2020 Annual One-Shot Anthology
A selection of short stories
This is a document that will list many one-shot stories from the Premiseverse. The majority of these stories come from the members of the Premiseverse Discord community.
LP's Author Note: This is the last story in the Anthology, and it is the combined work of myself and Pallan Minerva. It took shape over the course of several months, and… is the sort of conclusion to the very ugly hints already known about Rasa.
Rasa is based on some of the parts of a real person I knew very well, and so is Brooks. This is not a piece for the faint of heart, nor is it something you should read if you are worried about reactions to descriptions of 'bad things'.
I could not have done this without Comma (Pallan) who managed to find just the right clinical tone to bring out what Rasa is. There are places where this is...unsubtle. I know. And I also know that just as there are good people in the world, in real life, there are also monsters.
If the monster is in service to the greater good, does that make them less monstrous, or more?
Pallan Minerva's note: There are many figures in the Premiseverse who are evil. Many people who have power and use that power to hurt others and to snuff out the light of our souls. But LogicalPremise does a very good job of giving almost every single one of those people a depth of character that makes you almost able to sympathize with them, because you can understand where they're coming from.
Rasa is not one of those people.
He told me the stories of the woman he based her on, he told me her history, and I scoured the stories and the chat logs and everything I could find to try to create an image of her and I still didn't manage to put more than a few puzzle pieces down. I do not expect you to sympathize with her or even really understand her. But I hope that this helps you see her a little more.
A blank slate can never let go of the marks of its past, no matter how hard it tries.
The music to go along with this chapter is Miracle Workshop by Vasily Kashnikov.
Rasa: On the Music of the Silent
by LP and Comma
A light, a sun, the shine of a person's life snuffed out.
The frissons of orgasmic joy thrown into sand, blackened and smothered.
The sound of a faded connection, written in the notes of screams and the taste of fear.
Rasa looked up, water sluicing from her hands, as a bird flew by, its bright color flashing in the dawn's light by the river. Sunlight speared through the trees, golden shafts of radiance that felt warm against the cool temperature of the river. Gentle breezes stirred the limbs of the trees into rustling murmurs, carrying the faintest scent of sea-spray from the coast a few miles distant.
And of course, all in the light of that same sun, a glorious day.
She smiled faintly, turning her attention back to the water. The river easily washed the blood (not her blood but her blood) away, small trails of red sloughing off of her perfect artifice. With a grace that most would find unnaturally alluring, she slipped into the water.
The chill was refreshing, grounding her senses, but it allowed her to let go of sensation.
To wash away the afterglow and become cold once more.
To pretend for a moment that she was part of that rushing, cool embrace that slithered over limbs and soul alike.
The sun's limb peaked over the treeline, sending more lances of radiance to outline the form resting, panting, on the blanket by the riverbank, equally nude. Unconscious, with a trickle of blood seeping from her ruined flesh like a serpent, winding patiently down dark flesh and darker bruises. A map of faded scars traced nearly half of her body, each one a memory of a night given over to the excess and agony given freely.
She gazed at Brooks, even as the chill of the water deepened. Her eyes traced the new scars she had inflicted on her skin. The caress of a trail of electrical burns scored into flesh. The reddened injection marks that made a crimson constellation on her arms. The cuts into the young body. More blurred and indistinct marring here and there - the blurred line of an angle grinder, the pinprick-raised dots of searing-hot needles, the angry red scars across the bottom of the feet - all a record and a testimony.
To devotion.
Her body was a tapestry, woven in the fabric of agony and ecstasy, the thread a glittering collection of little stories of every pleasure and every poison that she inflicted upon the other woman. And it was also a temple, to what Brooks worshiped, to what she had given herself over entirely to becoming.
Horrifying nightmares and memories were unseen, long since painted over by disguise. Brooks was all she needed now, someone who did not exist, who destroyed herself to simply chase being needed.
As it should be. The little girl child who'd saved her life had done what none of the other many dolls she had left broken and dead had done, and accepted her place. It was like a jagged shard of mirror that fit back perfectly into the completed whole.
As it should be.
In that moment, she allowed herself to let go of a sigh of contentment that she had been holding in, and with it gone she became empty.
Or so she wished.
To even imagine nothingness is to have something, thus, one cannot try to become nothing.
One must allow it to happen. To define your shape is to limit yourself, to define your desires is no less containing than to define your shape. To hold on to something was to cling. Even her desire and joy in having Brooks was a definition - of wants and needs and things that kept you from being truly empty.
She knew her own limits and failures. Holding on was… human. She'd let go so many times, after all. But there was always something left after she let go, and thus she was never truly empty.
She dragged a wave through the river with one hand, watching it part before her, and seal together behind her.
That is nothingness.
Why can I not emulate it?
What do I still cling to?
She didn't need to consider the question, for she already knew what the answer was.
The answer begged for her touch every night, the answer would slit its throat if she so much as looked at it wrong, the answer needed her as she needed the answer. The answer had panic attacks and broke down crying if she even thought she was no longer wanted.
Brooks was the only weakness Rasa had ever known.
If she was honest with herself – a dangerous and self-destructive thing that led to places even Rasa was not prepared to poke around in – Brooks was not something she could let go of because she was the living justification of everything Rasa wanted. In venting herself into and onto her child she emptied her frustrations at her own failures. If there was pleasure and delight in carving herself into her lover, there was also resentment that Brooks had achieved so easily what Rasa had always chased.
And there was always the acid nature of that resentment, pushing her harder, and glorifying in the acts. To hear a throat unable to scream due to having worn itself bloody, to watch muscles twitch in uncontrollable spasms and to taste the sweet mixed delight of blood and sweat and need from the body given over to Rasa's every desire...
There was always the thrill in Brook's eyes of not knowing if any given session would end with her dead. She longed for that destruction, to join a thousand black-haired girls in the slack embrace of Rasa's hunger.
Yet Rasa had never brought herself to that final step. Was that fear? Appreciation of so perfect a sacrifice? Prudence in that while Harper might allow her to ruin Brooks he wouldn't tolerate her picking other victims?
A laugh died before it even had the chance to be born. Were it only so simple.
She could wish to change all she wanted, but the formlessness, the emptiness always eluded her. She could never escape her past, or the suffering and memories that shaped her. The nights of agony and fear of being used. The scrape of scalpels on bone, the sensation of agony and despair. The same engine that drove her to wreck and torture a woman who worshiped her because she simply had no other way to act was borne of the things done to her in her ruined past.
She could not forget. That pair of dark eyes, framed in black hair, that had haunted her dreams since that night. She had obliterated a thousand variations on that. Did the fact that she hadn't killed Brooks yet mean she had changed?
Into what? And what does that change entail?
She lifted her hand languidly from the water and found that she did not know the answer, anymore than she had forty years prior. All she had to show for that time was a new piece of herself that she couldn't let go of.
The rain began without prelude, turning blue skies gray in the span of minutes. Her partner awoke as soon as the first droplet hit her, standing up without a care for the wounds still healing on her body. She stretched almost languidly, a soft smile on her dark features, and Rasa only nodded.
"A little earlier than expected," Rasa commented as she slowly walked out of the stream. Brooks's eyes followed her closely. "Let us hope the storm's eagerness does not interfere with our timetable."
"Yes," Brooks said simply, beginning to gather their things together. Rasa put on her catsuit and looked back out at the sunrise. Now barely a glimmer in the clouds, she was reminded of a different sunrise that died the day she had.
The day she wished she had... ceased. Like she should have done.
"Mother?" Her partner's voice was soft and concerned, a voice full of a love that was neither sane nor caring of lacking such. Rasa turned to glance at her, and extended a hand, red hair slipping from her shoulders to frame her face in a crimson fall of shadows.
"Come. We will… relax later. It is now time to work."
O-ANTHOLOGY-O
Jack Harper stared at the datapadd for some time before reluctantly raising his glowing blue gaze to the pair in front of him. As always, Brooks was polished and professional, her Cerberus slick-suit immaculate and her posture erect, a gentle smile on her lips. Beside her, Rasa's expression was as empty and blank as her soul, the flame red hair neatly tied back into a queue her only concession.
"This is… more than I was expecting. Tizan Jathan was a truly hard woman, a survivor of both the FCW and the purges of the Commissars against the supporters of EAGL. Finding her couldn't have been easy, and getting this information must have been...somewhat difficult."
Brooks's smile only widened. "Yes, sir. She had professional grade nanoware managing and securing her greybox, what looked like an AI under construction, and more than twenty bodyguards, most of them ex-military."
The lips twisted ever so slightly and suddenly Brooks was not a polished young woman, but a leering demon, preening in front of her mistress. "But she was oh so lonely, and after her paramour had an ugly accident in the river…"
She trailed off, and Harper reminded himself that these two fed on weakness and fear. He merely arched his eyebrow, took a slightly deeper drink of the Wild Turkey in the hand-cut tumbler at his side, and used the time it took to withdraw and light a cigarette to gather his thoughts.
"Was taking out the other woman a necessity? It does not seem to be exactly cautious, two brutal murders in the span of a few days."
This time Rasa spoke, her tones that of ash in shadows, of whispered secrets and a tone of amusement. "Mr. Harper, there are a great many organizations in the detritus of human civilization that could be of use to Cerberus, and our plans. Many of them are disinclined to do so out of fear of Commissariat reaction. The only use for them is to either frame them to discredit other groups - such as the Hand of Hades - or convince them that there are indeed fates worse than death at the hands of the Commissars."
She gave a languid gesture to the padd. "The Sons of Freedom, the Terra Nova Compact, the Idealists Conference, and the Old Earth group have all since agreed to work with Cerberus after the death of Ms. Jathan. This was not a coincidence."
Harper glanced over at Trellani, who very minutely shook her head. He saw she already had two fingers arched in a biotic mnemonic if these two got out of hand, and he decided that he was really better off not knowing all the details.
"In that case, well done, Agents. I believe Maya asked for some downtime for both of you, correct?"
Rasa gave a single nod, while Brooks swallowed and became slightly flushed. Rasa finally showed an expression, a faint and sardonic smile that slowly widened as she looked from her victim into Harper's eyes, her voice calm. "Yes, a couple of weeks. I need to focus more on Brooks for a bit."
Brooks shivered, and Harper managed to restrain a shudder and instead nodded back. "Very well. We'll need you two, ah, functional for the operation to retrieve several more medical specialists, including a doctor - Six-Hawks, a cybernetics specialist - for the Revenant Project."
Rasa's lips tightened as her expression fell back to blankness. "As you wish, sir. We'll be ready." She turned, Brooks following in her wake and speaking something in a low voice Harper didn't catch, and he waited until the door slid closed behind them to exhale.
Trellani shook her head, a frown on her features. "Beloved, I know they are lethal, dangerous and almost always successful, but those two are the most twisted beings I've ever met, and that includes the Thirty. Why have you not had them killed?"
Harper took a long drag on his cigarette. "The Broker made that mistake - trying to have Rasa killed. It cost him some of his best people and ended up with her working for Cerberus. I cannot even imagine the catastrophe that would occur if I tried the same and it cost me forces I can ill afford to lose."
He looked back at Trellani. "Or how ugly things would be if she and Brooks ended up working for the Hand of Hades."
He leaned back in the chair and chuckled as Trellani's hands jerkily tore through a motion of siari negation, and then outright laughed when the matriarch glared at him.
He sobered a second later. "Rasa and Brooks are… broken people. Broken in ways that I cannot - and do not want to - understand. They are distasteful tools to have to use, but also a self-solving issue."
Trellani said nothing before moving silently to the door, the tight fitting fabric of her dress the only noise in the room. She stopped as the door slid open, glancing back over her shoulder.
"They took six hours to kill that woman, they peeled her entire body out of her skin with caustic agents and hand tools. They broke every single bone in her entire body, pumped her full of pain-enhancing drugs and then let her own security nanotech eat her alive - while transmitting her demise on live broadcast. I have done terrible things in my life, beloved. So have you. So have many in our galaxy."
Her purple eyes were for once clear of madness or sorrow as she turned away. "But I never enjoyed those atrocities, much less got off on them. They are poison, Jack, and the sooner we lance that poison the better off we are."
The door hissed shut behind her, leaving Jack Harper, the Illusive Man, alone in his chair. He glanced back down at the padd by his side, and at the horrific image of what had once been a human being, reduced to a tangle of bones and burned meat and horrible mocking messages written in blood.