler thinks. It's going to be one of them where the protagonists' ultimate victory is paid for by blood and endless sacrifice.

But when he and the survivors exit the citadel, running to get to safe distance through more enemy fire, and the Air Force comes in, it's all worth it.

First come the B-58s with nuclear payloads. There's six of them, engaged by line of sight lasers and guided missiles, and five are downed-but one remains, spiralling towards the massive tower of the MUSCOVITE citadel. There is a blinding flash and the sky goes white. The shockwave races towards the mixed forces as they retreat. The radiation would be deadly-but this is the realm of Hollywood, where such things are plot points rather than realistic consequences. When the light fades, the citadel still stands, reduced, molten in places, its tower shattered. But that was merely the first strike-and more weapons lance at it. Missiles fired from strike aircraft or fighter-bombers, bombs dropped from B-17s and B-52s and B-1s, a veritable rain of steel and fire hammers at the walls and remaining weapons emplacements, dueling with robotic fighters firing blaster bolts or semi-autonomous warplanes. Slowly, chipped away bit by bit, the citadel and falls and hopefully so does its creator.

Kessler watches stoically, mindful of how much has been paid to purchase victory. He wonders how everyone else's efforts are going.
***​
The projectionist's head hits the wall, and he slumps down, bleeding from the temple. Catherine Nichols winces and slides the knuckle duster off her hand and slips it into a pocket, rubbing her fingers thoughtfully. She looks around the cramped space, taking note of the power sockets and the projection machine, then closes the door behind her and sticks a door stop in the way.

Peeking past the projector, she looks down at Screen 02. That's where they're showing Paradigm Origin Iteration 3.33. She isn't sure why they have decided to make it .33, but there's probably some smug metaphorical marketer who's proud that it makes them stand out or something. There are too many sequels anyway, she thinks, as she pulls a laptop out of an inside pocket of her coat which really shouldn't have been able to fit it and starts its boot up sequence.

But she read the review, and the spoilers the realm didn't even know were spoilers have clued her in. She had been trying to find the screen representing the story of the monster out in the realspace version of this realm, and to find that it was the same screen as Henriette's screen... well. In the Hollywood Multiplex, everyone's life is a movie.

But you're not meant to share your screen with someone else. Unless something strange is going on. And now that she's checked her data of what happened when Pilot Langley pulled her little stupid stunt - oh my, is something strange going on.

Her machine is up and running. She plugs it into the projector - and is very glad that this is running off digital media, not a film - and begins the load sequence, keeping an eye on the screen. She's on a deadline. There's an explosion out from in the main hall, and she checks that her future-forecasts are in-line. They are. Naryskin has done what Catherine predicted she would, and her phone is showing the ticking-down field integrity of the monster.

Which means her next gambit gets to go ahead just as planned. Admittedly, she planned it on the jog over here, trying to find Screen 02, but that's still a plan.

She pulls out her phone, and dials Henriette's number. The time in the two subdimensions isn't in synch. From Henriette's point of view, she's been unconscious for a long time, but there was just a dramatic cut and she's blearily coming to in the Multiplex, mere seconds after the blast.

"She's weakened," Nichols says. "She's barely hanging on. She's running out of power and out of tricks."

"She doesn't look weakened to me!" Henriette shouts back, the voice coming in parallel from the phone's speakers and the film outside. "She's the size of a battleship!"

"Pshaw. Compared to the gigantic god-body she had, a giant monster the size of a battleship is weak. She's only five times as tall as you are. And this is all that's left of her. You can do it. Chin up." Nichols says. "If Kessler pulls through you can kill something like this just fine."

Sometimes Catherine Nichols used to wonder if she fell into NWO habits too easily, habits like casually misleading people without technically lying. It seems to be nonsense on the face of it. Of course, in the past few years, she's found out how close she was to winding up in the Order rather than the Void Engineers. A few events going slightly differently, a different choice of lecturer at Cambridge, and she'd have been picked up directly by Director Wells. She'd have required more to go differently in her life to wind up in Iteration X, and Progenitor-her required even more divergence.

But enough about that. She slips her Shadow Ministry-made psi-amplifier on, plugs it into the laptop, and adjusts the position of the microphone. Counting down in her head, she waits for the perfect moment - and takes it. Leaning over the computer, she taps the enter key.

The scene change on screen is interrupted. And now the movie is showing a red-haired girl curled up into a ball lying on a bed, along with the subtitle;

***​

Moscow, Russia

Curled up in a ball, the red-haired girl clutches her head. She tried turning off her pain receptors and it didn't help at all. The splitting migraine feels like someone's slicing her head in half - only in reverse. It's like her head had been cut apart and now they're soldering it back together and it burns.

It's been like this for hours. At least. Her internal clock is telling her the precise amount of time, but she doesn't believe it. It feels like it's been days. The pain just isn't stopping.

There are voices up above her, echoing out of the red-tinged darkness of her world.

"... what do you mean, there's no change? Run the tests again!"

"I mean there's no change. There's nothing wrong with her. In fact, more than that - she's showing slight increases in mental function across the board, and... it's not the same as the neural activity produced when iterative enlightenment functionality increases, but it's not entirely dissimilar."

"But that doesn't make any sense!"

Tears leak from her eyes. She's been crying on and off since it started. Mostly from the pain. Not entirely. She's tried to explain that she got a signal telling them that her greater self has ceased functionality, but when she tries to talk about it she gets the scattered memories of greater-her's last moments and - worse - the emotional wrench. The loneliness. The pain. The all-encompassing anger.

Because she doesn't want to feel like that, she tries not to think about it.

She has now become all of 'I', Mari Langley considers, nails digging into her palms. She's... she's alone. Unitary. The only repository of her memories which remains. Maybe she should call herself Henrietta - no! That's not her name! That's... that's the other one's name. Only with an -a at the end, not an -e. She understands the truth better now, but some things can't be changed so easily. She can't forgive so easily.

She prefers to be Mari. It's being someone new. Mari is someone with the IBM. There are people here who are kind to her. Lots of people who lost their partners or their children in the Anomaly, so have her as a surrogate daughter-figure. They're nice to her. She's... she's even sometimes getting to go out, away from their hideout location. She's seeing Earth. The tech in her body is experimental and unstable so she can't really use it, but they'd locked most of it off anyway.

And when she's Mari, she doesn't have to think about Mama and Papa dying in front of her, or the fact that they were never the people she thought they were. Just braintape mockeries, less free-willed and less independent than a brand new HITMark. Fingerpuppets.

The pain comes back, blinding, and she nearly blacks out. She'd quite like to be unconscious. Maybe it wouldn't hurt so much then. It hurts so much she can't see.

It hurts. It hurts. It hurts it hurts it hurts.

"So this is what was at the other end of this link," a voice says. From the way it echoes, she somehow knows that it's inside her head. It's coming down the same channel she used to get commands from her greater-self. Except they weren't commands. Not as she perceived them. She merely did what her greater-self wanted, because they were all one emergent consciousness. Now there's a voice in her head, and she thinks it's coming from outside her.

Maybe she's just suffering cyberschizophrenia. It happens. And with the stress-trauma of the loss of her greater self, maybe she's just reaching out to feel less alone.

"You're not schizophrenic," the voice says, as if it's reading her thoughts. Mari thinks something rude at it. To test if it can read her mind. No other reason. "And please don't swear at me," the voice adds. "You're quite a troublesome young lady. Apparently it's genetic, despite the fact that you don't precisely have genes, per se. And unfortunately I'd quite like your help. I can't guarantee it, but if you help there's a good chance you might feel better."

Mari tries to think through the pain. "You know why it hurts," she accuses. "It's your fault!"

The voice sighs. "No, it's not my fault," she says. "It is precisely not my fault. I didn't want any part of this, but unfortunately the best laid plans get thrown off course by the winds of chance. And human stupidity. Actually, mostly it's the stupidity."

"Uh?" Mari tries. This... doesn't really answer very much whether it's a figment of her own brain or not. After all, everyone is stupid.

"Well, let's put it this way," the voice says. "Your big sister is a very clever idiot. I haven't met many other people who've been quite so cunning in their acts of idiocy. It takes real genius to be quite as dumb as she's been. Most stupid people manage minor acts of foolishness, but she's found whole new fertile landscapes of stupid in the uplands beyond regular intelligence."

Mari quite likes this bit. If she's going to hear voices, at least it's an amusing voice. "So it's her fault," she thinks.

"Yes. She decided, for reasons entirely beyond me, that now was the perfect moment to try to drive what you still think of as your 'greater self' into a nervous breakdown. It then promptly broke down a lot more than anyone could have foreseen, began an iterative process of excessive self-enhancement, turned against the Computer, tore apart an Autopolitan mothership for raw materials and began to attack Iteration X, the Syndicate and the Agency indiscriminately."

Mari feels like she was just punched in the stomach. "She-I did what? But..."

"It was quite messy."

The girl swallows. "I felt it. She-I was... it hurt so much. She was so alone. There are memory flashes and..."

"That seems to be what triggered the signal which upgraded you to full independent operation and primary intelligence status - essentially she reduced herself to an it, an EDE. The migraine is probably how you're perceiving the upgrade," the voice says. "Your body was never meant to be the primary intelligence, so it'll take some time to adapt."

There's a shape in the distance, in the blackness in front of her eyes, Mari realizes. It's a woman - a dark-haired woman in a tan-colored coat, her hands in her pockets. "Is that you?" she asks. She frowns. "I don't know who you are."

"Yes. And I'm a Void Engineer," the woman says. "I'm piggybacking on the carrier band which would have been used to control you, but I'm not going to control you. Instead, I'm asking you a favor. If you agree to help me, I'll use your new primary status to use your carrier band as a broadcast node and open a zero-width control channel. I need a pilot for a Core Mark V Theological Domination System, and you're the only one who can do this."

Mari's skin itches. She might not feel like she has a body at the moment, but she can feel it prickling. She wants it so badly. She remembers the joy, the elation, the feeling of power to be a Theological Domination System. All the old... the old conditioning comes back into the forefront of the mind. All those people telling her that she was the best. That she was the only one who could do that. That she was special. The joy of crushing Void Engineer traitor vessels off the bow of Orion.

But she... she heard there was only one Core Mark V made so far. And it was kept on Autochthonia itself and... and this is a trap. She doesn't want to... she likes being Mari. She doesn't want to be Henrietta again. She's been happy here. Happier than she's been in years. Happy in a way which makes all her memories worse.

"I'm an enemy of Control," the woman says, knowing what she's thinking again. "I'm not here to enslave you." She sighs. "If I was working for Control, I wouldn't be telling you that I want you - need you - to save your sister. We've killed two H/Ks, and crippled the EDE which used to be your greater self, but your sister is losing against the EDE."

"So?" Mari thinks bitterly. The pain rises in her head and unwanted memories of the end of her greater-self force their way in. "She... she was hurting me-us-her! It was so horrible! She... why do I want to help me-us-her against..."

"Are you human, or are you a monster?" the woman asks in a deathly cold voice. "Are you a young woman who was treated dreadfully and who deserves the mercy she was shown, or are you just a killing machine made by an ancient evil reborn in a new skin, a viper waiting to betray Earth?"

Mari realizes she has a body now, in this mental space. She realizes this because her eyes blur with tears. "Don't... you... don't you dare call me that!" she rages. "How dare you!"

"The question stands," the woman says. "Out there, a young woman is fighting a monster. Will you side with the young woman, or the monster? Will you prove yourself to be worthy of independent existence, of trying to become the woman you should have been, or will you surrender yourself to becoming an extrusion of a wild dog?"

Mari tries to rush at her, but the woman in the tan-colored coat remains the same distance away no matter how she tries to move. "Stop that!" she shouts.

"Answer the question."

"Of course I'm a person!" She gasps for breath. She doesn't need to breathe, but how she was raised - well, she has certain instincts. "I d-don't want to go back to... to being like that!" She balls her hands into fists. "I have to live with what she-we-I have done and... and it's horrible and... and... I'm not a monster! It wasn't my fault!"

The woman eyes her up. "I think you're telling the truth. I'm not asking you to like your sister. Honestly, I don't like her much. She's caused a lot of trouble for me. But because she was an idiot and drove your former greater self into becoming something not-dissimilar to what the Apocalypse Canceller became, she needs saving." The woman smirks. "And that's something only you can do. You're the only person alive who has access rights to the Core Mark V. It'll view you as its valid pilot."

Mari tenses her jaw, then laughs. "I suppose," she says, eventually. "I... I guess it's... it's like a way of leaving what they did to me-us behind. And... and I suppose I got a second chance, so... so maybe I should give her a chance." She bites her lip. "She'll owe me, though!" she adds.

The woman smiles. "Oh, believe me, she will. She'll owe you her life, so she'll owe you big-time," she says.

That's a much more palatable option, Mari concedes. "Very well," she says.

"Unfortunately," the woman says, "the advanced systems in the Mark V weren't built for a near-human level intellect. You'll be able to pilot at a basic level, but more advanced functionality will be locked off. That includes its anti-divinity weaponry. Fortunately, I have a solution for this..."

***​

Catherine Nichols cuts the connection, and lets the normal playback resume, watching how events pan out.

"Met two people like you when we were going after Totenkopf. Old school Virtual Adepts," she says to herself. "Best damn sniper-spotter pair I ever met." She turns off her laptop. "And now you have something that's basically a HITMark VII as your sister. I suppose I should just be thankful you didn't get it into your head to try to board the mothership and save her life support pod."

She chuckles. "Langley, you poor stupid genius," she says. "Caught up in something you couldn't possibly understand. Mystical sorts would say you got pulled by your Avatar into freeing its compatriot, but they say that sort of thing a lot. They'd deny the capacity for humans to be bloody stupid in smart ways all on their own. I for one just think you're very nearly as clever as you think you are." It's something the young Nichols would have understood. Catherine's just had a lot more time to understand her limitations.

On screen, the jet black shape of the Mark V Core Defender floats outside the vessel. And then one eye lights up. Even from up here, Nichols can hear the audience gasp.

***​

The Autopolitan mothership is a gutted wreck. The walls are ruined and there's power arcing between ruined conduits. The hull has long since been stripped of everything useful, and is open to vacuum. The pulped hemophage flesh is burned and blackened. Debris floats through the null-g space. There has been enough blood shed for there to be thick clouds of hemophage vitae, somehow coalescing and swirling around the ruined battlezone.

One of the bits of debris is Henriette Langley's unit. The Trinity Titan, the avatar of the nuclear age, Dr. Freiger's magnus opus in bipedal strategic combat machinery ever since Brass Cog was destroyed, has faced off against the power of ancient blood curses and the sheer unchained rage of a woman betrayed-and it has lost. Its last nuclear turbine flickers as green coolant spews out in clouds, its armor is rent and torn in a dozen places. Its head is twisted at an unnatural angle, giving Henriette a good view of the stub of its right arm in the one flickering camera screen that works.

Henriette has a distinct feeling of deja vu as she tries to bring systems back online, flipping switches that she doesn't know are doing anything or not. Once again, she's staring down at a biological horror controlled by the thing which was sort of her sister, in a crippled mecha, unable to fight it off. She really needs to stop getting into these kinds of situations, she thinks morbidly. And this time, she won't have her parents' ghosts show up to save her. Because they're gone. Eaten by the Apocalypse Canceller for its apotheosis. This time she's the one staring down the barrel of the transcendent god-monster.

"Mines was better looking," she hisses. It's about all she can do.

The monstrous techno-daemon-whatever moves with deceptive speed. It's jerky and inconstant, like its muscles aren't quite properly anchored to its bones. Whatever passes for bones and muscles in it.

And right in front of her, there's a flash of light, and the Core Defender Mark V teleports back in. Where it was once red, it's lit in white, but its eyes are a brilliant blue. Henriette almost laughs. So she just did it to give Henriette a false sense of security. Bitch. What an utter bitch. She feels a transmat field close on her, and Henriette supposes that her sister is here to torture her to slow death while destroying everything and anything that might be of value. Hopefully she'll manage to get a little spite in, just make her that much madder. It won't be very useful, she has to admit. But it'd spoil the victory a little bit, and sometimes that's all that's necessary. There is the wrenching of an unbuffered spatial displace, and Henriette is in a confined space without any light.

She tries to flex her fingers, move around. The stuff surrounding her is a thick liquid with the consistency of a very thick mud. She can move, but it's hard. Her helmet comes under nanotechnological attack almost instantly. So that's what she's in. Some sort of Henrietta-built torture chamber full of adaptive nanotech. She'll get turned into a mewling lump out of a Harlan Ellison novel, made to wish for death but not desire it. It's not what she wants. She thinks through her schooling about what she can do, decides that before that happens, she'll overload her ADEI's components and kill herself.

Henriette gets halfway through disabling the safeties before the nanoweapon strips away her suit helmet and the warm smartfluid courses down her throat and into her ears and eyes. Too late, she thinks. She expects the pain to start any moment, the pain and the taunting. It's strange that there hasn't been any happening yet. There's no pain. No agonizing loss of control. Maybe Henrietta's seen horror movies, Henriette thinks. Maybe she thinks the anticipation of the violation is worse than the violation itself. And in some ways, it very much is.

"You hurt me!" A voice screams through her ears. "You better say sorry!" the voice sounds very much like hers. A little higher-a little less mature, but it's her own. It's her sister's. Henrietta. Henriette is surprised. Of all the times to ask for an apology, now is the time?

"I am. I didn't think I had any choice." Henriette admits. "I felt really bad about it!"

"Stop blaming other people!" The voice says. "It's your fault. The Void Engineer told me! You got yourself into trouble and now you need my help! Well I won't give it until you honestly apologize!"

This is the most surreal torture she's ever imagined, Henriette thinks. It's not as if she has any choice, so she goes along with it. "Okay, okay! I thought it was a good idea to make you mad because I thought you were a fragile teenage girl! I didn't expect it to do... any of this."

"Look, you're doing it again." the voice says. "You're so annoying, sister. You're not saying you're sorry you did it, you're saying you're sorry it's hurt you."

"Fine." Henriette sighs. "I'm sorry for everything. I shouldn't have bullied my own teenage sister, no matter the good or bad consequences. Are you going to torture me now?"

"Why would I do that?" Mari asks. "Why would I want to torture my sister when I could save her from her own stupid mistake and she could owe me big time! I'm not as mean as you!"

"What." Henriette says. "This is some kind of joke, right? I've gone insane?"

"Shut up sister. You're ruining my good mood." Mari says. "We have an accident that needs to be cleaned up."

"We?" Henriette asks, and is immediately distracted by a complex upgrade program sent from a 'Mari Langley.' She scans it once, twice, three times, four times, and it doesn't seem like it has any malware in it. "Who are you?"

"I'm Mari." Mari says. "I'm your sister. I know it's hard to believe because you're so dumb and I'm so much better than you, but I really am. Just use the piloting program you dummy! Do you need to learn how to install it? I thought they taught you that already."

Henriette shakes her head, or tries to. "How do I know you're not a trick made to torture me?"

"The Void Engineer lady was right." Mari says. "You really are more than just regular stupid, aren't you? Does that... monster out there look like it's capable of subtlety? Oh wait, I forgot, you can't look, can you. One moment." The blackness flickers, and suddenly Henriette has a 360 degree view of everything around her. She is in the body of a sleek black machine, facing down a massive hemophagic god-monster. She can see up to gamma radiation and down to radio waves. She can see the probabilities of incoming attacks and their evasion vectors. She can see into the past, and into the future. It's a confusing overload of sensory information far beyond what her implants are rated to handle. She'd need easily twice the processing capability to make sense of-

"You need my help?" Henriette asks, comprehension dawning, as the machine rocks from a black shadowy weapon and starts to self-repair the damage resulting. She can even see the self-repair and the configurations which the machine could modify its armor cladding and energy shielding to, all the possible combinations of tools usable for defeating gods. Option after option flickers in the side of her vision, things she doesn't understand. Weapons system names, offensive and defensive combinations, arrays of lethal Clarketech tools. "You need my help."

"I-I-It's not like I want your help. It's just that I can't pilot this machine without help. And we need to synchronize to do that."

Henriette takes a leap of faith. She trusts this... Mari, somehow. Questions can wait. She knows that Jamelia would yell at her for doing so, but this trust goes deeper than anything she's ever felt. Deeper than love, deeper than even her vaguely remembered love and affection for her parents. She knows. The same way she knows herself, she knows that her statement is trustworthy. She opens the program and it unfolds in her ADEI.

[THEOLOGICAL DOMINANCE PLATFORM MARK V PILOT PROGRAM ACTIVE]

[UNLOCKING HIGHER FUNCTIONALITY]

[RECURSIVE HYPERCOMPUTING SYSTEM ONLINE]

Her vision clears now. The blur of options slows, the world slows along with it. The sensors array of the Mark V is easily the best she's ever seen. She can even see 'inside' her-no, their-borrowed body, see the differences in architecture. The Deity Suppression System-the Apocalypse Canceller-and the advancements in Moscow that were built on it, were cultured from powerful noetic entities, "gods" in their own right. The Mark V doesn't have any of that. It is a deva in and of itself-a perfect blending of machine and god, a literal deus ex machina. They-Henriette, Mari, and the TDP Mark 5-are a synthetic war god. The only thing not purely machine is its core, something that exists in far more than this dimension, a noetic artifact of unbelievable strength, a self-sustaining wellspring of power.

The Theological Dominance Platform's wings spread, their components scattering across a hundred meters of space, held together by no apparent connecting material or energy, but rather technology which has advanced so far that even its creators, those who refuse to recognize magic, would call it so. It flexes its claws, tipped with blades designed to cut what cannot be cut. Weapons emitters, too different in forms and use to be called muzzles, poke out of obsidian skin that flows like water, weapons that can kill what cannot be killed.

The god-monster which once knew of itself as Henrietta would have felt fear, if it still had the capability to do so. It lashes out with weapons that would have been heretical to its creator, half Iteration X tools, half hemophage thaumaturgy. The twisting, coiling beam of living shadow, almost sinuous in its movements, seeks out the Mark V again...

...and as easily as one might sidestep a drunkard's blow, the Mark V is not there. It is a thousand kilometers away-no, they are a thousand kilometers away, for there are several now where there originally was one.

[FORCED LOCATIONAL INDETERMINACY ACTIVE], Henriette sees. It's like... every prototype functionality that the Apocalypse Canceller manual theorized about, but more refined, more impressive.

"See? I'm good at this!" Mari says. "I just need you to provide an extra brain and look at what I can do."

"There's no 'I' in 'team,'" Henriette retorts, but she's in a good enough mood now that there's no venom in it. "But you're not half bad. Maybe almost as good as me."

"I'll show you that I'm better." Mari huffs. "And I'm going to protect Earth!"



@Strypgia wanted me to use this music for Moscow. I think this is a better place for it. So you might notice that the Agent fight isn't in this post. This is because I'm saving it for next post. But before that, you have a vote.

Core Guardian Online. Acausal Reaction Synaptic Interface Online. Anti-Deity Weapons Active. Theological Ability Neutralization Active. Unit Awaiting Commands.
[X] (x∞) Finish It.

I didn't say it was a hard vote. It is definitely a vote.
 
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