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Shadowrun: Imugi

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Act One Part Fifty Nine: I Know You Are But What Am I?
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    • You've never been very interested in women. It's okay to admit that now isn't it? After everything, after Jiaolong. There's never been anything about them that's made your heart race, made the heat rise in your cheeks. Shit that other guys live and breathe, the kind of stuff Gahm knew from verse to chorus, you've always fumbled with. Learning it like a second language: with rote and repetition and full-on immersion. Drinking it down, day after day, until you could vomit it back on command. Tits and ass and what to say about her face. Is she a prude or does she put out? What're her best features? What's her family like? It's crass, it's clinical, it's a neat little folder of things saved up in your head that lets you get by even as it leaves you cold.

    Mi-ran Seonwoo leaves you cold.

    The dress she wears is like stained glass turned to fabric: a hundred fractured, geometric panes of golden cloth winding up her body. Sections so small and fine they could be almost scales along the front, the chest, larger shards coiling up her legs, her back, framing the body below. Rippling through shades of ocher and amber as she moves, digital displays wrapping her wrists, her arms, in slim rings of burning brass. Everything culminating in a collar the color of the setting sun around her throat, extending up around her shoulders and the top of her spine in a sleek, synthetic halo. It catches the eye and oh you can hear from here, everyone's complimenting it. And it is beautiful, you can admit that (with a little bit of jealousy).

    But the woman herself is- not plain no. The rich and powerful aren't ever plain. But there's something subtly mathematic to it, carefully calculated. A narrow face and a sharp chin, a slender neck with long brown hair falling to her shoulders. She's like a composite of every single face on every single fashion magazine in the Republic. She could be any of them, all of them, none of them. She's not much older than you and definitely shorter than you. No obvious enhancements, you could probably shatter her spine over your knee and toss the broken, bleeding pieces away. You wouldn't even break a sweat.

    So if she's not a fixation and not a threat why do you pick her? Her and not her mother, not her father, not her handsome brother, smiling as he shakes hands, teeth gleaming, blonde highlights so obviously dyed in. Suit cut to frame the gym-tailored muscle beneath.

    Maybe it's because she's less threatening. Maybe you tell yourself the taint, the toxic keen won't be as strong because she's the youngest of the batch. That there's less a chance of her noticing you noticing her, less a chance of you hurting yourself. Or maybe it's just because you see something almost...sad behind her amber eyes. Something familiar. Just a flicker, muted behind layers of perfectly coordinated clothing and makeup and skin and genetics and then gone.

    You're probably just projecting. In the end it doesn't matter. You still need to know.

    The veins in your eyes bloat, red turning to black as your iris widens, drawing up into a slit as the wet surface of the sclera carbonizes. Flash burning into so much ash, bleeding away in a thin trickle of soot. A bodyguard passes behind you, a couple holds a conversation by your elbow. You stand framed by the press, just a face in the crowd. Feeling the pivot, the tug behind ocular nerves as the world shifts.

    Security spirits loom over the party. Each one is a goliath, a colossus: insectile and reptilian and industrial. Clinging to the curved flanks of the spire with huge, hulking limbs. Arachnid arms made out of ceramic composite and bunched CNT muscle, black glass bones jutting through, code crawling over the haptic screens. Long cables trailing from their backs, floating up into the sky, slowly undulating like kelp caught in an undersea current. Their heads are spotlights fused to angular crowns, golden beams slowly, methodically scanning the seams of the gardens, the points the plaza begins to blur and bleed into the fracturing, neon-laced insanity of Pyongyang's Astral shadow.

    Other, smaller denizens watch the party itself: fully matured camera-spirits sitting on ledges, kneeling on the underside of balconies near the black blisters of their physical bodies. Lanky stick-limbed men: a single glassy lens where a human's face should be, emaciated rubber-black bodies studded with ports and sockets. Knight-Errant summons stand beside their shamans, armored sentinels with visors lowered, their full plate a collage of firearms and blades smelted and forged together. Heavy halberds and greatswords resting against their shoulders, golden cloaks and tabards stamped with company insignia. Most are doglike, something canine to the shape beneath the suit, others avian or bovine.

    And then you see her.

    It's about what you'd expect honestly. A handful of bound spirits clustered around her like cleaner fish, beautifying her on the Astral, lending her that subtle sparkle, that shine in the Real. Essence rolls off her like a heat haze, mingling with the bonfire blaze of her family, their guards and the other guests. Carefully controlled and restrained, emotions kept in rigid check lest they bleed out and betray her to the Second Sight. Look at past it. There's nothing else. Keep looking. There's nothing there. Keep searching, scanning, you've seen the seam in the mask, and once you know its a trick it's all just a matter of patience and picking it apart.

    There. You have it, focus, iit takes a bit of work but just treat it like you're trying one of those optical illusions. You just have to relax and look the right way and the spiral will twist all on its own. The air shivers, her body goes translucent. The skin she wears, it's not the real her: it's just a see-through sack wrapped around the core, like Ms. Wu, like you.

    But she's not like you.

    Oh she's not like you at all.

    You understand it now don't you? Even if you don't want to. Even if you wish you could claw it out of your eyes, rip it free and throw it on the floor and smash the image beneath your heel like a bloated worm. Feel it squish. Innards splattering out in an oil black stain. But it's too late to take this kind of thing back. And it doesn't matter, it's fine if your brain's having a hard time working through it. Your body gets it: your guts turning watery, your belly clenched into a freezing fist. For one terrifying moment you're absolutely sure that you'll shit yourself. It's not that she's ugly, it'd be easier if she were just ugly. It's not that she's monstrous, you don't mind the monstrous.

    She's nightmare logic.

    The human body crucified against the spirit's skeleton. Fused and enmeshed and sewn (or is it grown?) together. Like a worker fallen between the gears, mangled and bent around the toothed cogs and spinning drums until you can't tell where the machine stops and twisted, torqued carrion starts. Her skin is glossy black plastic, shot through with circuitry, with sheathed cables like tendons and veins. Giant cockroach wings curl around her waist like a skirt. Anchored to the small of her back, the metamaterials as thin as tissue. You can see the shadow of her legs beneath the gauzy brown. Her toes trailing a few inches above the ground. Withered arms crossed just over her navel, a bony thumb stroking her wrist.

    She hangs suspended between mantis limbs. Crooked, hooked things, bowing her beneath their weight even as they lift her up. Hold her over half the crowd. Each one is like...a building heh. No, no they are. They are buildings, downtown Pyongyang in miniature, in a model. Steel and concrete and glass drawn into hypermodern skyscrapers. The skyscrapers bent until they're shaped into limbs. Lined with logos you don't recognize, holographic script that makes your eyes water and tear. Slim wires web between the skeletal radio masts and spiked transmission towers rising from her spine, curling like vines. Miniature satellite dishes unfolding like petals. A garden of metal. A telecom array blooming from her back.

    Burnished mandibles chitter where her jaw should be. A smaller secondary set within grooming and cleaning like a man anxiously wringing his hands. Her head is heartshaped. Studded with pools of black oil. Half-hidden mechanisms irising wider, narrowing just below the surface,

    It takes you a second to realize they're camera lenses.

    Mi-ran reaches up with one thin hand to brush back her hair (brown hair, she still has it in exactly the same style too heh). But then she stops. Then her head just...cocks. Neck craning as she turns to look over her own fucked up legs, every optic cycling wide.

    And for a second, just a second, you see the shape of something behind her. Some behemoth, some beast vast enough that the distortion alone makes your head throb, your brain ache. And for a second, just a second, your eyes meet Mi-ran's.

    Look away. Lids shut tight.

    Fuck.

    Start walking. Walk faster.

    Fuck.

    Catch Jiaolong's elbow.

    Fuck.

    "Wh-" Does he see your face? You don't know, you can't tell, your eyes are screwed up tight. Fingers on your free hand twitching, staccato drumming against your thigh. You feel like everyone's watching you, everyone's staring. You feel like you're stained, like her attention rubbed off on you, and now your skin's burning and itching like a chemical spill. The Drake shudders, shivering and thrashing. It slams itself against your skinsuit and you almost stumble. Crack your lids what are you fucking doing, do you want to draw more attention? Opulence and comfort swims back into detail. The cold bulk of Dust soaring above you, drowning you in its shadow. "Christoph what is i-"

    "Don't talk. Walk. We need to get out of this party. I think I've been made."

    Your voice pitched low, barely a murmur, moving your lips as little as possible. His reply is soft, his voice serious and soothing. "By who?"

    "Mi-ran, the Seonwoo they're not- they're not human. I looked at the daughter in the Astral and she was some kind of thing man. She was like me but all wrong. Like someone took me and built someone off my plans but made them wrong."

    "Insect spirit?"

    "No I don't...I don't know." Maybe if you'd Awakened to a Totem. Maybe if you'd been a better student. God- goddammit heh. Astral Ecology was one of the few classes you really liked, the old troll made every lecture feel so alive and-

    Focus. Focus you need to focus.

    The family is taking the stage to steady applause, the CEO is going to give a speech and whatever notice you've attracted is torn away. Vanished, if only for a moment, giving you and him a chance to wend your through the edges of the crowd. Where the well-dressed dozens fray away into small knots standing in twos and threes. A little win but you take it, hold onto it with both hands. It's good you caught Park early or you would have had to try to pick his pocket or some shit, try to peel him away in all of this and that thought alone is enough to make sweat stipple your neck."

    Things are moving fast now. Details blurring. Jiaolong leads the way, taking a drink off a passing tray as you move into the shadows, into the empty space. The Seonwoo family stands in the spotlight, Mi-ran just beside and behind her mother. Hands clasped at her waist, her face frozen in a smile. As you watch a pair of Knight-Errant troopers descend from the platform, down the stairs and into the sea of people. You see black glass helmets and golden faceplates on the other side. Something's happening but whatever it is the ceremony's slowed it, stalled it.

    Just long enough for you and Jiaolong to slip through the cordon, mingling into the steady stream of people going back and forth from a side-door. A short, brightly lit corridor stretching to a kitchen and makeshift prep area. Waiters dropping off empty trays, carts being methodically, rapidly, loaded up like it's a race track and the white-uniformed serving staff and chefs are the pit crew. Most of them don't even give you a second glance, so exhausted they've hit that meditative, zen stage. There's an ork soldier in ballistic plate, armor settled across his shoulders, clinging to whatever cybernetics he has beneath the mantle. He does a doubletake when he sees the two of you. Steps towards Jiaolong with a palm gingerly held up, other hand kept well clear of his sheathed sword.

    "S-sir you shouldn't-"

    Jialong immediately clasps his shoulder, leaaaaning into him, glass sloshing in his hand.

    "Yyyouuu are a tall bastard aren't you? What ever could they be paying you I don't- you see I prefer a certain kind of height to my security escort it's crucial. Crucial! That you look, mnm, the right kind of imposing. And that's the sort of thing that only a man's stature can really bring."

    Kick your brain into gear. You give the trooper a plaintive look over his shoulder and mouth the word "bathroom"? He points with a pair of fingers around the corner. You gently ease your way in between the two of them and, with some ginger nudging and careful guidance, move your principal on. Deeper into the warren of service corridors, past identical, utilitarian doors until-

    There. One just like all the others but you stop, Jiaolong straightens and you wait. You tapping your foot, him quiet. The sound of your breathing absolutely deafening. You think you're about to scream when the lock turns green and the barrier splits apart. You duck through, one after the other, the partitions whispering shut in your wake.

    There's a maintenance drone on the other side, clinging to the ceiling like a polyp, interfacing with the camera, it sketches a little wave to you. Fenrir. Nyx. Earning their keep. Fuck they don't know yet but you can't linger, can't dwell on that. All you can do is press on, slinking through the foundations of the colossal tower. You can feel its weight on top of you. The weight of the city on top of you.

    When the last door opens onto that bare concrete balcony you almost keep walking and pitch right the fuck over the railing. Jiaolong catches you by the collar, steadies you even as he gingerly tugs you against side enormous, curved section. A hundred plus stories curving, visibly sloping, as it leans into the next segment of the megastructure. Poised above you, if you tilt your head up it stretches over you.

    The wind moans between the portions, freezing and laced with fumes. You watch as scattered raindrops fall, a fine white mist, a silver shine in the black. Whipping up, visibly rising and falling in the artificial canyon. Skyscrapers shine above you, you can barely see the night sky.

    More waiting. You open your mouth and Jiaolong just loops an arm over your shoulder and wordlessly drags you against him. You shut up and take it. You have to stoop a little to make it work but you take it, if only to feel the heat of his body, the sleek, sinewy strength beneath those clothes. It makes it a little better.

    "We'll get out of this, alright? Just follow the plan."

    You nod and his embrace turns into a half-headlock, his lips brushing your cheek. You manage a weak, brittle smile. It sticks and stays as you see Tyrhand come rising up. Bobbing a bit, motors whining, central fan straining. A duffel bag beneath it, the straps stretched taut. You help guide it down onto the walkway and slip the loops over the drone's rigid "wings". It boops. It sounds almost happy as it hovers in place.

    You can Jiaolong start stripping right there in the open air. Back to back. Not out of shame, no, but at least this way he won't have to see that smile slip off your face and smash to pieces on the floor. Shrug your coat off and pull your shirt over your head. Pull your visor out of the bag and slip it on. Boot up the comms.

    [ ] Talk to Nyx. You've spoken the least to her, out of everyone, but there's something kind of comforting about her cold, mechanical indifference right now.
    [ ] Talk to Fenrir. You've bonded with him the most (you think) and he knows you, probably more than any other friend you've made in...in a really long time.
    [ ] Talk to Jiaolong. He's still a mystery to you, you know there's things you don't understand, but you know he cares. That he doesn't want to hurt you.
    [ ] SerpentOfEden isn't here. Not really. He can't be. But your weird voyeur...your friend is comforting in his own way. Talk to yourself and pretend.
    Adhoc vote count started by TenfoldShields on Apr 7, 2018 at 2:51 PM, finished with 2020 posts and 16 votes.
    • [X] Talk to Nyx. You've spoken the least to her, out of everyone, but there's something kind of comforting about her cold, mechanical indifference right now.
      [X] Talk to Fenrir. You've bonded with him the most (you think) and he knows you, probably more than any other friend you've made in...in a really long time.
      [x] SerpentOfEden isn't here. Not really. He can't be. But your weird voyeur...your friend is comforting in his own way. Talk to yourself and pretend.
      [X] Talk to Jiaolong. He's still a mystery to you, you know there's things you don't understand, but you know he cares. That he doesn't want to hurt you.
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    • Act One Part Sixty: Jigsaw
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    • There's a brutal sort of beauty to your mask: all sheer, sleek, lines and harsh angles. A solid wedge, an anvil-head, sweeping up along your cheekbones and over your nose, clamped just below your hairline. The impression of fangs in the negative space along the lower lip, the missing pieces cut to leave your mouth free. Articulated arms anchoring into the edges, jointed things running above your ears and hooking just below the lobes. Twin sets of actuators running to the segmented, sectioned half-collar clinging to the back of your neck, the base of your skull. Its nothing like Nyx's visor with its weird, almost delicate construction. Like origami paper creased and folded and bonded to crystalline composite. Nah, yours is predatory. One part fighter pilot to two parts raptor. Blood red rimmed in black rubber seals.

    Breathe in, breathe out, let the distance soothe you, let it slow the steady hammering in your chest. The world beyond the visor is muted, softened into shades of scarlet and smudges of charcoal. The edge of the balcony just a blur of shadow. It's safer this way. You're safer this way. Tug the second half of your mask down over your head, roll the gauzy cloth over your mouth, your chin, your throat. Stitched in skeletal jaws patterned over your teeth, stretching as you work your jaw, as the comm suite boots up. Pluck up the edges, setting them flush to the helm.

    You're not a kid anymore and you're not hiding beneath a blanket but it's the same principle.

    The Baekho Armory logo flashes across your field of view. Streams of silver white slithering from the edges of your vision, twisting into a stylized, snarling tiger. The company name stamped below in Hangul, the characters glitching, converting to English as a tone plays. It fades out and Dust swims back into crystalline clarity, rain drops striking your mask one by one, a gentle plink, a barely audible patter. They quirk and squirming away from the hydrophobic material suspended a fraction of an inch from your face. Dripping down to the cloth warmer. Beading on your ears.

    Startup finishes, finalizes, a set of names scrolling up past your right eye in stutters and starts as they come online one by one. Fenrir, Nyx, Jiaolong after a second. Folding, collapsing back into the nest of menus and applications hovering just offscreen, waiting to be called back up.

    It's amazing how much better it makes you feel isn't it? Just having this. It hits you with a little surge of dopamine. Feel-good fuzzies bubbling up inside your brain like a just-cracked can of soda pop, sugar on the tongue and a tingling against your teeth. Connection brings catharsis.

    But then it's always been this way.

    Before this, before all of this, before you changed, before the thing inside you hatched and tore its way out of your skin, this was your lifeline. Your umbilical. A little arrow-slit of a window looking out on the world outside, candy colors floating into your drab, shoebox of an apartment through a screen. Fun shit. Cute shit. Chin on your crossed forearms, looking through porn, comedy shows, news streams, cartoons. Mouth against your skin, covered from the nose down, just looking up stuff to keep the silence at bay while Emil slept in his little stuffed bed by your foot. Slim snout tucked down, body drawn into a corkscrew.

    Wind plays over your bare chest, flowing over your skin with freezing fingers. Pale flesh tightening, goosebumps rippling out but you don't really feel it, it's just a false reaction, an imitation response. Rain sizzles against your shoulders as you draw on those long, loose sleeves, loop between your thumbs and the rest of your fingers, sitting snug across your palm. You flex as the smart-mesh activates and it draws tight. Fabric textured to match the major muscle groups below, clinging so close it could be painted on, accentuating the definition. Like you dipped your limbs in a vat of crude up to the shoulder. The angled plates run in ridges down the outside of your arms, clinking softly as you test your range. Smoke grey hovering over an oil slick. Red lines kindle to life, forking and flowing down to your wrist; raw arteries and bloody tendons.

    You step out of your pants and ping Nyx.

    It's not because she's warm, or sweet, or nice, or...even likeable really. It's because she doesn't care, won't care about how scared you are, how scared you all should be. It's because she won't give a single, solitary fuck that you just saw a megacorp exec fixed and flayed and splayed out blood eagle style between her own pillar legs and you could use that. That kind of absolute indifference, that ability to casually carve away all the parts of the world that don't make sense and slice through the rest.

    You're connected but all you get is dead air.

    For a second you don't think it went through and your hand creeps up to tap the side of your mask, the more amorphous fear of the unknown momentarily overcome by the fear of being the only one whose shit won't work. But no, no it's working, she's there she's just not saying anything, you can't even hear her breathing. Behind you Jiaolong tugs on a long coat; the cloth in that uneasy band between midnight blue and true black, somewhere between a deep tissue bruise and fresh spilled ink. He turns his collar up against the chill and you see that he's wearing a hooded shirt beneath it or- no. No you can see the reinforced panels, these almost organic, chitinous segments shifting and twisting as he moves, sheer membranes stretching as the sections separate. His mask is different now, smaller, something like a muzzle, something like a beak. It's new and it's distracting.

    She says something and her words are flat, even, disinterested and uninvested. And it comes so mechanically that you don't process it at first, tuning it out in the same way you automatically tune out advertisements that call your name, staring instead at the back of Jiaolong's head. She repeats herself, terser this time.

    "What?"

    That gets your attention. You stumble, stammer through an answer as you pull leggings on over your compression shorts.

    "It's, um, it's Foe-"

    "I know," she says "what is it?"

    "I need a threat assessment. What are, um, what's your familiarity with astral-"

    "Adequate. Continue."

    And you tell her.

    It's not capital-T Talking, not really, you're getting better at that but you're still not anything close to good. But that's okay, she doesn't care about how you feel, she doesn't care what you want. If she did she would but she doesn't so she's not. Leaving you with no expectation, no demand, just steady, unwavering attention. Evenly applied in its awfulness and utterly impersonal in its pressure. You eventually fall silent and lick your lips beneath the scarf-thing, throat dry. You hear the not-so-distant clatter of rotors, almost lost beneath the steady drum of rain on metal. A shadowy shape moves against the storm and the sheer, golden glass, backlit in a flash of lighting. Vanishing again as thunder rolls through the megastructure, echoing between the fast petals. You can still feel it there, prowling, circling over your head like a shark over a reef.

    "I'm unsure," she says at last "The markers are atypical for possession. Generally-"

    "Generally people who get taken end up lopsided. Half a guy's body burns away or cables start growing from his skin like messed up tumors. But that's not what this was. This was…" you trail off, searching for the words.

    "Coherent."

    "Yeah."

    "Min-seo Seonwoo's mother isn't on any records. The general assumption is she died in the Unification."

    "That's not that weird," you say.

    "It's not," she agrees, "but you noted similar Essence signatures from other members of her family. The most likely explanation is that it's inherited. They're hybrids."

    "I-"

    You want to laugh, reflexively, anxiously, because it's...stupid isn't it? Of course it's stupid. It has to be stupid. The world doesn't work that way, spirits are not like people. That's the first thing they teach you: that no matter how cultured or amiable a spirit acts they're not like people.

    Instead what comes out is a kind of strangled "huh" as the idea hits your brain and fucking sticks.

    Each and every spirit has a thing that defines them, guides them, that nourishes and shelters them. They want it beyond obsession, they want it beyond reason, they want it like you "want" air or water, heat or gravity. They're built differently, gestalts in escalating complexity. The grove is every component tree, the forest is every grove in aggregate; a shopping mall is every store and sunglass stand. That kind of thing.

    It all works on thematics, functions on continuity and metaphor. That's why you liked the class so much heh, it was so much easier for you to follow, to understand. And you know, you know that sure spirits can make deals. That's the foundations of shamanistic traditions. And you know spirits can talk, even make friends or enemies. That's just politics.

    But that kind of fusion? Breeding, blending, distilling down into one thing?

    It doesn't work like that.

    Well why not? whispers a voice in the back of your head, wagging the Drake's tongue and smiling with your teeth, isn't that what you are? The best of both worlds?

    "This is concerning," she says after that half-formed slush of thoughts just drips off your tongue, splattering to the ground below. Her voice is even, level, with less enthusiasm or engagement than a targeted advertisement, "Spirits are purpose driven. An astral entity cultivating highly placed corporate citizens for decades speaks to a complex purpose. More vision than a denizen usually displays and a need for resources."

    "Purpose driven," you murmur back.

    "There was a bomb Chris. Someone carried a bomb into the heart of the city. A present for Blondie and Grandad. 'Tis the season for giving-giving-giving and all that." ​

    Yellow Sea built this city. The Seaonwoo are this city. Continuity and metaphor bleeding into fucked up fact.​

    Who's to blame? Look to the Yellow Sea Chris.
    Look to the white rabbit in the moon. Don't look at me Chris…"    ​

    But you don't know and you can't guess the endgame, there's too many pieces you're missing, too much you don't k- guh.

    There's a pain, a pain building behind your right eye. A steady merciless throb rising in intensity. Like someone's taking a hammer and chisel to the back of your socket. Cock your head and squint and try to stop thinking, just focus on breathing, on the air in your lungs and the qi slowly swirling through your stomach, your chest. Let your brain go empty, it's probably not as hard as it should be.

    "But I wouldn't worry about it."

    "H-huh?"

    "We're made to kill. In the end even spirits die, discorporate, stop. If there's an emergency Fenrir and I will move to extract you. You can handle anything less yourself. Even with Jiaolong slowing you down."

    "You know I can hear you," his voice filters through the comms, faintly amused.

    "And?"

    "Aaaand nothing, I put myself in Foehn's capable hands I guess."

    "Okay," and then before you can say anything, she closes out her end of the link and reverts to standby state. Leaving you standing there, at the precipice, with your mouth half open and hands just below your navel, your belt hanging slack around your waist.

    Jiaolong laughs, a little too terse, a little too strained to be natural but he's trying. You match him, a little shy and a little selfconsciously but it makes you feel better. Flashbangs and smoke grenades on the back of your belt, flanking a small medkit. Pull your swords from the pack and clip them in place, the weight on either hip lifts a steel girder off your shoulders.

    He's ready, you are too. It's time to go, time to fly, security'll work their way down here eventually and you know you can't stay.

    But instead you...hesitate there, just for a heartbeat. Your hand held out to him, standing at the base of the giants, those artificial mountains. Once you cross the chasm you're going to split up, him to Park's office and you to the security station. You won't rendezvous again until its done and you're already on the way out to the sewers.

    You're not superstitious, and you feel better from the call (sorta), but you'd like to say something wouldn't you? Just...just in case.

    Your last words to Jiaolong are…
    [ ] A compliment. Tell him how nice he looks tonight, act like you're any other couple at any other place in Pyongyang.
    [ ] A confession. Tell him how happy you are doing this, even as afraid as you are, because you get to do it with him.
    [ ] A question. Ask him his real name. It's not like he's hidden it from you exactly you've just never really had the spine to ask.
    [ ] Encouragement. Tell him he can do it. You think he might be braver than you but this is still pretty fucked up by any measure.
    Adhoc vote count started by TenfoldShields on May 11, 2018 at 5:13 PM, finished with 2058 posts and 29 votes.
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    • Act One Part Sixty One: Black Hole Sun
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    • Standing there on that cold balcony with your hand outstretched, wrist bent, fingers carelessly crooked. You look at Jiaolong, so beautiful in his blue coat, and there's...there's a glitch in your good mood. A kind of stutter-step as you realize something, And for a second you glance away. And for a second press your other palm to your sternum and you dig your nails into your bare, brawny chest like you can claw it out before it takes hold, before it starts to grow, but it's too late. It's too late you can already feel it spreading, worm-white roots burrowing through muscle tissue. The tendrils of some nightmare tree slithering across the underside of your ribs, blind and mindlessly hungry. Plunging pointed tips into the rich, steaming red so it can drain you dry. Sapping away your adrenaline, your energy, your qi. Eating up the one brief moment of happiness for the sake of its fucked up fruit.

    "H-hah..."

    Epiphanies, insight, people think that sudden self-understanding is all catharsis, a relaxation of the tension. That it's all enlightenment and one more step on the road to mastery of the You. But you know better. You know how ugly and empty it is down there. You know how much pain there is along with that release. It's like bone grinding against bone as a broken arm is snapped back in place, the lump vanishing beneath stretched skin. Like a dangling limb pushed back in the socket with the wet pop of fluid and the dull throb of torn cartilage. Every time a little different. Every time another breed of awful.

    Close your eyes beneath your mask. Take a shuddering breath. Try not to cry, not here, not now, not when so much is riding on this. Try to tamp it down, grind it down, kill the urge to let it in, to accept it, but the fruit is so inviting. Flesh like ruptured blood vessels, all scarlets and reds. It's so easy to press it against your teeth, touch your tongue to it; to bite down despite yourself and let the sickly sugary flavor spill down your throat. Some things are too sweet not to eat. Some thoughts are too satisfying not to think. And it whispers, the ugly, stunted thing inside you, clinging to you like a parasite whispers as you chew:

    This is the first time someone's really wanted you, isn't it?

    Hah. That's- what a messed up thing to say to yourself. What do you have some kind of martyr complex? Do you like imagining that you're just garbage, that you're not even a person; that you're just some hollow space in the world, more a silhouette than something real? But it's true, it's true and you know it's true and you're so twisted in the head that you find something satisfying in it, that you can relish this sin against yourself. That you can choke yourself with the rotten, rancid idea and cram more down your throat because you deserve it. Because what you have with Jiaolong? Let's be real even if you both make it through tonight, you're going to ruin it.

    You don't really know how to make this work and you don't know a thing about him. He's like some kind of god to you, above you, beyond you and all you can do is grovel at his feet, claw at his shins and beg for attention, for affection. Plead for him to grace you with a little kindness, with just a smile. You're too much of a wreck to make anything work. The only thing holding you together is this mission and some glittering golden scales.

    But don't be too hard on yourself, it's not your fault: you've never had anyone to teach you, never had anyone to show you how this kind of thing works, you in all your twenty-plus years of life…

    You've never been loved have you?

    Really loved. The kind like they show on stupid tri-d dramas you're half watching and sappy porn comics you shamefacedly slot in a few won for (you've calced it out, it's not much more than ten minutes of work given your salary and ten minutes of work is worth half an hour of fun right). The kind of love that makes you change. That shifts around your insides, stitching you and shaping you into something new. Nah, you don't know anything about that. Wouldn't know anything about that.

    You know other kinds. You know the kind of love where you're small and shy. Where you're standing in the doorway to your mother's darkened room and hesitantly watching the shape beneath the blankets, not sure if she's blissed out on BTL's or just worn down from wherever she's working now. Hovering over the threshold, heart lodged in your throat, softly asking if she would like to come play a video game, if you could go to the pool together, if you could go see a movie like she'd promised.

    "Maybe later, mommy's tired."

    "Okay."

    "Did you do all your homework?"

    "Mhm."

    "Go play in your room, I love you Christoph."

    "...Love you too."    ​

    You know the kind of love where it's just the words, only the words, a skeleton scaffold left standing after everything else has been emptied out by rote and repetition. Where it all devolves into a greeting, a parting, a ritual "hello"/"goodbye" as thin and as fake as the cheaper chips The Bitch buys. Bookending the grades-college-job vomit that comes pouring out of her mouth as you sit in the seat beside her and hunch down. Looking at her side-eye, trying to see beneath the glasses, trying to tell if she's been crying (joke's on you, she's always crying and it's always your fault huh). "I love you" why are you being so lazy, don't you care about everything I'm doing for you?, "I love you" why do you keep talking back, aren't I a good mother?, "I love you" You're acting like such a brat, are you trying to punish me?.

    You know Aunt Sarah's kind of love too. What you got when you were older and moved away, when you thought things would get better. That probing, picking, kind of love that always seems to ask "what's wrong with you?", innocently wondering why you don't fit, why you don't make sense. The kind of love that reaches for your stunted, malformed heart and then acts so surprised, so disgusted, when that's all you have to offer back. The kind of thing that tells you everything is fine, everything will be alright, before you catch the wrong-number messages on your PDA, from Aunt to Uncle, talking about another of your breakdowns, meltdowns and you know they're so tired of it, so tired of you, but you don't know how to be anything else. Shouting at you for charging a few hundred dollars worth of takeout to a credit card and not listening when you try to gag it up, try to spit it out that it's the only thing that makes you feel better anymore.

    It's the kind of love that pushes you to a rooftop in December, the pavers slick with frozen sleet, a few flakes of snow drifting down out of the night sky. That leaves you sitting by the door, scrolling through twelve different toll-free and not-for profit lines, sick little hiccups shaking your shoulders as you try to figure out the fucking ratings system. Numbly, clumsily, scrubbing your soft face while you try to find someone, anyone, who'll tell you not to do it because that's all you want to hear. That's all you want to have, someone to tell you you don't have to. It's the kind of love that cuts you loose in the aftermath. Severs you like you're an...infection, a vestigial organ threatening to pop and flood the body with bile and toxin. Some extraneous, amorphous, tumor of a person, that needs to be excised to protect the family. Not your family. You weren't a part of it by that point.

    Your hand's trembling. You can't even look at him anymore even as you hear him step closer.

    Is there anyone else? Let's see: there's your dad, you can barely remember his name, his face just a blurred out splotch in your brain. There's Ji-ae, the two of you mashed together like a pair of plastic dolls, barely able to get hard for her and boy wasn't that feeling mutual. There's your cousins who never really called, never really cared. There's your friends from highschool who were only there because you all needed a space to sit at lunch. Your friends from college who were only there because you had to get up at the crack of dawn for the same class. There's Gahm who adopted you like you were a stray cat and that was the closest thing you had in...ever. And look how standoffish you were, the distance you kept between him and you no matter the effort he made to include you (and you were shy and suspicious and wasted most of it you see that now).

    This is the only kind of love you know. This is all you have to give.

    You shouldn't blame yourself, it really isn't your fault. You're atrophied inside; it's like asking a blind guy to paint, a double amputee to go jog a few laps sans augs. Everything that was supposed to be there has withered away, decayed and degraded, starved to death in the dark. Even the idea of trying is terrifying now. Trying to reach out again, trying to have more, be more. It's just a dream isn't it? He's not yours, he'll never really be yours. You're so far below him that you'll never be anything to him, that he might as well be fucking a dog for the relative difference in your stations in What You Are, that-

    "Hey Jiaolong?" You ask quietly as you let your arm fall, as the pain breaks and ebs and you stand there, feeling frail and feverish. Like you've been untethered from your own body. Like you're drifting out of your head, so overloaded that some circuit in your head broke and now there's just a kind of emptiness, a strange sort of clarity.

    "Mnm?"

    "What's...what's your name?"

    "Jingsheng. Jingsheng Choi."

    You turn it over in your brain, sound it out a few times. Jingsheng Choi. You have a boyfriend and his name is Jingsheng Choi. He holds you and he cares about you and he makes you feel so warm inside it's like nothing hurts anymore, like all the voices in your head are quiet and maybe that's not love, maybe it's too simple and too early to be love. But it's probably the closest thing you've ever known. Indexed along the same nerve bundle as "flying" and "fighting" and "shedding my skin". And you can settle for that for now, for these crude associations. You can call that affection, you can call that "want". Because you like Jingsheng Choi. He likes you too. Maybe one day you'll love each other like in the comics and tri-d shows and you'll find out what it's like to change on the inside too.

    He's looking at you, curiously, cautiously, and you think he sees it. Sees something behind the polished visor and the death's head scarf. His forehead creased a little, there's concern on those black eyes. He steps in against you and you gently, gently, take his hand. You carefully tug him even closer. His body lithe and lanky and strong against yours and God you never want to let go. He lets you lead and you're so pathetically grateful for that.

    "(Y'know)," you murmur in his ear, chin on his shoulder, visor against his cheek, "(s'fucked up as it is tonight's not all bad.)"

    "Mnm?"

    "(I get to show you flying)."

    It's a pulse that ripples through your body, it's an audible, organic, slithering. Something stirring beneath a too-thin membrane, flexing and unfurling, straining against its cramped confines. The flesh across your back blisters, bulges out and you're forced half hunched over. Your skin stretching taut over the skeletal spars; long finger-bones pressed together, fanning apart. Curved hooks dragging along and small tears opening in their wake, baring glimpses the black keratin below. Muscle crawls out of the hidden spaces of your body and you flap your wings once. Your back ruptures, twin strips of skin burning away, carbonizing into inert ash as they bare gleaming scales, membranes the color of aged parchment. Your tail slides free with staccato crackles as you flex the new limbs once, twice. Little shivers and tics as you work the kinks out, steam curling from flanks. The sheer, blank, awe on his face is everything you could have wanted. And for a second you can forget again. Forget how empty you are.

    "(Hold on)."

    "I'm-"

    The rotorcraft is gone, the window is open. You crouch down and clutch him close. And the muscles in your legs bulge, the cement beneath your feet cracking with a hairline fracture as you leap free. The ground falling away beneath you, gravity gone. The wind keening, calling, raindrops stippling your arms, your legs. You start to fall, fall into the nothing, the negative space between twisted skyscrapers and you feel his jaw tighten. Self control killing the scream even as it builds in his throat, wind whipping away the low moan. You laugh in his ear.

    You asshole.

    Flare your wings and your fall's arrested, your whole body jerking, wrenched up on unseen wires as the howling currents curl around you. As you stretch out, hair fluttering in the wind. You row them once, only once, shaping ambient mana into twin plumes of power. Adjusting, modifying, with a dozen minute motions and your leap turns into an even glide. Careless, almost lazy, with its easy. Condensation trickles off your visor as you taper the flow, trim your span, sending the two of you in a wide arc. You land a second later, braking in midair, flapping, dropping him onto the walkway and then alighting with all the nonchalance of a commuter stepping off the train. You curl your wings around your shoulders like coat, like a cloak, your tail swishing back and forth behind you.

    He's panting as he stumbles forward. Running his hands all over his chest, feeling where your claws left pinpricks, turning to look at you with wide eyes. You spread your hands in a small "well, what is it?" motion, somewhere between sardonic and self-conscious.

    "That was fucking fantastic," he breathes. You pat his back. You pause, you shift your hand lower and pat his ass and he snorts, snickering, a flush in his cheeks. Sweat trickling down his temple, his breaths still coming in shudders as adrenaline shock works its way through.

    "If you're done," Nyx's voice hisses through the comms. A few seconds later Tyrhand flutters overhead, shadowing you. A small flock of subverted security drones in tow, their armor china white and stamped with yellow logos, small turrets curled beneath like scorpion tails. Boxy jets pulsing a soft blue. They settle around Jingsheng in a loose halo while Tyrhand glides over your shoulder. Fenrir's voice echoes in your ear. He's all business, half-vocalized snarls backing his syllables, and you can kinda picture him somewhere hundreds of meters beneath your feet. Crouched comfortably in some utility side-tunnel, wolf-helm cocked to the side as he stares into the darkness.

    "Foehn. Heliport's on the seventy fifth floor, North face of the section. Way's lit and we only have three minutes before the next rotor-patrol comes through. Get going."

    You want to kiss Jingsheng, or even just hold him again. You settle for a little salute, touching curled fingers to your forehead and sweeping them out in a little mock bow. He tips his head back, beak-like muzzle hiding his smile. And then he's turning and the maintenance door is hissing open and then he's just...gone. Vanished up an access hallway painted in sterile whites and industrial grays. The door sliding shut behind him, the lock flickering from green to red.

    Deep breath.

    Place your palm to the cold, wet stone. Tilt your head up towards the sky, the heavens half-hidden by the sheer mass of the monster in front of you. You kick off, cut yourself free of the Earth and you're so light now. Guts shifting, changing beneath the surface of your stomach. Black clad arms hanging loose by your sides, your body drawn straight like an arrow, like a flung spear, as you stare up, unblinking. Glass windows shooting past like the surface of some sunset lake. Nobody sees you. No anti-air defenses shoot you down.

    You're just a shadow in the storm.

    The security station is less than two hundred meters from the helipads, Fenrir can get you in but once you land you will either be engaging or be engaged. Given that you are some kind of weird murder-monster Jingsheng gave you pretty free reign with this part of the plan. You will…

    [ ] Strike from stealth. Play it like a horror movie. Your Drake agility and raw athleticism give you access to many unexpected avenues of attack. Unfortunately you are still a glittering golden lizard with no appreciable stealth training and thus not particularly covert.
    [ ] Strike from the Astral. Bypass everything but the spiritual defenses. Your Drake physiology and dual-plane biology allows you to not only view the shadow world but access it as well. Unfortunately, while you can inuit the process, this is your first time trying it.
    [ ] Strike from the front. Mount a one-man assault. Your Drake strength and inhuman reflexes move this solidly from the realm of "suicidal" to "eminently achievable". But you still lack the desire to, y'know, butcher corporate soldiers, complicating any pitched battle.
    Adhoc vote count started by TenfoldShields on Jun 9, 2018 at 9:55 PM, finished with 2084 posts and 20 votes.
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    Adhoc vote count started by TenfoldShields on Jun 14, 2018 at 12:24 PM, finished with 2084 posts and 20 votes.
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    • Act One Part Sixty Two: Replica
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    • You're half-hatched, half-formed, something more than human tearing its way through pale, scarred skin. Something made out of razor sharp angles and golden scales. You can taste mana gradients, feel the texture of Dust on your tongue; fortune and fear like a mouthful of rich red meat, thick and fibrous, dripping honey sweet blood down your throat. You see in shades of heat, slitted eyes behind your smooth visor; surreal colors rippling off of air conditioning vents, swirling around the exhaust turbines of the dropship in the distance as it banks around. The building pulses, shuddering with life. The darkness around you bleeding away to grey in every direction, charcoal mingling with bloody orange gleam of its windows, with the the rainbow shimmer of its thermal respiration.

    Pick any point on the mirror-polished surface below you. Your reflection keeping pace as you flash past the offices inside, you're so close that if anyone looked out their window they could see you, if only for a second. You're so close that you can peel back the skin just by looking, feel the heat, the essence, note down every single detail. It's too much, should be too much, it's synesthesia, the kind of sense-blurring that foreshadows an epileptic fit. But it fits. It makes sense. Natural associations, instinctive connections, snapping together in your brain with barely a conscious consideration.

    This is how dragons see the world.

    Grey mist curls around your arms, whips past your shoulders. Rain pelts your body, boiling off as acceleration drags the drops down. Drying as they curl across your brawny chest, leaving steaming tracks as they follow the hard lines of your stomach. You beat your wings once, twice, each downbeat gathering, shaping, focusing, the streams of mana that howl past you. Tail twitching, guiding the flow like a rudder. For something almost spiritual it's so...visceral. Leathery membranes catching against the currents, the shudders working through the slab-muscle of your back and shoulders, the steady panting that presses your ribs stark against your sides. Parchment yellow skin, translucent and shot through with nearly black veins stretched out between skeletal gold-scaled struts, the tips terminating in vicious spikes. You can see the hand in it. See the flayed skeleton of a mammal's anatomy, blown up until the limb, the bicep, the fingers makes a span wider than you're tall.

    Should be enough to make you sick huh? Feeling your frame pulling itself apart like this, the edges of your Christoph-suit crinkled up like burned paper where your real body burst through. You should be throwing up right now, retching at least. You should be screaming, the little lizard -hah- part of your brain desperately scrabbling for the ground below. But it's gone now. It's dead now. The bones in your ear shifting and rearranging, your guts crawling over themselves into new patterns.

    The Earth's pull is just a suggestion. A plucking on the edges of your leggings, your silver-scaled sleeves. That's all. That's it. It doesn't hold you, can't hold you if you don't want it to. You're free, free of everything and you just...want to take this moment and capture it, frame it, chip it. Paint it onto circuits and get a slot in your head just so you could plug it in and play it, again and again and again for the rest of your life but God you don't even have to. You don't even need to and that makes you so happy you almost want to cry. You never have to be like Her. You don't have to desperately lick your good feelings off the flat of a simsense card. You can have this whenever you want it, you can rip your wings out through false muscle and fake skin and just kick away whenever you'd like.

    You've got-

    You've got people who care about you. As stunted and fucked up as you are. You've got a place where you fit, a purpose, as reason to be. That's all you need. That's all you've ever needed. You can do this. It was never in question, the only one who ever doubted was you.

    The heliport rises up ahead, a stark cutout against the purple-black sky. Bulging out of the side of the building like some barnacle, some sea-thing: a collection of hard-edged shell segments and intertwined rubber tendrils, an industrial polyp. The kind of thing that slices open your foot in cold waters, where you don't even notice until your feel the faint pain and see the crimson curling around your ankle. Big enough now that you could slit your whole body open on the edges. It rushes to meet you, swelling until it fills your whole field of view.

    Flare your wings, twist, your bare feet hit a support strut hard enough for a hollow boom to echo out, hard enough that your bones buzz with the impact. The reverberation lost in the sound of rolling thunder. Black talons, a curved dewclaw burst out of your feet, splitting nails and shredding tendons. Your lower limbs just stockings stuffed full of razorblades. Get a grip, hang on as gravity belatedly takes hold, your hair standing on end (your blood doesn't even rush to your head anymore). Flap your wings once, twice, then fold them behind you and wait. After a few seconds Tyrhand drifts up, rotor whirring, bobbing in the wind. You reach out, catch its ceramic casing and pull it in the rest of the way. The soft whine ceasing the second it's tucked into the underbelly with you. Safe and sheltered from the endless gale moaning, keening, through Pyongyang's artificial mountains. Count it off, exhale, let the qi circulate through your veins, collect in your lungs.

    A dozen meters down a rotorcraft slices through the thinner clouds; blades whirling, wet with cold condensation, tiltjets humming deep enough to shiver in your chest, blasting away the wispy scraps with waves of rippling distortion. It's longer than the thing that blew up your apartment, wider, a two story whale to the sleeker shark. It lifts up its tail as it ascends and you can see the segmented underside. The cargo containers of bipedal droids hanging from clamps. The spider-tank curled up on itself like a sleeping tarantula, lovingly cradled in robotic arms. An entire drone platoon, ready to drop on command.

    "I made it," you say quietly. Shit radio protocol you know but you're not corpsec anymore and you and the drone are distracted anyway, watching the monster drift away. Looking at the city as it spreads out below you, over your head. An artificial archipelago rising from filthy iron-colored clouds, smaller buildings and roads like reefs, wrapping around the bases of island megastructures. Tyrhand cants closer, its grey optic eye inches from yours, secondary lenses in a neat column on the side. You can see the finer mechanics irising inside the glass casing.

    "What's the plan?" Fenrir's voice rumbles in your ear, you could almost confuse the harsh snarl backing the syllables for static if you didn't know better. As it is it still takes you a few seconds to shake your head, clear out the fascination and get your brain back in the game. Not that it'll necessarily help a ton because calling what you have a plan is so goddamn generous you could write it off as a tax deduction but-

    Sure. Sure it's what you have and you're committed now, you're confident, you're not going to coward out just because you're slamming your face into a hostile dimension full of hungry spirits. For the first time. Upside Down.

    "Foehn."

    "Ah, sorry heh just- I'm just anxious. I'm going to infiltrate from the Astral Plane, my body's dual-natured so I can make the jump okay. Can you get Tyrhand in through the drone ducts?"

    A huff, the click of long yellow teeth against each other. Razor sharp enamel behind thin black lips. He doesn't seem angry, and if he was he'd probably just tell you. But he doesn't even do that long-suffering sigh thing people do when they want to let you know you're being an obnoxious fuckup but can't be bothered to make you change. Instead he just hums, the sound wet and raw. A tone away from tipping into a gutwatering growl.

    "Mnm. How long will you need?"

    "Five minutes on the outside, distance is different in the Astral but it's not far."

    "Understood."

    The drone peels away, shadowing the savage angles of the landing platform. Ascending up, deeper into the guts. Just you now, all the privacy you need here at the roof of the world. Hanging from the attic eaves like a scarlet-stained nightmare.

    Hah. Funny. If only they knew right?

    If only they knew.

    Your body swells, twists and breaks. False flesh charring away like a fresh coat of paint in front of a blast furnace. False bones crushed into nothing, cannibalized as fat red worms squirm beneath golden scales, something new slotting itself in place. Emerging piece by porcelain white piece into the mass of yourself. Your legs snap, knees crunching backwards as tendons come undone. Connective tissue flexing and curling up upon itself as new cartilage threads its way through you. Your body is a doll, a caul, an anchor: you replace yourself. You destroy yourself. You consume yourself.

    Ash creeps up your cheeks, burning away the flesh nearly back to your ears, to the hinge where your jaw hangs from your skull. Your mouth shatters as razored fangs push through blackening gums. Your tongue splits apart into petal-portions as something longer, thicker, slips free and traces a circuit around your chops, tenting up the cloth mask. Sleek black material creaks over your bulging arms, your rippling legs. Layers of brawn slithering over your bare chest like snakes beneath the skin, anchoring, fusing, forming a new anatomy. In the end it really is just anatomy; instincts and autonomous functions.

    Reach out, black claws slipping free of their casings. Reach through the layers, the slippery wet sheets of reality, overlaying, overlapping each other. The membrane between worlds, boosted and stabilized by local ward-systems. It doesn't matter, you find the seam, the catch between rubbery skeins, you pull down your mask and dig your claws in. Dig your teeth in. Pull your head back, twist and tear and feel the world snap. Ripping, fraying, a glassy patch pouring itself out into the rainy night, a half-visible wound. You ram your folded wings in the shimmer and fan those fingers out before it can reverse, before the cut can heal over and close up completely. .

    Good, just like that.

    Beat your wings once and let heat haze swallow you whole. Let it flow over your body, part scales, part skin, part leggings and sleeves and mask. Let it drag you through. It's a little like drifting off. That blurry unclear span where you slip down the spectrum from awake to asleep and can't quite tell where the change even occurred. But you open your eyes a second later as your talons touch the lip of the platform.

    You wake up in a world on fire.

    You weren't ready. You really weren't ready. You thought you understood it, and you did in the intellectual sense. In the astral metaphor has mass, imagery is architecture, but you're at the heights of power now and it's more than just an expression.

    A solar eclipse burns in a golden sky, orange and copper clouds curling around the blazing rim. Perpetual sunset spilling down the flanks of the mountain range beneath your feet. You're at the end of the helipad, at the end of a polished pier of black stone and braided industrial cables. Pyongyang's Shadow sprawls out beneath you. Barely glimpsed through the rosey haze, arcologies and secondary superstructures, each one the size of a city block in their own right reaching up to the shadowed sky. Flowing into each other, a fused warren of roads that go nowhere, covered walkways that twist back into themselves, mag-rails that run into the ocean, into industrial cliff faces, into the sky.

    A labyrinth rearranging itself in real time, portions of the map visibly shrinking, others expanding as the city respires and turns over in it's sleep. Streets sliding into each other as city blocks collapse down, apartment blocks folding out of the sides of buildings as composite complexes rise up. It all turned toylike by the distance.

    Water swirls like so much spilled paints, pouring itself down streets in foaming white rivers, drowning entire Wards. Advertisements the size of skyscrapers dance down ashen streets in the twilight glow, digital dust storms billowing in their wake. Tiered pyramids crouch over vast plumes of mana, shopping malls and commercial concourses wrenched into massive mining rigs. Tear your gaze away, the entrance is assembling around you. More stone erupting out of the air, pylons and clouds of gold sand and silicate glass flowing up, solidifying, setting into the storefront of a modern transit terminal. Camera spirits line the walkways, the emaciated figures press their faces into the ground as you pass, their long-fingered hands over slit-ears. They won't see you, they don't want to hear you. But you hear them murmur let us be like a prayer. Chanting it like a mantra in the self-imposed silence.

    Your scent, your heat, soaking the air. A tangible pressure deepening the golden glow around you, focusing it. Making the bloody lines of your uniform drip, making your gold scales shine.

    You stand in the plaza before the terminal. Foot paths and elevated rails and secondary roosts for blade-winged things cluster around, branching and forking out crazily. Most wind to other levels, other floors, four seem to advance towards the central security office for this bloc.

    [ ] So many workers sleep at their desks here that they've dragged visions of their homes with them, residential sections impinging on the more regimented landscape. A warren of blind hallways and private rooms infested with transplanted daydreams and mute longings.
    [ ] The break room is a menagerie, overgrown and overrun, spirits from all over the bloc congregating to feed on the endless emotional turmoil (and each other). A clot that's one part industrial refinery to one part botanical gardens to one part potentially lethal watering hole.
    [ ] This floor houses portions of the in house legal team, the offices of the more senior partners have grown proud and ornate, webbing together in a grand network of fortresses piercing the innards of the building. A steadfast and ultimately static network, well developed and immobile.
    [ ] Human Resources is a small, unassuming outpost of an office whose Astral shadow sprawls like a malignancy. The first line of defense for the company against its employees and ostensibly their critical resource, its nature in this world is schizophrenic and seemingly all observing.
    Adhoc vote count started by TenfoldShields on Jul 1, 2018 at 11:58 PM, finished with 2106 posts and 16 votes.
    • [X] The break room is a menagerie, overgrown and overrun, spirits from all over the bloc congregating to feed on the endless emotional turmoil (and each other). A clot that's one part industrial refinery to one part botanical gardens to one part potentially lethal watering hole.
      [X] Human Resources is a small, unassuming outpost of an office whose Astral shadow sprawls like a malignancy. The first line of defense for the company against its employees and ostensibly their critical resource, its nature in this world is schizophrenic and seemingly all observing.
      [X] So many workers sleep at their desks here that they've dragged visions of their homes with them, residential sections impinging on the more regimented landscape. A warren of blind hallways and private rooms infested with transplanted daydreams and mute longings.
      [X] This floor houses portions of the in house legal team, the offices of the more senior partners have grown proud and ornate, webbing together in a grand network of fortresses piercing the innards of the building. A steadfast and ultimately static network, well developed and immobile.
    Click to expand...

    Adhoc vote count started by TenfoldShields on Jul 7, 2018 at 2:55 PM, finished with 2106 posts and 16 votes.
    • [X] The break room is a menagerie, overgrown and overrun, spirits from all over the bloc congregating to feed on the endless emotional turmoil (and each other). A clot that's one part industrial refinery to one part botanical gardens to one part potentially lethal watering hole.
      [X] Human Resources is a small, unassuming outpost of an office whose Astral shadow sprawls like a malignancy. The first line of defense for the company against its employees and ostensibly their critical resource, its nature in this world is schizophrenic and seemingly all observing.
      [X] So many workers sleep at their desks here that they've dragged visions of their homes with them, residential sections impinging on the more regimented landscape. A warren of blind hallways and private rooms infested with transplanted daydreams and mute longings.
      [X] This floor houses portions of the in house legal team, the offices of the more senior partners have grown proud and ornate, webbing together in a grand network of fortresses piercing the innards of the building. A steadfast and ultimately static network, well developed and immobile.
    Click to expand...
     
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    • Act One Part Sixty Three: Obligate Carnivore
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    • The Astral is you, you-the-individual and you-the-collective and that's the joke isn't it? This place huddles around metahumanity, drawing power from it, pouring itself into the shapes that mankind offers. Affections and affinities flayed apart, reworked and reconstructed into something new, something more honest. It's intoxicating: you don't have to fight to show the world who you are, what you are, don't have to carve out the most inoffensive slivers of yourself you can find, serve them up to everyone else on a bended knee. You don't have to hear Her voice, whispering in the back of her head every time you open your mouth, telling you that they don't care, it doesn't matter, they won't want you either. The truth is just...stripped out of you. Showcased for all to see.

    You couldn't hide it even if you wanted to.

    Walk on, backlit by a black sun crowned in fire. Walk on and feel the raw power roll off of you; the air around you swimming, shuddering behind a heat haze. The temperature spiking, your footprints steaming and smoking on the rain-slick stone. Those spirits kneeling on either side, flinching as your shadow passes over them and oh you have so many shadows here. They cling to your feet, fanning out like tarot cards. This one a man, broad shouldered and long haired, his mouth cracking open into a broken, predatory smile; like a kid's drawing of a monster's teeth. This one clad in corporate armor, sleek and skin tight; tailcoats falling to the back of his thighs, billowing a bit as he walks. This one a beast, hunched over and half-crippled; prowling on all fours as his body shudders and snaps.

    A pair of great wings that span the width of the square. Pouring themselves over it in silhouette, staining it like tar. Larger than they are even in the real world, so huge that they seem more at home on a true dragon than your hybrid body. Beating once, twice, before settling down around you. Embracing you. Vicious, gutting hook claws, reformed "thumbs" tap tap tapping silently on the plaza's pavers as you slowly scan the tangle of tracks and paths that fork away. The four you need waiting ahead.

    The air around you sparkles.

    "Huh?"

    You're surrounded by chains. Half-material, half-seen, like spars of glass held at just the right angle, shining one second and then gone with a turn of the wrist. More fading into view as you take another, hesitant step, pulling them into visibility by the flexing, the tension of your body. They're delicate things, slender things, each link no longer or wider than your pinky nail. The leads running for meters before they melt away into nothing. You stop and they glimmer for a second, gently clinking, before sight and sound slip away again. The plaza around you empty.

    Raise a hand, tap your thumb to a bare pectoral. Gently probing the heavy muscle of your chest. Channel your qi, just a trace, just a quirking, vein-like tendril into your breast. A lustrous glow shoots out and you see it again, see the others too: anchored to your scales, your skin, by golden loops and molten piercings. A brand kindles to life beneath your hand, scoring itself in clay-soft flesh and false muscle. A glyph in a language you don't know. Or no- no that's not right. You do know it, you're just not far gone enough to remember, you're still wearing enough of Christoph's body that it acts as a mask. But even you (he) know what it is. The materials are different, the script unutterably ancient, but the principles are the same.

    It's a bar-code. A serial number. Because…well.

    You remember don't you?

    How could you forget? You were made, you were manufactured, and all Christoph Esser the Human Being ever was was a fat caterpillar. Chewing on his leaf, waiting for some subliminal signal to become something else. Something more. But that doesn't change the facts.

    You are a slave. You are a sword (his sword). You are property (his property). You are owned. By the king (your king). The emperor (your emperor).

    the mountains are high and the emperor is far away​

    You slowly wind the chain between your fingers. Feeling the links slither around curved claws. Do as you please, live as you like right? You can pull it free if you want. Tear out these umbilicals that bind you to that other sun. The Drake shifts within you: uneasy and uncomfortable for once, but you ignore him. Is this want you want? You pause, tip your head back to stare at the painted sky. You don't...have an answer you think. The golden monster that's staked its claim to your soul, the long lost science project that lives beneath your skin, between the two of them they've given you everything you ever wanted. And all it cost is everything you were.

    Gray areas, gradients, you let the leash slide out of your grip. You feel the Drake relax. Maybe it doesn't really matter, either way you've changed so much there's no way back from this. Not for you, not for the thing you've become. The butterfly can't fold itself up and bloat back into a caterpillar and that's...that's alright, you decide. That's alright too. You know they'd be proud of you, that kid lingering at the threshold, waiting and hoping; that young man sweating through his thin shirt in Detroit's pre-dawn chill.

    They'd be happy for you, to see you're still around, that you've come so far and you're doing so much better.

    Steps the soft colors of a polluted sunrise ascend in crooked, canted tiers. Sweeping out at the edges, a deck of playing cards half-shuffled together and knocked out in the center. Glass-faced bluffs rising at the top. There's a stillness, a quiet, even as the energy in the air soaks into your blood, into your bones, hitting you like a caffeine shot, an adrenaline burst. Raptors the size of helicopters watch from their scattered roosts. Tilting cockpit canopy skulls, fanning and folding rotor-blade feathers as they keep a wary distance. Wires and armored plates embedded in their downy breasts and scaly patches of reptilian skin. Weapons pods carefully concealed beneath pinions. High above you can see more of those spotlight-monsters clinging to the slopes of the mountain, anvil-heads scanning the sky. Road-wide tails lashing, boulevard broad shoulders bunched with power, beams of light probing the storm.

    The heavens ripple and roil, thick, fluffy, clouds whipping past at hurricane speeds. They're a hundred colors: red blush and tangerine skin and the first feathery touches of jaundice. You feel the world flex, feel it shiver, some outside pressure pushing against your heat, your strength, and the motion being welcomed. Reciprocated.

    They're waiting for you inside.

    Take the steps one at a time, bare feet barely a whisper on the polished cement. Draw your blades, the one full of leashed lightning and thunder in your left. The keening tempest in your right. Your body's split open, coming undone at the seams as you roll your shoulders. Barely contained by the tight sleeves and the leggings. The doors slide open on rubber tracks. They stand waiting in the center of the terminal. A holographic board hanging above, sunken stairwells beyond.

    Dog headed, bull headed, hawk headed, ram headed. Their bodies are smelted together guns and swords and soot-stained armor. Their cloaks whipping, billowing out like sheets of fire; golden bright, livid, lurid. The eclipse outside filters through the great windows. Orange-yellow shapes splashed out onto the ground between you and them. You're a scarlet-etched shadow against the sun. Cock your head and as one they draw.

    "Save us," says the Dog.

    "Kill us," says the Bull.

    "Eat us," says the Hawk.

    "We have not raised the alarm, there is only us," says the Ram.

    "It wouldn't matter even if you tried," you reply softly, "I kill faster than you can scream."

    "Good," says the Dog.

    They were dead the moment you crossed the threshold, they lost the moment you pulled Lung's gifts free of their sheathes. Everything else, everything: the impact and shock of your blades on theirs, the qi coursing through saturated, transforming tissue, crash and rumble of collapsing stone, it's all…

    Details.

    You don't have Nyx's raw economy of movement, her precision calculated grace, no. You're as relentless as a river. Jagged and hungry as roaring flame. You surge forward, body rippling, snarling behind your stitched skeletal smile and they are not ready. How could they? You exist to end things like them. Your thudding heartbeat sets the tempo. Giving time to the machinegun impacts as metal crashes against metal, to the squealing of shorn armor and scraped scales. Giving order to the fury, the frenzy.

    Unseam the Ram, open their belly, mana spilling out in colored tendrils as they crumple. Arc your jian overhead, carve deep into the Hawk's shoulder, the Bull's sword caught on your sidearm. Channel qi through the blade, water and gale-force winds blasting out in a razored ribbon, hewing Hawk in half as Dog thrusts. As you smack the canid spirit's greatsword with your tail; redirecting momentum, smashing it into the ground. Lightning chains down Bull's wrist, numbing and slowing. You hit them like a hurricane. Their sword shatters with a scream of tortured metal. They fall with a gargling bellow. And then it's just him, just the Dog, alone against the storm.

    He swings. You fade to the side and spear him neatly through the throat.

    There's something like relief in those eyes as his sword slips from a gauntleted hand. Something like satisfaction his knees hit the lobby floor and he slumps forward. He doesn't try to save himself, doesn't try to spite you, he just lifts his chin as he lays there, widening the wound. Mana pumping out more thickly now, splashing across the shorn gorget, curling up like clouds of paint in water. Multicolored strands of the self, coming undone. The sparks he has instead of pupils go to his fading comrades. Drift down at his own ruined body. The plea is mute but achingly sincere. You stand over him: in the wound you see something brutal, something sharp; cement tumors and steel shards lacing the phantom matter and now you think understand, at least a little.

    Flick the ichor from your swords and resheath them. Pull down your scarf and bare those pearly whites, sharp enough to rip chunks from even the unborn, the undying. Sharp enough to rend an inhuman soul. The sound that thrums in your chest halfway between a growl and a purr.

    And for the first time since you hatched from your skin, your body charred and carbonized into an ashen shell, you give in. You make it quick; there's only four, they go fast.

    There's a kind of salvation in consumption.





    Work your jaw, lick your chops, the taste of them lingers on your tongue. You feel the gentle hum, the rattle and rock of the tram beneath your feet as it carries you along the winding track. Claustrophobic concrete tubing broken up, interspersed, by yawning chasms: the wind roaring, howling past, hard enough to rock the train on its rails. Flecked with skeins of silicate, glass and grit whispering, hissing as they flow over the metal hull and then you're back in the tubes. Burrowing your way deeper into the building. How far have you traveled? It feels like at least a mile. How long have you been here? Feels like it must have been at least half an hour.

    Three minutes, murmurs the Drake.

    Well. You guess you must be getting close then.

    A shadow slips over you, gloom rushing along the length of the car as you enter another tunnel. The tram slowing, brakes whirring as it gradually comes to a stop. The doors opening onto a platform just like- hah, just like the one at Sze. You walk out, up yet another set of stairs. Space is variable in the astral, indexed to importance, the weight of memory. And the room you come out into, blinking, a little dazed is gigantic.

    The same room patterned over and over again, running in rings, descending in tiers. The same sectioned countertops with the same sink and small electric stove, the same handful of tables and uniform chairs, the same sets of windows looking out on the same skyline. Every room with three walls and the same stretch of short grey carpet running past where the door should be. Every room copied and pasted a dozen times, a hundred times, a hundred empty sockets merged together. Cells in a shadowed, honeycomb hive. The potted plants grow wildly, ivy climbing over burners and clinging to the sills; thick roots (or is that rubber?) running across the "hallways". Over the lip of one tier and down the walls of the rooms below.

    The ceiling hangs heavy and low, a checkerboard of fluorescent lights buzzing, gently crackling, iron pipes framing the patches of flickering white. Veining the spaces between. In the center, a good fifty feet down and even further away, there's a well. A sinkhole, bored straight into the foundations of the room. Thigh-thick hoses and clusters of tubing laying thick around the edge. The water is dark, stagnant. The circuit-patterned leaves that cluster around it are black and rotting. Plastic sloughing off the branches.

    It takes you a second to realize it, what's so wrong with this place, this picture. You, the city kid so used to the sound of cars honking at 3:00 AM and rotors thudding past at 4. So used to the sounds of the city in its sleep that you'd be climbing the walls in five minutes flat if you ever got dumped in some country cabin.

    It's the quiet.

    Nothing moves. Nothing breathes. Ash grey boughs rustle in the flow of air from countless vents. Somewhere water drips from from a faucet tap. You pace forward, cautious, and then stop as your claws click on something hard and cold. Look down.

    Metal grows through the ground beneath your feet, stark as any scar; a mirror-polished swathe oily, bruised alloy. Neon bright advertisements spidering across the surface, too fast to catch. Your eyes itching, aching when you try to read the text. Look closer: there's an impression in the surface, the fossil of some spirit, an afterimage in indentations.

    "You know," says SerpentOfEden over your shoulder, "they really think they're signing on with the winning side-side-side."

    Your whirl, swords scraping the sheath, singing as they leap into your hands, eyes wide beneath your visor. But there's nothing, nobody, just the stairs back the way you came. Your breathing comes hard, each pant so loud, so harsh in your ears. Swallow and feel the sharp-edged lump bob in your throat.

    "H-h-hey easy Chris easy. Easy." You lash out without thinking, your arm moving on raw instinct. Whipping your shocksword into-

    Empty space. The movement makes you twist a bit offbalance, a rush of qi helps you steady. Leaves you in a low crouch, looking out over the silent breakroom. You hear a sound, a gentle chiming, you gingerly, gingerly, pad forward to the edge of the upper level. Look down into the exposed room below. An icon flashes across the tri-d set hanging in the corner. The projectors into the narrow lip that's all the breakroom has in way of a roof. A snake sketched in pixels curled around an eight-bit apple.

    A single cup of tea sits on the table, a tongue of steam curling up.

    "It's okay. I wouldn't hurt you. Are we friends Chris? I think of you as a friend. N-n-never been good at getting them, keeping them. But you…"

    Four minutes, the Drake breathes.

    "C'mon, we have time. And we should talk." His voice buzzes through the speakers, distorted and tinny. Glitches and digital artifacts crawling across the screen, blooming like rainbow fractures before being swallowed up by the dead, glossy, black. After a second you step over the edge, let yourself fall. Land lightly on your feet. You stare down at the cup, up to the tri-d set.

    "How do you kill a corporation Chris? Don't- hey. There's a point. I promise-promise-promise."

    "I…," you'd say it's just to humor him, just to pump him for information in return, to fish for some fucking answers. But this place is all about honesty and let's be honest: you're not even close to done processing this. This...whatever this is.

    Whatever this is.

    [ ] You kill a corporation by killing its revenue stream. Megas exist to sate stockholders and make a profit; without the money nothing else matters.
    [ ] You kill a corporation by killing its leaders. The board provides the vision, the mission statement, the guiding light. Without them it's just a name
    [ ] You kill a corporation by killing its reputation. Companies can only soak so much scandal before they start carving themselves open to escape it.
    [ ] You kill a corporation by killing its infrastructure. The workers, the servers, the physical locations: murder the body and the soul won't survive.
    [ ] Write-in.
    Adhoc vote count started by TenfoldShields on Sep 7, 2018 at 5:49 PM, finished with 2132 posts and 21 votes.
    • [X] You kill a corporation by killing its revenue stream. Megas exist to sate stockholders and make a profit; without the money nothing else matters.
      [X] You kill a corporation by killing its infrastructure. The workers, the servers, the physical locations: murder the body and the soul won't survive.
      [X] Write In: You kill a corporation when you show the world that it doesn't need them anymore. When you can show them a dozen others willing to fill their niche and do better.
      [X] You kill a corporation by destroying it utterly.
      -[X] If you kill the revenue, the executives will just restructure the company and find new markets to exploit. If you kill the executives, the company will find more. If you destroy the infrastructure it will be rebuilt. If you kill the workers, more will be hired.
      --[X] To be sure, a corporation can die to a single point of failure, if that failure cascades and causes the other parts to fail as well. But you can not rely on that happening. Better to just smash it all, really.
      [X] You kill a corporation by killing its reputation. Companies can only soak so much scandal before they start carving themselves open to escape it.
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    • Act One Part Sixty Four: Prophet
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    • You understand now, more than you did before tonight, more than you ever thought you would. Yellow Sea Consolidated is the God of Pyongyang, the God of your world and there's something sick inside it. Something beyond greed, beyond human rapacity; chaotic and carcinogenic. Industrial tumors clotting and clumping in Astral organs. The city's self sprouting from the shoulders of its leaders and favored daughters; mantling them in miniature skyscrapers and glinting satellites. Echoes of you, of the Drake, and your shared design. Built to commune instead of kill.

    With...who? With what? Who do the titans of Korea talk to, through the cables buried in their skull and the dishes bracketing their spine? Who talks back? Uploads and downloads. A bomb in Kangso and a kill-team at your apartment. A hundred hands moving pieces that you can't see.

    God is in his heaven and the black-glass skin is sloughing from his bones.

    You take a slow step towards the table. Gingerly, gently, sheathing your blades and resting your claws around the head of the chair. Curved nails click-click-clicking against the harder portions, digging small divots into the plastic. Drag it back.

    You think you're taking it all sort of personally. Wrapping your arms around the hurt when you really don't have to. But, honestly, who could blame you? One of the players in this is Ares and you wouldn't have survived if it weren't for Ares Macrotech, King of Kings, Mega of Megas, and your One Stop Shop From Cradle To Grave. A shareholder stake on every semester of your education, every sword-stroke of your training and every cell of your body.

    It's hard to explain but it's more than company loyalty, more than branding, more than a rejection from a military-manufacturer turned pseudo-father. Cities like Seattle, like Berlin, like Hong Kong are chimera: lion head and goat haunches and a snake's tail, a conglomeration of patchwork parts. Mismatched grafts and implanted tissue growing, mingling, thick cords of corporate muscle spasming and ticcing as they try to work in something like concert. To pull the whole mess towards its next meal. But places like Pyongyang? Like Detroit? They belong to someone. The people there belong somewhere. And anything else there exists solely because the Mega suffers it.

    And it's...Ares suffered you, you know? Ares saved your life. Ares took away the fear and the panic and the loneliness and pulled the choice from your hands, gently shifting you, guiding you down conveyor tracks where all you had to do was not fight against the current. Not struggle, not fuck it up, not sabotage yourself out of a future of steady paychecks and order-in dinners. Where all you had to do was keep shuffling forward, keep passing the basic benchmarks, and you- you could always do that. Shy kid, quiet kid; the kid who loved to read and was awkward around people he didn't know and anxious about starting all his projects and papers. You weren't a bright star, you weren't the class ace, you weren't everything the Bitch wanted you to be. But they still took you didn't they? You were exactly the kind of person they loved. Consistently adequate and pliant, acceptable; reliable mediocrity.

    You sit.

    You owe Ares your life. After Aunt Sarah cut you free they made a place for you, a space for you; lockers and company gyms and rooms like this, set aside for you. It's really eerie honestly but the one at Sze Thaumatech was almost exactly like the one here, right down to the same brand of kettle on the electric stove. For all that it's some horrifying hellworld you find that comforting, to be back somewhere where you used to belong.

    It's a little like nostalgia, a little like a once-favorite shirt now tattered and too-small. But you take it, you hold onto it, and it helps as you swallow and feel your heart thudding all the way back down your throat. You feel naked and exposed here, your back to the open hall and the empty tiers. Bare chested, the shredded scraps of your skin stretched taut over gold scales. Sweat beading, dripping down the hard lines of your body; your peach pale flesh flushed by the heat. The gloom at your feet flickers and dances like there's a bonfire burning in your lap. The shadow of your wings stains the wall. Golden chains softly clink and rattle, serpentine in their motion as you shift, the machinery of your brain lurching, stumbling, desperately towards something like an answer as the silence stretches on.

    The tri-d spits and hisses, patiently waiting. You curl your tail around the legs of the chair with a cascade of popping vertebrae, curl your black claws around the cup of tea and give it a sniff. The Drake raises its hackles on principle, twisted sinews like bridge cables bulging across your shoulders, sealed wings shuddering, but it's still safe. You tug down your cloth mask and take a sip.

    It's good.

    Outside: doll houses with opened walls, an inverted step pyramid descending down and out of sight. Inside: a gleaming sink and a hot-box full of cans of soycaf. The air here is dry and still and stale...but as you tip your head back can smell it. Just a faint note, a chemical bite beneath everything. Like the scent of chlorine at the pool. Like you're back at the indoor aquatics center at U of M again and the tiles are sweating it, the floor slick with it. Like you're back at the party, watching as Mi-Ran's body splits and ruptures.

    "This isn't some shitty koan thing is it?" You ask. "Where there's no right answer and- or I guess you wouldn't tell me if it was."

    "It's not," he says.

    "Alright heh, you-" your voice catches, you push on anyway; shrugging self consciously and already apologetic, "You kill a corp by killing the revenue stream right? At the end of the day they need to make a profit, they need to have a product, property, to pay people. If there's none of that then...they're insolvent, and they'll get bought out and split up. If they have money they exist. If they don't they don't. Without the money nothing else really matters. Without money nothing else works. That's just the way the world is."

    "Hm," his voice is thoughtful, the eight-bit snake-and-apple rippling as static laces the projection, a gasoline rainbow crawling across the dead black, lingering before it resolves. Snapping back into focus, "I guess you get it too, don't you Chris?"

    "Wh- Huh?" You say, eloquently.

    "In the end we all just make money to make money to make money-money-money. Eating, for what? Sleeping, for what? W-w-working your liver raw with the boss and dragging yourself out of bed at 6 AM and for what? So you can do it all against with a guy in a bigger s-s-suit and better booze? Existing just to exist, because we're all too scared to stop. Because that's how we built the corporations and that's the world they built for us-us-us."

    You cock your head, sharp fangs poking past torn lips. The corners of your mouth charred back, ripped up to hinge of muscle and tendon that anchors your jaw. "It's not like people have a choice though. It's not like they can be different. Or they can but it's- it's not really something that they can control. It's what brain-camp pre-school their parents sent them to and the shiny shit they had to put on their college applications. Most people get swept into a mill if they can manage that but-"

    "But that's the point," he breathes, his voice tinny, syllables edged in distortion, and God if he doesn't sound almost giddy, "Your point. My point. That's what they've made us into, that's what you were, that's what I was: just shadows on their wall. Barely breathing, barely real, just a c-c-constellation of algorithm associations and net-value equations. Living in a world where the best we'll ever be is a corrupted cell; a hijacked artery feeding the growth, endless growth, growth at all costs. Spread to the liver and crush the lungs in the 3rd Quarter, it's what the shareholders want. There's no difference between mergers and metastasis Chris. Corporatism is just cancer of the body politic-politic-politic."

    "That's-" eyebrows drawing down, the wreckage of your mouth pulling apart as you bare your pearly whites and lean forward. Instinctively balking, reaching for an argument and finding only empty space; whatever debate powers you had exhausted, your imagine tapped. Adrenaline warring with distraction with the slow underlying throb of wanting your fucking answers. A deep breath, you smooth your hair with your palm, and let the qi work its way up your spin. Lending clarity, concentration; fighting of the weightless, dreamlike feeling of this place "I. Fine, sure say I don't disagree, but what does that have to do with anything? Why are you here? How are you here?"

    There's a long, long pause. He says nothing, you wait. You glance away from the screen and let your eyes fall to the tabletop. Absently scuffing at a brown, long-dried ring of soycaf with your thumb as you take another sip of your tea. Already regretting raising your voice, the frustrated outburst.

    "...I'm like you," he says at last, your head whips up, "N-n-not a Drake, Chris, before you get excited. But I'm like you in most of the ways that matter-matter-matter. When I first came to Korea I felt so alone. I used to go to some of the transnational chains, the burger places, Saja Ultra. Going just to go. Going just to be where everything was clean and kept and the lights were bright and you didn't have to cook for yourself. Where you could be around people and have some kind of continuity. Congruity. D-d-did you ever do that Chris?"

    "No," you say, your voice low, "but I know what you mean."

    "A-a-and I thought that was enough. That if I held onto that, things like that, I could make it through the internship program. Through grad school. Through the next six to seven decades of my life, through every second of all those empty hours-hours-hours." He halts, searching, and you understand; more than you would want to, more than you'd like to. That feeling of trying to piece together fractured thoughts. Trying to articulate shit you've always wanted to say that makes so much sense to you and sounds so crazy to everyone else. You take a deep breath, you exhale, you give him time. Minutes are mutable here anyway. "But it wasn't. In the end. It wasn't until I changed that I realized how hollow it was. How stupid it was."

    "That you were existing just to exist," you complete the thought. "And you only figured it out when you finally had something you cared about."

    "Heh. Here's a question Chris. Would you give it up if you could? Would you go back? Would you t-t-tear off your wings and let yourself fall, all the way back until you were nothing at all."

    "Never," you shoot back, instant and almost vicious. Fire creeping unbidden into your words, enough heat that you're surprised you don't char your tongue.

    "See Chris? You do understand." The icon gutters and surges, white all but glowing against the black, there's the impression of a tongue tapping against teeth as SerpentOfEden considers something. "But they don't. The Seonwoo, they think that money really is all that matters. That it's the only thing that could ever matter. That it's the only thing there that's really real. They think they've made an investment, that they're playing the markets, that they've got an inside line on some hot new developments. Came to the crossroads to meet the devil and just because they walked away without a soul they think they got something out of it. Idiots."

    "So, what, are they not even important is that what you're saying? That they're just, fucking what? A sideshow? Then why are they running around dropping fucking Firewatch on people."

    "Because they think it's a war Chris, that this is a war and you're an enemy combatant. That they're in command. That they're in control."

    "Are they not?" You shoot back.

    "This is the Sixth World Chris, there were f-f-five before it. There are truths that were buried as reality reset-reset-reset. The old man in the wheelchair? He found a fragment, something old, something dreaming, something not-really dead. Left behind like liquified fossils, oil pinned beneath strata of stone. When the first Pyongyang burned it brought it back, bubbling up to the surface; mixed it in with the ash and dust and fired bone. Made it base. Made it less." There's something sing-song in his voice, something salacious and savage and utterly gleeful. "Do you know who he was Chris? Who he r-r-really was? A day trader with debts to the kkangpae. Whose only idea of a better world was one that was exactly the same but his bank account had a few more zeroes at the end. All he ever did was dig it up. All he ever did was give it a daughter for a bit of luck and a bit of fortune. And the three of them think that they're the vanguard, that they're collaborators, that they've switched to the winning side and they're laughing-laughing-laughing at everyone else. Joke's on them Chris. And boy wait until you see the punchline. 'Cause They don't care about money Chris. They don't care about stock value and revenue streams and the things that make this ugly, ruined world work."

    Your mouth is desert dry. The chill from before is creeping back, wrapping you up in its arms. "Who's 'They' Serpent?"

    "God," he says.

    The word hangs in the air between you, swathed in the stillness, cradled by the silence.

    "...You should get going Chris," he murmurs, "she's coming for you and you need to c-c-cover your friend. I'll see you soon, alright? And I'm glad you've been doing so well. Y-y-you'll make it through this."

    And you make to stand up, to work your jaw back closed and say something, hurl another question at that screen another twenty but the minute you move the world falls away. The Astral flexing around you as the darkness clusters thick, every light guttering low. You feel a shape behind you, the impression of lips inches from your ear.

    "Don't worry, I'll drop you off close. It's the l-l-least I can do."

    You stand up, the chair sliding back and you turn but then you're already falling. Swallowed up by the living, liquid blackness that courses around you.

    Your head swimming, your thoughts blurring. After everything SerpentOfEden said you're on the cusp of some kind of understanding and it feels as if your skull's about to hatch. There are answers in the black, all you have to do is look.

    [ ] Open your eyes, look out into the blackness and see what it has to show you. Gaze into the endless night.
    [ ] Keep your eyes shut, turn away and look inward, clutching the Drake closer. Stare into that golden sun.
    Adhoc vote count started by TenfoldShields on Sep 29, 2018 at 11:25 PM, finished with 2158 posts and 23 votes.
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    Adhoc vote count started by TenfoldShields on Oct 5, 2018 at 5:27 PM, finished with 2160 posts and 25 votes.
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    • Act One Part Sixty Five: I Walk Into Empty
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    • You've become nocturnal by nature, flipped your circadian rhythms and fucked up your body's natural cycles beyond easy repair. You live in that neon darkness now: beneath a sky scorched out by light pollution, in shadows stained every shade of a digital rainbow. And so you know, better than most, better than all but a few how bright the night can be. How Pyongyang burns like a concrete pyre, a steel-and-glass bonfire. Megastructures rising from the gutted mountains, lit up by the shine of storefronts and tri-d screens and the windows of countless skyscrapers. The glow reflected in the gunmetal skin of the magnarails as they wind between the buildings, captured in the midnight blue depths of the Taedong River as it rushes through the city center on its way to the sea. The sidewalks and MTR stations are riots of color and augmented chrome. Your soot-black and lustrous gold just another few splotches in that glittering, gasoline-skim palette.

    The night is where you live now. The night is where you work, the night is where play, where you've made your home and it's a place -a location- as much as it's a simple span of hours. There are parts of Pyongyang that don't exist in the daylight. There are people here who disappear in the sunlight. You should know shouldn't you? You're one of them now, SINless and free.

    But this is different. This is something else. A passing similarity but it's just that, a similarity and the connection is thin at best. It-

    ...Do you remember that Winter in New Brunswick? You sort of do, you weren't that old and the memory lives in that blurry, uncertain, part of your brain that holds everything before the age of fourteen. Slices of impression, scraps of recollection, all arranged in a crude timeline with pictures and sounds and scents overlapping; with huge chunks missing.

    But you do remember enough, bits and pieces. You remember standing behind the sliding glass doors, wrapped up in a beige blanket. The fabric that kind of soft, almost slippery, polyester; faux-fleece. You remember looking out over the narrow slip of a balcony, barely big enough for you to stand out on by yourself, and staring at the sea. At the iron-and-ink thunderheads sweeping in over the Atlantic.

    You remember the way the storm raged and howled when it hit, hammering the apartment complex with hail and half-frozen rain. The wind rising until it screamed like a subway line blasting right past your window while you hunkered beneath the covers; comforter drawn up over your head. The block lost power at some point in the night and you woke up in the early hours of the morning to switched off digital displays, the hallway lamps that filtered beneath the doorframe gone, the candy colored stars that ringed your laptop and baby's-first-PDA dead and dark. Countless, constant companions gone, your nightlights burned out, leaving behind a world swathed in soft, blue-tinged shadow

    It's like that.

    A world in shades of grey, in pitch black and snowy haze. A world done in charcoal smears, countertop and tabletops and projector mounts sketched out with swift, deft strokes and then smudged with the artist's thumb. Distorted by design, leaving everything a suggestion, an impression, drawn from memory and expectation; the two filling in the blanks where sharper details should be.

    The breakroom tri-d flickers and shows nothing now, the larger cavern behind you with its repeating rooms is gone. The doorway opening onto a yawning, sucking void. All you have to see by is a silvery shine; a little like moonlight, a little like distant starlight filtering through a window. A pale, cold glow that creeps in through the corners of the kitchenette.

    the moon the moon the moon,
    there's something you're supposed to remember about the moon    ​

    God you're freezing. You're hardly ever cold anymore but this just seeps inside you.

    there's a rabbit in the moon​

    You can feel the ache in your jaw, feel the sliced-gum sensation as it crawls into your ruined mouth. As it kisses the tips of hidden fangs, buried in that pink bed, waiting to replace shed teeth. Rows of razor enamel throbbing in tandem. Try to work your lungs, force out a sound. Nothing comes, it's like you're screaming underwater. Screaming just inside your head.

    All around you the conference room is dissolving, coming undone and falling apart at the seams. Section by section, panel by panel, neatly split off and peeled away; floating free in the void as the argent gleam flares a little brighter. As something starts writhing, squirming through the cracks in the room's construction. Something thicker than just shadow, something viscous and wet and so much worse than mere water. Drywall bubbling and blackening where it touches, as it forks and divides and spreads like the roots of some twisted tree, like arterial conduits and branching blood vessels. Cilia filaments digging into the places where the light bleeds through, into the lines between the tile, into the seams. Working together to pry it apart. Their slick surface rippling, twitching and ticcing like there's a colony of worms just beneath the tarry flesh. The collective greedily devouring this hollow shell, this empty dream.

    But it's not completely empty is it? Because he's here with you too.

    He sits across from where you were just a second ago, back to the the breakroom tri-d. Leaning on the rear two legs of his chair; arms across his chest. He wears a shirt stained filthy, like it was soaked through with crude oil; the edge has more in common with an ink splatter than with fabric. White pants and a white coat and his shoulders and legs are skinnier than yours, slimmer than yours, even though if he was standing he'd be about your height.

    The edge of his coat sits in a puddle. More tendrils slithering up the back, woven in with the moon-pale material; a tainted tracery so much like vines, so much like veins. His sleeves are stained and you think it might be by his own skin because there's not an exposed part that doesn't gleam a glossy-wet obsidian. Golden fire kindles within you, coursing through the false layers and shared spaces of your body. Tongues of flame wavering and dancing as patches of flesh ignite, the heat inside escaping it's still so small, so...fragile. Like a lantern in a hurricane.

    The figure twitches towards you, noticing you noticing him for the first time. He doesn't have a face. In the darkness beneath that cowl there's just a mask, like an elaborate tri-d tattoo but somehow more material, more real. Semi-solid pixels, squares the size of a thumbnail, white as snow and cream and ice and frothing, foaming waves. White as polished canines and blind eyes and bleak, exposed bone. Different gradients, different hues; the edges are flickering, fading, glitching in and out and artificacting. But you can still see the jagged, angular design: a snake skull on liquid black.

    SerpentOfEden leans forward, the legs chair legs softly clicking on the linoleum as he sits up straight. The sound hollow and tinny, as if filtered through shitty speakers. The wall behind you is breaking up, shattering in slow motion. The thigh-thick tentacles are pushing through, sliding across the floor, reaching towards you. He holds up a hand and the movement stops.

    "H-h-hey Chris," he says softly, "you really are a brave kinda guy huh? I wish I was more like you you know-know-know? You wouldn't have listened to the Seonwoo and their fuckdolls, to Hisaya and his p-p-precious pocket cult. You wouldn't have been so scared of Lung and L-"

    A hitch. A catch in his chest. A hairline fracture in his words. He has to start again, to force the name out, his voice thick with emotion.

    "L-Lofwyr."

    The golden fire in you flares a little brighter.

    "Hah. Yeah. It's kind of l-l-like that isn't it? Still...I couldn't have come here like you did. J-j-just to find answers, knowing I might die. And isn't that just the funniest thing Chris? Considering how I went out in the end," elbows on a table that's dissolving in front of you, fast-rotting as flakes fall like Autumn leaves, as they curl up and float away; cloth rustling as he tilts his head, snake-mask shining, "That's my dirty secret Chris, I used to be like them too-too-too. I thought I was a soldier, making that sacrifice, doing the one thing anyone's ever needed me for. I thought that I understood. But God isn't a general Chris, and I'm not a soldier. Just a signal. A lucid dream."

    A pause, contemplative.

    "You're going up against her y'know. And s-s-she's so much stronger than her father or her mother; than her children. She might hurt you. Even kill you. B-b-but then again...you've never needed saving before have you Chris? Still, you might tonight. It might even be me y'know? Wouldn't that be funny Chris? If after everything I get to be the one who saves you?"

    He motions and the tentacles wrap around your legs and snake around your chest and loop around your throat and you can feel the space around you ripping, tearing. A jagged maw of distorted gravity, a silvery halo as the Astral folds open like the petals of a fanged flower.

    "Sssseeya Chris."

    And then the jaws close around you. And it slides beneath your skin and beneath your scales and it's touch is like the mud scraped from the bottom of the ocean floor, those drowned places where the sun hasn't shone for a million, million years and alien, volcanic spires spear up into the black, wreathed in red-lipped worms. Specks of bioluminescent life floating like constellations in the night as the pressure bears you down. There are certain shared features between the far reaches of space and those places, fathoms deep beneath the waves. There are certain constants between the lonely places of the Sixth World.

    You're starting to understand now, aren't you?

    you remember them don't you?
    you remember the hungry sky every time you spread your wings and soar.
    mom loves you. dad does too. god loves you most of all. they think about you a lot.
    they still dream of you.
    do you dream of them too?    ​

    God was always here.

    And then you're falling through the air and and sucking in a shuddering breath as you hit the ground. Splayed on all fours, back-bent legs behind you and hands planted like forepaws; tail lashing over your hips. All catlike grace and instinctive balance.

    Right in the middle of the security station.

    Chairs quietly creak as Knight Errant troopers slowly turn from the wall of monitors look at you. The door to the hotbox swings shut with a muffled thump, the duty officer standing beside it with a can of soycaf in hand. A shaman sits cross legged on a low couch, trancing as they probe the Astral for the source of the incursion. It's not a large room honestly, a suite sealed off with armored blast doors; with just enough space for everybody to stretch their legs and just enough amenities that they don't go insane. You're not farther than three feet from any of them and in those close quarters the silence is profound.

    "Wh-" someone starts.

    And then you pick up the shaman with your tail and bodily slam him into the officer.

    It goes fast after that. It's not a fight, not really, that implies some equal exchange, some equivalency. It implies that you don't hit a trooper so hard with your hand curled around a flashbang that you fracture her visor. It suggests that you don't drop the grenade at your own feet and let the metallic ping, the magnesium flare, rip through the room. It, by definition, means that tagging the prone and groaning bodies with your shocksword is more than a literal afterthought, your mind distracted, something in you disturbed and unsettled.

    Loop your tail around the trooper sitting limp in their chair and roll them away from their work station. Pull the small cartridge from your utility belt and pop the glassy, translucent chip from it's protective foam layer. Nyx made it, crafted it with the aid of whatever latticed processors she has slaved to her brain. It takes longer for you to find the input jack and slot it in than it does for the malware to run. The virus. The thing. You don't- You don't actually understand how it works you just watch the upload bar shoot across the screen, the golden lines of your uniform fading, cooling. Your visor slipping back into that bloody scarlet hue as you hunt and peck your way across the keyboards. Scanning through sub-menus for the controls for the drone vents. And it helps that this too is almost familiar and you've been here before.

    The progress bar chimes complete and the program auto-executes. You finally figure out the floor you want and open the slatted shutters, letting Tyrhand in. And then that's-

    ...It.

    That's everything.

    After the party, the climb, the infiltration through the Astral, that's your job done with a few keystrokes. Fenrir's drone'll be here in a matter of minutes to take control of this from you, for you, to hook you back into the encrypted network. Leaving you free to pace and prowl, to wait for Jingsheng to play his part and the rest of the team to give you the all-clear for extraction. The Loup-Garou and the cyberzombie in the depths of the foundations, spliced into the systems, your own mission control.

    You rest your weight at the command console, knuckles popping like firecrackers as your skin-suit slowly heals, closing over the molten rents and exposed anatomy. Thinking about what you saw, what SerpentOfEden said. You hesitate, you carefully move a still-smoking forearm away from the haptic interface and start typing, calling up camera feeds. There, Jingsheng already in Park's office. He must have been nearby, waiting for the go signal from Nyx. And there the party still in full swing, the close protection crews on the edges expanded, every patrol doubled. And there the empty central atrium on floor 105, Jingsheng's floor, the elevator doors opening and Seonwoo Mi-ran stepping out, surrounded by Ares-supplied bodyguards.

    Hands flex and curl, claws punching through the metal desk with a tortured shriek.

    You stare, wide-eyed. Whipping your head around, towards the faint humming coming from the vents only for an alert to flash up onscreen and drag you back. Seaonwoo Sang-jun on his way to the 100th floor, to your floor, moving the security station to ready status and requesting a report when he arrives. The sound you make is somewhere between a piping cry and a panicked snarl. Resonating deep in your chest and utterly inhuman.

    Tyrhand drifts in behind you, all sleek, curved armor and spinning blades. Tracing a lazy circuit through the air before pausing, blue optics burning as it studies you, drinks in the feeds behind you. Fenrir's icon appears in the corner of your HUD. And you can barely think, barely process it because you need to not be here you need to move but you still have to tell him-

    What are you going to tell him?
    [ ] Tell him you're going to the 105th floor, to intercept Mi-ran before she can find Jingsheng. You don't know what she is or how she tracked him but right now you need to buy him all the time you can. To protect him as best you can. You don't know what she really is but you got a good look at her other body, her real body, and you can tell she's not combat oriented. Not like you are.

    [ ] Tell him you're staying on the 100th floor, to ambush Sang-jun before he realizes what's wrong. You don't think he knows what his sister's doing; his message is curt and concerned, not panicked so you'd have the upper hand in the first strike. But you don't know what his true form is and you have no idea what he's capable of. And you'll have to trust Jingsheng to take care of himself.
     
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