Shimmer, Glimmer, & Gleam - A Quest of Loss & Gain

Your mind is racing. It's not the same as in Bayview, not like Corporate, but the adrenaline is firmly in control and the memories keep trying to leak in. They're. Strange, in comparison to the situation; held up high by Marie, waiting for the larvae to come in, the two of you can't be the first wave. Her breath quakes in your ear, and it strikes you for the first time that she, and you, have been here for five gods-damned years but neither of you have visibly changed much. You have some new scars, and so does she (that fucker who went at her left the teen with a slash that nearly blinded her...), they clipped your wings, and they clipped hers, but...

Five years Inside. And no one using just their eyes would ever be able to tell. Five years Inside. She should have finished her gender apprenticeship or whatever childhood is and become an adult, but she didn't. Five years and only Inmates are going to understand. You taste blood and realize you've bitten the inside of your cheek while grinding your teeth in rage.

(On the edge of your thoughts, a dark living room with the television on. Satellite hookup, of course. Pirate stations using cable...well, the old man has a reputation to think about, is the thing, so he can't be having a cable hookup to his house. This was...what...gods, this was just before you shipped out, wasn't it? Before the uniform, and the guns, and the islands.

You would have been about eighteen.

The room is dark because neither of you had gotten up to turn on the light. Fighting, all the time, since...since she died. The room is dark and you haven't been paying attention to the shows and honestly maybe you should be asleep but the dreams are worse than the ragged exhaustion that you can feel in the edges of your eyeballs and sense as a cloying pressure at your temples so you are awake. The old man checks his watch, picks up the remote, and he very intentionally changes the channel.)

"Orchid," Marie whispers, in your ear, and the quake in her voice pierces the red haze. She's clutching so tight that it kinda hurts, but you'd never tell her that. Not now. "...Is it hard? Killing someone?"

"No," you murmur. "People are pretty good at dying. Most of the time they're so good at it that they die while trying not to, so the killing part is easy. It's being alive after that gets hard."

"...He has to die."

The chittering, slithering sounds of the young of the Wasp are blotting out the gunfire that tries to keep them back. You can barely hear Nattie ("KEEP YOUR HANDS UP AND WALK SLOWLY TOWARDS THE BOATS, NICE AND GENTLE, HANDS UP AND EVERYBODY GETS TO GO HOME -"), and her voice will soon be drowned out entirely, but that carrying shout brings a fond little smile to your lips. Your fierce little cellmate with her glass foot, so brave...

So you tell Marie: "I know. I'll help. Here and...after, I'll help."

"Thanks," she manages. "...I don't think Jack and Sasha are gonna know how. So. Thanks."

(You sit up a bit straighter. The old man barely watches TV on purpose unless it's like a rerun of a movie he hasn't seen in awhile, which is a habit you picked up off him. You've got the film taste of an octogenarian, the both of you, it's pathetic. But this isn't a movie, it's...oh. It's the debate. Some publicity stunt between Doctor Gerald Clear and...

"Who's she?" you ask, leaning forward, elbow on your knee. The woman on the screen is maybe your age, dressed not enough like one of the bishops; notably, she lacks a stole or a hat, instead wearing her brown hair down to her waist and bearing a belt over her robes that is festooned with charms. "I thought this was supposed to be, whatshisface, the cardinal or whoever that did the first gay marriage way back in '13? Don't tell me someone whacked him."

"Nobody whacked Archdeacon Hughes," the old man says with a long-suffering sigh. Your secret is that you absolutely knew the right name; dad's a religious man in a field with a reputation for cockwaffle atheism, and if you don't bully him about it everyone else is gonna bully him incorrectly. He gestures at the screen. "That's Cathar Dottie Heck."

Your illusion of heathenry crumbles instantly in the face of your surprise. "Wait, wait - you're telling me that mousy little hottie is the face of the fuckin' - she's the leader of the - really?"

"Mmhm. And in addition to witnessing what I hope will the the humbling of my most annoying peer in oneirophysics, you are seeing a social and political concession to the Beatification Heretics or, as they prefer, the Cathars," the old man agrees. "It's been a long time coming, if you ask me. The gods are more mysterious and more magnificent than official doctrine has ever cared to tolerate." He turns his head in the dark, and flashes a smile that is more like a plea. "Would you care to watch with me?"

"...Solely for gay reasons."

"Obviously.")

"...Will the larvae come after me?" you ask. Marie shakes her head against the back of your neck. "Alright. Get me in sight of that gunline, and I'll get you a clear flight path to the Warden. Marie?"

"Yeah?" she asks, and her voice is so small.

"The killing part is easy. Don't complicate it, okay? You don't need to prove anything to him. You don't need to make speeches. No mercy. Make the problem go away so you can be safe and your family can be safe. Kill him any way you have to but don't screw around. I suggest the throat, his armor'll be weaker there."

"He doesn't wear armor," Marie says dreamily. "Why should he have to wear armor when he's bellied up on the Law of the Long Arm, which seeketh in hidden places?"

And then she drops you, and you descend into the twin nightmares of memory and the red haze of the slaughter.

(You quickly realize that Doctor Clear is a worthless prick of the highest order. The old man had, if anything, undersold just how subhuman he is; scrolling through your phone to check on his work and social media while he snidely makes his points reveals a whole lot of real interesting ideas on his part, like the revival of eugenics research. Real class act, this one. Old money family, conservative leaning, OH THERE'S THE POSTS ABOUT QUEER PEOPLE BEING GENETIC DEAD ENDS WHO HAD THAT ON THEIR BINGO CARD HUH, and, gods be fucking damned, he's the world's foremost oneirophysicist. No wonder Dad hates him.

Still, despite the bit where you went from not caring about this man to wanting him dead inside of five sentences, the shape of his arguments does stick to the outside of your mind; Doctor Clear is a proponent of 'new atheism', an intellectual movement which posits that divinity is a solely memetic construct and does not represent a meaningful ontological category. It sounds like a whole lot of splitting hairs to you; why not just claim the gods are strong manifestations?

"He's getting there," your father says with a sigh. "He's getting there. As much as I despise the man, he's rigorous in building his arguments, and clever enough to realize this is his chance to win legitimacy for his most controversial idea. If he can smuggle this in past right-thinking people, it'll carry water for his more repugnant ideologies."

You scoff, quietly. "And what, the church bitched out and fed the Cathars to this wolf?"

"On the contrary. She asked to be the one to come here." Your father flashes an amused grin at you. "The separation between the Cathars and the state-sanctioned church has been a source of great vulnerability for them, and people like Clear have used that distance to attack them because they are seen as socially acceptable targets. This, in turn, gets Clear's talking points into the mainstream, where he hopes they'll outlast the people whose ideas he seeks to discredit and destroy."

Hhhuuuh. Sociopath Dad with the solid logic, yet again. You frown at the television while Clear reiterates a previous point so that he can build on it further. "...So why'd Heck and her Cathars want in?"

"Aside from sending the message that negotiations with the Church Universal are going well? To prove to herself and to everyone else that they, and their ideas, are not weak.")

You splinter into reflection and emerge from the scope of a sniper high in the Panopticon. The guard has just enough time to understand that it's going to die before you pitch it over the side, already ignoring its terrified scream. It's a long way down. Some of the gunline below turn their heads to look at you, but they can't cover their back and their front at the same time, especially not after the first one to look rather suddenly finds itself not owning a face. You work the bolt on the rifle and set up properly, feeling the ache in your shoulder from that impulsive shot.

Worth it, though. Absolutely worth it.

"Chaos reigns," you mutter to yourself, as you find your next target. "Glory to the name of the wildfire and the aurora; drink deep of this red river, mighty Wasp."

You squeeze the trigger just as the wave of the Wasp's young crashes into the first barricades.

Being Marie has never particularly been easy. Therapists slapped names on the reasons they said you had trouble fitting in at school; 'autism' came up early, and was followed by a flurry of others, but they all meant the same thing; Marie is the problem, Marie doesn't fit, Marie needs to fix herself. But why? Why's it your fault that people built the world without asking for your input and then, when you arrived, decided it didn't have room for you as you are?

In secret, shameful thoughts late at night, you're grateful that it all came crashing down. Now you get to help build the world. Now you fly on burning wings as if you were born to them, and you know the secrets of moving through air without having learned them. The Wasp reached out to touch you with the barest brush of a presence older than any empire and it was so, so familiar...

Guards start dropping like puppets with their strings cut, each the answer to the crack of a rifle. You look out, trying to spot - there it is, Orchid, high on a sniper's perch upon the tower of the Panopticon. It turns smoothly and shoots at the guard on another perch, who staggers and slumps half-over the railing, stone dead. There's so much blood, but there won't be for long. The young are devouring their way through the barricades and their own dead, and they leave nothing behind. As the gunline starts collapsing, desperately retreating, you know it's time, and you race forward like a wildfire.

You know where the Warden is. Not the top of the tower; the top doesn't have the view. The heart, though, the middle, defended from above and below, where the rotten light of the Panopticon beams...that's where he is. You circle, and are rewarded with the cracking sound of the Warden's pistol as he wastes ammunition trying to lead his shots on you. Every loop tightens in as you change elevation, zig-zag, you have to get closer, closer, he has to die!

Finally the sound you've been waiting to hear over the screams of dying guards and the chewing crack of concrete and glass and steel vanishing into the maws of the larvae; the Warden is reloading, casings falling from his service revolver. You go into a dive, flip mid-air, hit glass tempered by the Law feet-first and smash through it as if it were made of sugar. He wasn't expecting that. Good. The kids that hit you and the teachers that let them always let the Law protect them because they knew it bound you but did not shield you, but you are no longer a creature of that Law, are you? You are a beast of chaos, and it has no power over you.

The Warden takes the full weight of your body at chest height and the two of you go tumbling into the blinding, burning chamber that houses the Panopticon's eye, which fills with your shriek of hate. A hard fist crashes against your cheek, and you hear a tooth go skittering, but the pain can wait its turn in fucking line; you dig your fingers into his wrists and extend the stingers, lancing through nerves and meat and shredding muscle, and you are rewarded with a howl of agony and of terror. You raise your other hand and see him staring at the armor of light you'd passed through as if it were nothing, disbelief written all over the Warden's face.

"Your Law is hollow," you whisper hotly. "It needs fear to flush out its prey, to compel obedience. But I'm not scared any more."

"...Fear is the only way to keep order," the Warden growls; his other hand moves in a blur, you bring yours down towards his throat, and the two of you pierce each other at the same time. Your side feels cold and hot simultaneously, but the flesh of his neck parts around your new stingers, which feel like you've had them your entire life, and you rip. You rip until you see red bone under the meat, and then you jam your hand up under his chin until the stingers come away with bits of brain clinging to their tips.

Maybe it should have been more dramatic, you think, as you stand shakily. The manifestation ending in some catastrophe, the prison exploding, something. But it won't. You know it the way you know how to fly, and you know it the way you know that you are a changed thing, and you know it the way you know you love your siblings and the way you know the hate born here will not die with the Warden any more than the manifestation did. But the moment still needs a little something more, so you drag the heavy body to the broken window and strain as you take off, feeling blood soaking into your jumpsuit around the knife he left in your body.

It'll be nice, you think. You'll make a world with space for Marie and all the other Maries out there, and one day nobody will remember a world that didn't do that.

You drop the Warden's warm corpse to the larvae below, and in your heart you hear the voices of the Wasp tell you: It is not yet finished, child of empire.

"I know," you whisper. "...But it's a start. Can I say goodbye to the rest of them, before...before I go?"

I am patient, child of empire. Of course.

Good. That's. That's good. You try not to breathe too hard; Orchid is yelling something about meeting you outside, so you drift towards the entrance to the prison, your exit accompanied by a chorus of screams and then chewing. The larvae will pupate soon enough, but they won't emerge until you have fulfilled your promise. You must go forth into chaos, and bring its wisdom back to your home before you can choose a new Law. If you want to. If there's one worth choosing.

It's never been easy being Marie. But maybe it can be.

You are...
[ ] Orchid, staggering back home with Marie and Nattie
[ ] Marie, preparing your goodbyes
[ ] Captain Isoldt Young, getting the AAR on this horse shit