You are Captain Isoldt Young, and you set down the warning from Micky the Grin, your late father's mobster friend. You hope he got through the suburbs somehow, maybe, but you don't have high hopes. You haven't heard from Hoch in far too long.
"We're set up, Captain," Hannah says as she jogs up, snapping a sloppy salute. "...Are you sure about this?"
You pinch the bridge of your nose and sigh. "This is a long way for me to have hauled out the fucking artillery to not be godsdamned sure, Hannah. Out with it."
Your subordinate (we are not saying girlfriend, that just ends badly, Hannah's a good person and she deserves better than you) worries at her lip with her teeth, and stares out into suburbia. It's quiet out there. Only the animals make any noise, and even then...
"...What about survivors?" Hannah says softly.
You shakes your head, and you sigh. "Hannah, do you know what a food desert is?" She shakes her own head in turn. "It's when a community doesn't have access to basic essentials and has to travel to get them. These developments are food deserts. They don't have grocery stores, or even businesses really. Strictly residential zoning. It's been months now. If they can't escape suburbia..." You thumb a little symbol on your belt, the sigil of the Everlasting Lady, one of the few things your father passed on that you accepted willingly. "They're already dead, Hannah."
"Captain," she replies, saluting again. "We're ready to fire on your order."
You look out into the nightmare hellscape that blocks access to the farms and the outlying towns, deceptive in its placidity. And you say: "My compliments to the mortar crews:
burn it to the ground."
* * * *
You are Marie Miller, newly-minted saint of poison, and you flit from rooftop to rooftop, always keeping an eye out for that damn dragon. Your destination is halfway across the city, as good a place to start as any: the Saline Cathedral, built in honor of the Empire's gods, and maybe a place you could learn about this new relationship you're having. The Wasp isn't...cruel to you, but it's not good at being kind, so it doesn't talk to you too much. It doesn't help that a lot of times your perspectives are different enough that even when it tries to answer questions there's no joy to be found. You're still turning over something it said, when you asked why the cars are all shitwrecked. It had said:
the real reality is remarkably good at getting its own way.
"Yeah, sure," you mutter to yourself as you fly on wings of burning glass in complete defiance of aerodynamics, lift, and all conventional physics. You peek your head over the lip of the roof you're on and see movement...
Hold up.
You raise a pair of binoculars and confirm what your naked eyes suspected. There's people out there, clustered in what used to be a city park. The play equipment has been thoroughly taken to pieces, and if you know your fantasy movies - which you do - there's a couple honest-to-the-gods
forges there. A small team of people is busily disassembling a car, and carrying parts towards the forges to be sorted. This is exactly the kind of skill set your new home needs...
You worry your lip with your teeth, and flit towards a nearby water tower. No one ever looks up, you learned that quickly. Maybe you can settle in and watch.
That place is not chaos, little saint.
"I'm aware," you mutter, under your breath. "...I'm aware."
* * * *
Your name is Morrowday, THE SPIRIT OF....
...No, you don't have the energy for that. You deflate and settle back down on the upturned cup that is your chair, and you sneak a look through your gossamer wings at where Sunshower is smoking a cigarette the length of her entire torso. It's a whole affair, like, it barely fits in her entire mouth, the effort is so heroic that you almost forget that Heroes Don't Smoke. It's you, and Sunshower, and Honeyblossom, and Gigglegrin on guard duty right now, and you're having doubts. Sure, sometimes bad guys have to go to jail, but.
...Are these even the bad guys? They're not being fed enough, you know that, or being allowed to bathe, and the way your new "friends" talk to them when they think you aren't listening is...
Sunshower finally manages to take her drag and vanishes in a cloud of tobacco smoke, coughing up a storm, which is the exact moment one of the bad guys who's been scratching at the back of his home-made concrete cell makes a crumbling sort of noise. You zip up into the air, all five inches tall of you, and see him wiggling out of a little hole in the base of the wall.
"C'mon girls!" you call, and the four of you zip up and over, spreading out. Gigglegrin yells out for the evildoer to halt; he doesn't even slow down, scrambling to his feet, making for the Wrecker Wall at the edge of the 'village'. The people here had taken you in, and said they were the good guys, the true heirs of the Empire, and they'd been kinda familiar. Their flag even has the
fasces on it, the symbol of friendship and unity!
So why're they so mean...
No time to think about that right now. Without speaking, the four of you split further, outpacing the prisoner and forming a rough square that easily keeps pace with him. "Halt! In the name of justice!" Honeyblossom demands, and he does not halt. So she starts gathering light in her hands, and you feel it gather in yours as an answer, and in Sunshower's, and in Gigglegrin's.
Your four tiny voices yelling out 'Friendship Blast!' finally gets some of the human-sized people to show up, far too late. It's not supposed to go like this. Friendship Blast sends people to
jail so they can learn how to be good friends again and get the help they need. That's what it does! It's not supposed to hurt people. It's not supposed to burn them up and leave their head and their legs and parts of their arms scattered across the asphalt, it's not, it's not supposed to -
You lurch, land heavily on the shoulder of one of the humans, and lose your little lunch all over his uniform.
"Good job," the man now carrying you says. "You did a good job, Sparkle Squad. The others will think twice now."
"We killed him," you whisper, and you dry heave, vision swimming.
Sunshower is wringing her hands, but Honeyblossom...
She stares at those severed legs, and her voice is...different. "He was a bad guy," Honeyblossom says, almost eagerly. "Bad guys get what they deserve."
"We
killed him!" you shriek at her, through tears in your eyes.
"It's not bad when the good guys do it!"
Gods help you all. What've you done? What've you done...
End Threshold 3: Perspectives
"In Glitch, to become aware of something is to affect it. To pay attention to something is metaphysically potent; to see meaning in something, significance in something, often generates that significance and that meaning."
- Doctor Jenna Moran, Glitch: A Story Of The Not
You Are...
[ ] Orchid, Jill, & Jackie (begin
Arc 4: Where The Heart is)
[ ] Marie (begin
Arc 4: The Flame of Chaos)
[ ] Captain Isoldt & Hannah (begin
Arc 4: First Contact)
[ ] Nattie & Sasha (begin
Arc 4: Empire of Joy)
[ ] Diamond & Thomas Bright (begin
Arc 4: Risk All Or Save None)
All of these plot lines will be happening. You are selecting your perspective. Choose only one.
You have 4 points of Communal Effort, but can earn more.
