FFFF
- Thread starter BiopunkOtrera
- Start date
- Original Mature Sci-Fi
- Location
- Massachusits
[X] An abduction at the dinner is a low probability option, but there might be an opportunity, or a crisis while you look at her. Bring Mirareki, as local guide, and the Ettas, who have great skills at unarmed combat. Reizay should provide electronic cover and Luyu should hang out nearby in order to rescue you if anything goes wrong. Shenla and Atet can do research.
Spectrum
Tell me a secret~
- Location
- Behind you~
I have to imagine it depends on how augmented children are in a given society. How early can they be backed up, how early do they have implants (if any) necessary for reduced sleep, how early do they get gene therapies or how much is automatically inherited...and how early that stuff turns on. And even then it depends on how much is still found to be psychologically healthy vs biologically necessary. That all plays into how much truly private space everyone needs while growing up and is thus accustomed to.
[X] An abduction at the dinner is a low probability option, but there might be an opportunity, or a crisis while you look at her. Bring Mirareki, as local guide, and the Ettas, who have great skills at unarmed combat. Reizay should provide electronic cover and Luyu should hang out nearby in order to rescue you if anything goes wrong. Shenla and Atet can do research.
Seems interesting even if it's not likely.
Though personally I probably prefer a nighttime home invasion or the like in terms of trying for highest pure success chance.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Atet is the only one of you who knows Dandelion at all from the inside. She might spot some things nobody else would. She could also be recognised with the diplomat crystal over her eyes. Still, she can watch while you and Mirareki go in. Of course carrying that kind of active link might be suspicious, so you should bring the Etas with you and have Luyu standing by.
[X] Realistically, there's no way an abduction is going to happen. Mirareki should come because this is her specialty, but the rest should stick around and do research. You and Alex can sniff her private key without Reizay's help.
- Location
- Wörms, the half continent
[X] Realistically, there's no way an abduction is going to happen. Mirareki should come because this is her specialty, but the rest should stick around and do research. You and Alex can sniff her private key without Reizay's help.
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
[X] Realistically, there's no way an abduction is going to happen. Mirareki should come because this is her specialty, but the rest should stick around and do research. You and Alex can sniff her private key without Reizay's help.
- Location
- [REDACTED]
[X] Realistically, there's no way an abduction is going to happen. Mirareki should come because this is her specialty, but the rest should stick around and do research. You and Alex can sniff her private key without Reizay's help.
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
[X] Realistically, there's no way an abduction is going to happen. Mirareki should come because this is her specialty, but the rest should stick around and do research. You and Alex can sniff her private key without Reizay's help.
Solarstream
It's all in the cards
- Location
- Zombie World
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Realistically, there's no way an abduction is going to happen. Mirareki should come because this is her specialty, but the rest should stick around and do research. You and Alex can sniff her private key without Reizay's help.
- Location
- Here & There
[X] An abduction at the dinner is a low probability option, but there might be an opportunity, or a crisis while you look at her. Bring Mirareki, as local guide, and the Ettas, who have great skills at unarmed combat. Reizay should provide electronic cover and Luyu should hang out nearby in order to rescue you if anything goes wrong. Shenla and Atet can do research
[X] An abduction at the dinner is a low probability option, but there might be an opportunity, or a crisis while you look at her. Bring Mirareki, as local guide, and the Ettas, who have great skills at unarmed combat. Reizay should provide electronic cover and Luyu should hang out nearby in order to rescue you if anything goes wrong. Shenla and Atet can do research.
Hollewanderer
The Bee Commander
Putting aside that the dinner abduction sounds like a possibly funny but definitely low-probability option, I'd be pretty worried about Stella being able to actually pretend to be Chalita to whoever she is working with, given the subject topic.
[X] Realistically, there's no way an abduction is going to happen. Mirareki should come because this is her specialty, but the rest should stick around and do research. You and Alex can sniff her private key without Reizay's help.
[X] Realistically, there's no way an abduction is going to happen. Mirareki should come because this is her specialty, but the rest should stick around and do research. You and Alex can sniff her private key without Reizay's help.
Vote closed
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Interval 100: Chalita
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] Realistically, there's no way an abduction is going to happen. Mirareki should come because this is her specialty, but the rest should stick around and do research. You and Alex can sniff her private key without Reizay's help.
"I don't think grabbing her at this dinner is viable," you say. "She's going to be surrounded by Sacred Band and probably have her own security and a QRF on standby. Plus I don't know how to act like her yet. We should concentrate on intelligence gathering for now. Mirareki, I think you and I should go while everyone else checks her out."
"But we can–" she cuts herself off abruptly. "Sorry. I just want this to be over. I–" She rises, swallows "I need a moment." She's already aout the door, Shenla going after her with an apologetic look. You hadn't realised that coming home would hit her so hard. Maybe it's the revolution, or maybe the coldness of her friends in the local Firewatch.
Reizay pauses for a long moment, then goes back to business. "You're going to need a legend. Mirareki too. Like, they know who she is. They kidnapped her after all."
"I know someone who can provide faked up feeds and ID plates." Luyu says. You suppose she needs them for insertions. "Do we need anything specific?"
"We should just work out a proper profile." Reizay glances at the door through which Mirareki left through, "I think we'll need her contacts too."
"I'd better prepare the house's auto-doc counter biometrics." Atet says. She smiles a little. "I wonder what the resident is going to think when she comes back and sees that."
The Ettas are frowning. It's Minetta in charge for now: "I think it would be best if we were to make contact with locals to publicise what Chalita is doing and work from there. Covert operations like this aren't really something we're good at." Her mouth twists slightly. She disapproves.
"Yeah." You nod. "We need a backup plan. Do you know anyone locally who might help?"
"Yes. We've been searching local records, and found some old acquaintances and members of our order who might help."
Mirareki steps back in a few moments later, looks around then sighs as if you've copied her dress to the party and sits down. Shenla bobs at her arm. "So," she says tightly, "Let's do this. If we're doing it."
The next few hours is actually quite relaxing. It's one of those things that you feel you've done before but can't recall it. Luyu's friend sets you up with legends showing you to be offworlders who work in private shipping, which explains why you're going to a talk hosted by these particular members of the Sacred Band. Through Mirareki's contracts you work out a set of local messages and events that can be faked into. As Mirareki works on this you leave a message for the Writer on Scythia, and with the firewatch cell on Nereidi, calling in your favours to have her vouch for your new backstory through their own off world contacts. Hopefully both have deep enough pools to call on that it won't link back to either planet.
In between, as you wait for messages to flash back and forth, you research the Sacred Band, and study more of Chalita's life. Luyu managed to appropriate one of the Chrysanthemum's briefing machines, and so the memories of information about the Sacred Band pop into your head as if you learned them in the recent past.
There are three orders of them on the planet, perhaps ten thousand total end strength. The Chevaliers Mordant, the Tempered Lions, the Unshriven Blades. Luyu starts sniggering as you review the names until Reizay firmly asserts that she thinks they're very cool. All three groups have an alleged speciality: the Chevaliers with a cavalry focus, the Lions as assault troops, and the Unshriven, ridiculously, as infiltrators. In fact all of them appear to be more or less the same. Heavily armoured line breaking shock troops and occupation leg breakers who did almost, but not quite, the work of modern Valkyries and Amazons. It's the Unshriven you're really interested in. They're the ones Chalita is dealing with, and the ones most into this logistical company, and the hosts of tonight's dinner.
You're surprised anyone can deal with a logistics company connected to a group called the Unshriven Blades. Of course the actual logistics entity is called Five Star Logistics, so maybe it doesn't need to use a name as extra as "Unshriven Blades"
Mirareki sits back and pulls her legs up. "Alright. Thanks. Yeah. That's good." She gives a thumbs up gesture. "We're good on the last vouch server." The identity verification you've set up is a mix of routes. Some of the routing is provided that one of your contacts, or one of your contacts' contacts have enough access to alter records to validate your legends. Others are real contacts within firewatch, trusted or ignorant, who vouch for the existence of your cover identities.
"So we're good now?" You ask. "We know who we're going to be?"
You only have two hours for the party. It's fortunate you have the memory briefer or that would be a tight timescale to become someone else.
"Yes." Mirareki says. "I'm Citlalli Salinas, a private shipper from Ḫepat. You're Nona Twist, my bodyguard and assistant." She sends you the memory package of Nona's backstory and background on Ḫepat. You remember beautiful fields of low buildings and gleaming skyscrapers, and vast rosewood forests where you ran as a girl. You picked Hepat because one of the Writer's Nyxian bodyguards was from there, so you have a lot of access to memories.
The briefing memories settle uncomfortably. You find yourself worrying that maybe you'll end up as Nona more than Stella. That Nona, still a fake, might be more of a person than Stella is. You find for an unpleasant moment that you don't look right. Where is your light gold hair? Why aren't you even darker skinned? This face surely isn't quite yours.
Alex's fingers brush your mind and the dysphoria vanishes like mist. "Steady love." She whispers. "I won't let you dissolve into a fake person."
You take a deep breath and get up to check your gait alteration has hit properly.
"Okay." Luyu doesn't seem to notice your discomfort, or maybe just doesn't comment on it. "Let's see about finding some outfits." You spend the next hour picking through various high couture, then come down to a list of four and pick. Twirling in front of a mirror you think you look good.
By the time you've picked out your outfit, jewellery and makeup it's almost time to leave.
Only an uncomfortable twenty minutes of the autodoc awaits. The house has a good medical unit, a whole small hospital setup in fact, in the basement utility level next to the sealed area you're not allowed into. The autodocs are an antique design, each one a gleaming pod of silvered glass which flowers open to reveal a mass of needles at Atet's instruction.
The mask clamps down over your face so you don't get to watch the injections, just feel a few pinches of discomfort as the nano goes in. When you step out, you have the face from your false memories. The sight gives you another uncomfortable mental twitch, and another flicker of Alex holds it down.
Luyu has packed your party outfits into a carry case and loads them into the delivery slot as you get into your travel clothes. The big problem here is moving around without your faces appearing on public sensor systems. They should mostly be down given the revolution but it's better not to take chances. You need an excuse to wear a mask, a mask that a lot of people are wearing. The solution? Go on a pilgrimage.
Up in suspension arcade and to the most famous shrine to Justice on Hera, built in the mid levels of one of the oldest megastructures. It's a bit of a disappointment, in that way very old places sometimes are. A long, narrow space on some anonymous floor of the megastructure, lit by candles and with a statue of justice that claims to be from old Earth and is distinctly showing its age and has mostly just become a woman-shaped blob. Still, the trip does its job. You mix in with hundreds of other women, each with her face covered in a white veil, and the precise measure of your gait covered by the airy floor-length skirt.
You say your prayers and make your offerings. The lady will understand why you have to cover your face. The pilgrimage route takes you through a few other mapped shrines, and then you make a turn into one of the smaller space ports that dot the arcade. This is where you hit the first snag, delayed in a traffic jam by yet more conflict specialists. These are a dark rose group, mostly dark skinned girls with red eyes and retractable claws, an ancient design based on the hellhounds of old earth myth. This group of them, named Lilith's Brood, are an extremely large and well regarded company. This hasn't stopped them getting in a growling argument with the crowd as they try to shift a gigantic convoy of everything from conventional light armour to teardrop shaped alien artillery made of what looks like dark granite. The battalion of them is almost blocking the street as they shuttle vehicles across it from the entrance of the spaceport you're headed for to a bank of inclinators.
<<Why are there all these troops around?>>
<<Something about an outbreak of some technoplague in the lower levels of the city,> says Mirareki. <<It's mostly just causing subsidence but there have been some cases of aggressive fruiting bodies or mechanical subversion. Officially, the troops are here to protect the sanitisation effort, but there's a lot of claims that they're here as a propaganda show by the interim government or to support this or that faction. I can't tell what's the best theory just from skimming the digests, though.>>
<<I hope the Echos take a contract here soon. We could use their help.>>
Nona and Citlalli dead-head over to another space port in a passing orbital taxi, and then emerge from a station hotel in time to catch a small flitter towards the party. This should be enough to confuse even an automated panopticon check, though you worry that a really precise check might note that Nona and Citlalli seem to have arrived on planet and immediately headed to this talk, which could seem like a yellow flag, if not a red one.
You try to relax, looking out at the air traffic and the grand buildings. You pick out the notable examples from the guide, the great sky blue shape of the cloud temple, the glittering black monolith of the Sophia's Needle, and the one you're heading to, the Hall of Figures.
It rises up ahead, supported upon the hands of four massive bronze goddesses, squared off, but woven around with a million representations of the human form. Feminine shapes realised as everything from abstraction to fully realistic nude stand and pose, some in scenes, others free standing. In full colour paint or gleaming white marble or flickering half real hologram.
Yours is not the only flitter coming in. You circle for a while in a queue of air traffic disguised by a sweeping beauty pass around the building that pops you up onto your landing pad at what feels like the end of a guided tour. The megastructure is tall enough that the air is a little chilly and you hurry towards the doors. This dress is much too complex to let you run a defence aura.
The concourse inside is crowded. A transit stop empties out here, and there are party goers who have ostentatiously decided to use it to get here rather than the much more dress friendly resort to a flitter. Most of them, you notice, are vanishing into a discreet row of repair booths along one side.
Far less discreet is the outer layer of security. A pair of Unshriven Blades in full blade armour. White and gold leaf highlights glitter on the surface, and the black itself is so polished as to catch the light. Their beak faced helms have surprisingly small optical slits rather than the gleaming insectile masks you associate with depictions of the Underwater Wars, or the blank surface of the optical array of a modern helmet. Their armour has a external power backpack moulded into the back, from which a swarm of drones circle, and each one has a larger flying attack system hovering at her shoulder. Rather than a carbine each carries a massive small arm, long barrelled with a bore you could fit a fist down. The brutal looking weapons seem oddly archaic and impractical, but their archaism is certainly decorative.
You make sure not to look away from the security. Everyone else is looking, so you must too. Great doors open up ahead, with a guest book at the entrance where you sign your name and pad.
Inside, the hall is windowless. The sky over the city gleams in a skylight that amplifies the stars into shining white veins in deep black marble.. Soft light dapples through cascading water features amidst statues of nude hero queens in scenes of love and battle. Soft music churns the wash of conversation into a twist of white noise. At one end is a raised stage, framed by a pair of war goddesses, and an empty podium where, you assume, Chalita will speak. There's a buffet table to one side, and a seating area, but most people are in small groups, meeting and circulating.
Waitresses with elaborately done hair move through the throng. Each is different, no clones here, but they all wear the same collar and skimpy rope inspired outfit in glossy black. A gleaming teardrop and heart tattoo below their eyes marks each as a concubine in the same harem. Secondary information from the tattoo shows them to all belong to the same Domina: Ivonne Fortuin. Fortuin is one of the open members of the Laumic Mysteries and as a successful artist and influencer, their frequent spokeswoman. You suspect she's showing off how large her harem is.
Among the crowd, more sacred band in their battle armour. Some without helmets are chatting to party goers, while others seem to be standing guard.
<<There's a posthuman watching through the local information system.>> Alex tells you.
<<Why haven't the intervened to stop this?>> you ask
<<Who'd want to risk touching something like this?>> she says. <<It's unsanitary. But they will if they have to. Hopefully it goes better for you all than it did for the Nereidi.>> She pauses. <<Most of them are hiding in the Choir anyway. They don't want to come out into the world.>>
You snag a glass from one and are just wondering which group to start trying to join with when someone makes the decision for you. "Good evening to you." The woman approaching you is beautiful in a very conventional kind of way, with silky black hair cut short to expose the nape of her elegant white neck. Her dress, a whirl pool of white silk is fetching, but quite conventional. She's athletic, not overly muscled, and entirely normal seeming except for the sensor systems set into her skin and the firewatch greeting sign she's making with one hand. "Milelki Saintress, at your service."
Mirareki returns the secret sign and smiles. "And good evening to you." She says smoothly. "I thought some of us might be at this event. Citlalli Salinas, at your service. Ms. Twist."
"Delighted." Saintress smiles. She's a strangely bland seeming person. Not like any of the other firewatch agents you've met, even Mirareki, her smile is too open and insincere. "Many of us have joined Lady Chalita. Perhaps we can finally come to a solution of the posthuman problem."
"Is there really a posthuman problem?" You ask, arching an eyebrow.
"My family fought against the Mythless during the Revolt of the Mutes. Billions died from the actions of the posthumans." She glances at the stage again. "It's Lady Chalita who's freed us from that old enemy."
You blink internally, realising you don't, actually, know what the revolt of the Mutes was. Wait. Does she mean Everdancing Flame? You try for memories of the Revolt of the Mutes and find nothing, then start to reach for historical data.If it was something that made Everdancing Flame look bad, could she have blocked it herself? The thought twitches inside you with the shiver of disquiet around your fake memories.
"Isn't it dangerous to speak so openly of such things?" Mirareki raises an eyebrow. "Aren't we giving away our intentions."
"The security Lady Chalita has around herself is ironclad." Saintress smiles. "No posthuman spy will be able to pass among us. You'll see." She turns to the stage.
And suddenly, Chalita is there. She's wearing
[ ] A swirl of gleaming black feathers
[ ] A concubine-inspired creation of white ropes
[ ] A many pieced ensemble of white silk
[ ] A spiral of multi-coloured flowers
and you realise, in a strange fractured thought, that you and she have chosen the same dress. She glides to the podium, a pair of Sacred Band at her heels and looks around the hall. She is so identical to you. Her long silver hair. Her dark skin. The way she walks and the way she smiles. They are all the same as yours, and yet, so much deeper, the skin on the bottomless depths of a whole person and the whole universe they constitute, a skin you've merely stolen and stretched over a void, ridden by the bitter corpse of a god.
"I'd like to thank you all for gathering here today, to share and unifying of perspectives in the best tradition of our Garden. Many of us have long been concerned about our relationship with the posthumans…"
She's actually not a fantastic speaker, at least to crowds. Too stiff and formal. The speech, at least this preamble, is a little banal. It's just as you feared you might be, in that role.
"...however, unfortunately we first we need to deal with a security issue." And she looks directly at you.
Spotlights pin you and Mirareki to the floor. Chalita's diplomatic smile has frozen into icy confidence. Saintress and the other nearby guests duck back out of the perimeter.
How did your cover get blown? That's the question you should be asking. But for this moment before you're fleeing or fighting for your life, you feel like you need to say something. You've waited too long to see your face to just run.
What will you say to her?
[ ] Curse her as a kinslayer for using her own self so casually.
[ ] Ask her if she hates herself.
[ ] Ask if she's proud of what she did on Scythia.
[ ] Tell her that you forever belong to Alex.
You speak, and Chalita looks like she's about to respond even as she gestures her Sacred Band forward. Do you fight? Do you run? When was your last backup? Should you destroy your queue? Can Alex save you? All these questions run through your mind at once, as the glass of the skylight shatters, the Sacred Band ignore Chalita to turn to new assailants and then drop as their armour is suddenly penetrated. The assembled crowd issues the beginnings of a scream of panic as through the doors and from the sky descend silver-armoured figures with tragic, black-eyed masks who fall like meteors and alight like birds, overwhelming force given way in an instant to absolute grace. Gossamer forcefields float about them like robes as they surround Chalita, weapons raised and angled so she has nowhere to move that is not covered. Every exit covered, every combatant down.
Las Desconocidas, special troops of the Chrysanthemum Central Interface. All Chalita's plans, and yours, are in an instant obsolete.
"I don't think grabbing her at this dinner is viable," you say. "She's going to be surrounded by Sacred Band and probably have her own security and a QRF on standby. Plus I don't know how to act like her yet. We should concentrate on intelligence gathering for now. Mirareki, I think you and I should go while everyone else checks her out."
"But we can–" she cuts herself off abruptly. "Sorry. I just want this to be over. I–" She rises, swallows "I need a moment." She's already aout the door, Shenla going after her with an apologetic look. You hadn't realised that coming home would hit her so hard. Maybe it's the revolution, or maybe the coldness of her friends in the local Firewatch.
Reizay pauses for a long moment, then goes back to business. "You're going to need a legend. Mirareki too. Like, they know who she is. They kidnapped her after all."
"I know someone who can provide faked up feeds and ID plates." Luyu says. You suppose she needs them for insertions. "Do we need anything specific?"
"We should just work out a proper profile." Reizay glances at the door through which Mirareki left through, "I think we'll need her contacts too."
"I'd better prepare the house's auto-doc counter biometrics." Atet says. She smiles a little. "I wonder what the resident is going to think when she comes back and sees that."
The Ettas are frowning. It's Minetta in charge for now: "I think it would be best if we were to make contact with locals to publicise what Chalita is doing and work from there. Covert operations like this aren't really something we're good at." Her mouth twists slightly. She disapproves.
"Yeah." You nod. "We need a backup plan. Do you know anyone locally who might help?"
"Yes. We've been searching local records, and found some old acquaintances and members of our order who might help."
Mirareki steps back in a few moments later, looks around then sighs as if you've copied her dress to the party and sits down. Shenla bobs at her arm. "So," she says tightly, "Let's do this. If we're doing it."
The next few hours is actually quite relaxing. It's one of those things that you feel you've done before but can't recall it. Luyu's friend sets you up with legends showing you to be offworlders who work in private shipping, which explains why you're going to a talk hosted by these particular members of the Sacred Band. Through Mirareki's contracts you work out a set of local messages and events that can be faked into. As Mirareki works on this you leave a message for the Writer on Scythia, and with the firewatch cell on Nereidi, calling in your favours to have her vouch for your new backstory through their own off world contacts. Hopefully both have deep enough pools to call on that it won't link back to either planet.
In between, as you wait for messages to flash back and forth, you research the Sacred Band, and study more of Chalita's life. Luyu managed to appropriate one of the Chrysanthemum's briefing machines, and so the memories of information about the Sacred Band pop into your head as if you learned them in the recent past.
There are three orders of them on the planet, perhaps ten thousand total end strength. The Chevaliers Mordant, the Tempered Lions, the Unshriven Blades. Luyu starts sniggering as you review the names until Reizay firmly asserts that she thinks they're very cool. All three groups have an alleged speciality: the Chevaliers with a cavalry focus, the Lions as assault troops, and the Unshriven, ridiculously, as infiltrators. In fact all of them appear to be more or less the same. Heavily armoured line breaking shock troops and occupation leg breakers who did almost, but not quite, the work of modern Valkyries and Amazons. It's the Unshriven you're really interested in. They're the ones Chalita is dealing with, and the ones most into this logistical company, and the hosts of tonight's dinner.
You're surprised anyone can deal with a logistics company connected to a group called the Unshriven Blades. Of course the actual logistics entity is called Five Star Logistics, so maybe it doesn't need to use a name as extra as "Unshriven Blades"
Mirareki sits back and pulls her legs up. "Alright. Thanks. Yeah. That's good." She gives a thumbs up gesture. "We're good on the last vouch server." The identity verification you've set up is a mix of routes. Some of the routing is provided that one of your contacts, or one of your contacts' contacts have enough access to alter records to validate your legends. Others are real contacts within firewatch, trusted or ignorant, who vouch for the existence of your cover identities.
"So we're good now?" You ask. "We know who we're going to be?"
You only have two hours for the party. It's fortunate you have the memory briefer or that would be a tight timescale to become someone else.
"Yes." Mirareki says. "I'm Citlalli Salinas, a private shipper from Ḫepat. You're Nona Twist, my bodyguard and assistant." She sends you the memory package of Nona's backstory and background on Ḫepat. You remember beautiful fields of low buildings and gleaming skyscrapers, and vast rosewood forests where you ran as a girl. You picked Hepat because one of the Writer's Nyxian bodyguards was from there, so you have a lot of access to memories.
The briefing memories settle uncomfortably. You find yourself worrying that maybe you'll end up as Nona more than Stella. That Nona, still a fake, might be more of a person than Stella is. You find for an unpleasant moment that you don't look right. Where is your light gold hair? Why aren't you even darker skinned? This face surely isn't quite yours.
Alex's fingers brush your mind and the dysphoria vanishes like mist. "Steady love." She whispers. "I won't let you dissolve into a fake person."
You take a deep breath and get up to check your gait alteration has hit properly.
"Okay." Luyu doesn't seem to notice your discomfort, or maybe just doesn't comment on it. "Let's see about finding some outfits." You spend the next hour picking through various high couture, then come down to a list of four and pick. Twirling in front of a mirror you think you look good.
By the time you've picked out your outfit, jewellery and makeup it's almost time to leave.
Only an uncomfortable twenty minutes of the autodoc awaits. The house has a good medical unit, a whole small hospital setup in fact, in the basement utility level next to the sealed area you're not allowed into. The autodocs are an antique design, each one a gleaming pod of silvered glass which flowers open to reveal a mass of needles at Atet's instruction.
The mask clamps down over your face so you don't get to watch the injections, just feel a few pinches of discomfort as the nano goes in. When you step out, you have the face from your false memories. The sight gives you another uncomfortable mental twitch, and another flicker of Alex holds it down.
Luyu has packed your party outfits into a carry case and loads them into the delivery slot as you get into your travel clothes. The big problem here is moving around without your faces appearing on public sensor systems. They should mostly be down given the revolution but it's better not to take chances. You need an excuse to wear a mask, a mask that a lot of people are wearing. The solution? Go on a pilgrimage.
Up in suspension arcade and to the most famous shrine to Justice on Hera, built in the mid levels of one of the oldest megastructures. It's a bit of a disappointment, in that way very old places sometimes are. A long, narrow space on some anonymous floor of the megastructure, lit by candles and with a statue of justice that claims to be from old Earth and is distinctly showing its age and has mostly just become a woman-shaped blob. Still, the trip does its job. You mix in with hundreds of other women, each with her face covered in a white veil, and the precise measure of your gait covered by the airy floor-length skirt.
You say your prayers and make your offerings. The lady will understand why you have to cover your face. The pilgrimage route takes you through a few other mapped shrines, and then you make a turn into one of the smaller space ports that dot the arcade. This is where you hit the first snag, delayed in a traffic jam by yet more conflict specialists. These are a dark rose group, mostly dark skinned girls with red eyes and retractable claws, an ancient design based on the hellhounds of old earth myth. This group of them, named Lilith's Brood, are an extremely large and well regarded company. This hasn't stopped them getting in a growling argument with the crowd as they try to shift a gigantic convoy of everything from conventional light armour to teardrop shaped alien artillery made of what looks like dark granite. The battalion of them is almost blocking the street as they shuttle vehicles across it from the entrance of the spaceport you're headed for to a bank of inclinators.
<<Why are there all these troops around?>>
<<Something about an outbreak of some technoplague in the lower levels of the city,> says Mirareki. <<It's mostly just causing subsidence but there have been some cases of aggressive fruiting bodies or mechanical subversion. Officially, the troops are here to protect the sanitisation effort, but there's a lot of claims that they're here as a propaganda show by the interim government or to support this or that faction. I can't tell what's the best theory just from skimming the digests, though.>>
<<I hope the Echos take a contract here soon. We could use their help.>>
Nona and Citlalli dead-head over to another space port in a passing orbital taxi, and then emerge from a station hotel in time to catch a small flitter towards the party. This should be enough to confuse even an automated panopticon check, though you worry that a really precise check might note that Nona and Citlalli seem to have arrived on planet and immediately headed to this talk, which could seem like a yellow flag, if not a red one.
You try to relax, looking out at the air traffic and the grand buildings. You pick out the notable examples from the guide, the great sky blue shape of the cloud temple, the glittering black monolith of the Sophia's Needle, and the one you're heading to, the Hall of Figures.
It rises up ahead, supported upon the hands of four massive bronze goddesses, squared off, but woven around with a million representations of the human form. Feminine shapes realised as everything from abstraction to fully realistic nude stand and pose, some in scenes, others free standing. In full colour paint or gleaming white marble or flickering half real hologram.
Yours is not the only flitter coming in. You circle for a while in a queue of air traffic disguised by a sweeping beauty pass around the building that pops you up onto your landing pad at what feels like the end of a guided tour. The megastructure is tall enough that the air is a little chilly and you hurry towards the doors. This dress is much too complex to let you run a defence aura.
The concourse inside is crowded. A transit stop empties out here, and there are party goers who have ostentatiously decided to use it to get here rather than the much more dress friendly resort to a flitter. Most of them, you notice, are vanishing into a discreet row of repair booths along one side.
Far less discreet is the outer layer of security. A pair of Unshriven Blades in full blade armour. White and gold leaf highlights glitter on the surface, and the black itself is so polished as to catch the light. Their beak faced helms have surprisingly small optical slits rather than the gleaming insectile masks you associate with depictions of the Underwater Wars, or the blank surface of the optical array of a modern helmet. Their armour has a external power backpack moulded into the back, from which a swarm of drones circle, and each one has a larger flying attack system hovering at her shoulder. Rather than a carbine each carries a massive small arm, long barrelled with a bore you could fit a fist down. The brutal looking weapons seem oddly archaic and impractical, but their archaism is certainly decorative.
You make sure not to look away from the security. Everyone else is looking, so you must too. Great doors open up ahead, with a guest book at the entrance where you sign your name and pad.
Inside, the hall is windowless. The sky over the city gleams in a skylight that amplifies the stars into shining white veins in deep black marble.. Soft light dapples through cascading water features amidst statues of nude hero queens in scenes of love and battle. Soft music churns the wash of conversation into a twist of white noise. At one end is a raised stage, framed by a pair of war goddesses, and an empty podium where, you assume, Chalita will speak. There's a buffet table to one side, and a seating area, but most people are in small groups, meeting and circulating.
Waitresses with elaborately done hair move through the throng. Each is different, no clones here, but they all wear the same collar and skimpy rope inspired outfit in glossy black. A gleaming teardrop and heart tattoo below their eyes marks each as a concubine in the same harem. Secondary information from the tattoo shows them to all belong to the same Domina: Ivonne Fortuin. Fortuin is one of the open members of the Laumic Mysteries and as a successful artist and influencer, their frequent spokeswoman. You suspect she's showing off how large her harem is.
Among the crowd, more sacred band in their battle armour. Some without helmets are chatting to party goers, while others seem to be standing guard.
<<There's a posthuman watching through the local information system.>> Alex tells you.
<<Why haven't the intervened to stop this?>> you ask
<<Who'd want to risk touching something like this?>> she says. <<It's unsanitary. But they will if they have to. Hopefully it goes better for you all than it did for the Nereidi.>> She pauses. <<Most of them are hiding in the Choir anyway. They don't want to come out into the world.>>
You snag a glass from one and are just wondering which group to start trying to join with when someone makes the decision for you. "Good evening to you." The woman approaching you is beautiful in a very conventional kind of way, with silky black hair cut short to expose the nape of her elegant white neck. Her dress, a whirl pool of white silk is fetching, but quite conventional. She's athletic, not overly muscled, and entirely normal seeming except for the sensor systems set into her skin and the firewatch greeting sign she's making with one hand. "Milelki Saintress, at your service."
Mirareki returns the secret sign and smiles. "And good evening to you." She says smoothly. "I thought some of us might be at this event. Citlalli Salinas, at your service. Ms. Twist."
"Delighted." Saintress smiles. She's a strangely bland seeming person. Not like any of the other firewatch agents you've met, even Mirareki, her smile is too open and insincere. "Many of us have joined Lady Chalita. Perhaps we can finally come to a solution of the posthuman problem."
"Is there really a posthuman problem?" You ask, arching an eyebrow.
"My family fought against the Mythless during the Revolt of the Mutes. Billions died from the actions of the posthumans." She glances at the stage again. "It's Lady Chalita who's freed us from that old enemy."
You blink internally, realising you don't, actually, know what the revolt of the Mutes was. Wait. Does she mean Everdancing Flame? You try for memories of the Revolt of the Mutes and find nothing, then start to reach for historical data.If it was something that made Everdancing Flame look bad, could she have blocked it herself? The thought twitches inside you with the shiver of disquiet around your fake memories.
"Isn't it dangerous to speak so openly of such things?" Mirareki raises an eyebrow. "Aren't we giving away our intentions."
"The security Lady Chalita has around herself is ironclad." Saintress smiles. "No posthuman spy will be able to pass among us. You'll see." She turns to the stage.
And suddenly, Chalita is there. She's wearing
[ ] A swirl of gleaming black feathers
[ ] A concubine-inspired creation of white ropes
[ ] A many pieced ensemble of white silk
[ ] A spiral of multi-coloured flowers
and you realise, in a strange fractured thought, that you and she have chosen the same dress. She glides to the podium, a pair of Sacred Band at her heels and looks around the hall. She is so identical to you. Her long silver hair. Her dark skin. The way she walks and the way she smiles. They are all the same as yours, and yet, so much deeper, the skin on the bottomless depths of a whole person and the whole universe they constitute, a skin you've merely stolen and stretched over a void, ridden by the bitter corpse of a god.
"I'd like to thank you all for gathering here today, to share and unifying of perspectives in the best tradition of our Garden. Many of us have long been concerned about our relationship with the posthumans…"
She's actually not a fantastic speaker, at least to crowds. Too stiff and formal. The speech, at least this preamble, is a little banal. It's just as you feared you might be, in that role.
"...however, unfortunately we first we need to deal with a security issue." And she looks directly at you.
Spotlights pin you and Mirareki to the floor. Chalita's diplomatic smile has frozen into icy confidence. Saintress and the other nearby guests duck back out of the perimeter.
How did your cover get blown? That's the question you should be asking. But for this moment before you're fleeing or fighting for your life, you feel like you need to say something. You've waited too long to see your face to just run.
What will you say to her?
[ ] Curse her as a kinslayer for using her own self so casually.
[ ] Ask her if she hates herself.
[ ] Ask if she's proud of what she did on Scythia.
[ ] Tell her that you forever belong to Alex.
You speak, and Chalita looks like she's about to respond even as she gestures her Sacred Band forward. Do you fight? Do you run? When was your last backup? Should you destroy your queue? Can Alex save you? All these questions run through your mind at once, as the glass of the skylight shatters, the Sacred Band ignore Chalita to turn to new assailants and then drop as their armour is suddenly penetrated. The assembled crowd issues the beginnings of a scream of panic as through the doors and from the sky descend silver-armoured figures with tragic, black-eyed masks who fall like meteors and alight like birds, overwhelming force given way in an instant to absolute grace. Gossamer forcefields float about them like robes as they surround Chalita, weapons raised and angled so she has nowhere to move that is not covered. Every exit covered, every combatant down.
Las Desconocidas, special troops of the Chrysanthemum Central Interface. All Chalita's plans, and yours, are in an instant obsolete.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Thank you all for letting us get to 100 updates. It's been an amazing ride.
Hollewanderer
The Bee Commander
Congrats!
[X] A spiral of multi-coloured flowers
[X] Ask her if she hates herself.
Picked these on impulse, for better or worse. Looking forwards to 100 more!
[X] A spiral of multi-coloured flowers
[X] Ask her if she hates herself.
Picked these on impulse, for better or worse. Looking forwards to 100 more!
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
[X] A swirl of gleaming black feathers
[X] A spiral of multi-coloured flowers
[X] Ask her if she hates herself.
[X] A spiral of multi-coloured flowers
[X] Ask her if she hates herself.
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- Location
- Wörms, the half continent
[X] A concubine-inspired creation of white ropes
[X] Ask her if she hates herself.
[X] Ask her if she hates herself.
- Location
- Massachusits
[x] A concubine-inspired creation of white ropes
[x] Tell her that you forever belong to Alex.
[x] Tell her that you forever belong to Alex.
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
IMO Stella declaring that she belongs to Alex is too much like rebuking an ex; this seems more like mommy issues 
[X] A many pieced ensemble of white silk
[X] Ask her if she hates herself.
For the symbolism.
[X] Ask her if she hates herself.
For the symbolism.