"No. No, I am not Deep Throat and the only thing I can say is that I wouldn't be ashamed to be because I think whoever helped Woodward helped the country. No question about it." - Deep Throat
The Citadel was prone to the better part of dead quietude, Marie found, being its least social occupant (if her lover could be counted as one, then by about ten orders of magnitude). If asked to explain why she had chosen one of its quietest nights to have Danika and Thalia over, but it felt borderline ontologically objectionable on its face not to. This was a world-shifting puzzle they were dealing with. Were they not permitted the joys of faux-conspiratorial secrecy?
Marie beamed, well and utterly. Upon the dining room table, she unfolded an A3 world map, and laid a mechanical pencil. "Do your homework?"
"Yes, ma'am!" Danika grinned back and saluted. Thalia imitated the gesture, only far less dexterously.
"Alright. So we are... here..." She scribbled a cross over the general location of Sydney. "And the Russian author was wherever Chernyshevsky was exiled. Did you get that?"
"Apparently it's a town called Vilyuysk. About sixty-three point five thingies north, one hundred and twenty-one thingies right."
"East, you mean."
"Yes! One hundred and twenty-one East right."
"East, not right! The thingies are degrees!"
"C...elcius...?"
"I- I mean we can just call them thingies." Marie counted along the coordinate markings she had inscribed upon the margins and crossed out Vilyuysk.
"And they had something in common, right?"
"The woman said they had a leyline between them!"
"That's a lot of space it can be in," Thalia remarked.
"Oh, no, no! Not as in physically somewhere in the middle of them. Between can also mean leading from one side to the other." She conjured a hammer, head down, onto the table with a tremendous crash. Both her guests jumped back. Along the flat of its head, she drew a straight line between the two cities.
"What? Oh, I just don't know if we have a ruler anywhere. Oh, hey! That runs through Papua New Guinea, let's just..." Another cross. "Where else did I mention?"
"Umm... something about India?"
"Big place." She circled it. "Somewhere in that coun- wait! Dammit, India was bigger back then, wasn't it?" She erased her circle furiously enough to stress a crease into the paper, which she stamped out just as quickly. Satisfied, she corrected her approximation of the country. "Where else?"
"Haway, or something?"
"Where...? Oh! Hawai'i." Another cross.
And this process continued, for each other place Marie had glimpsed. Taken together, they revealed...
"Nothing."
"What?"
Marie shrugged. "I don't know what to tell you. You can draw a line between those three points, but the rest... nothing. Sorry, I thought with the mention of leylines and all that there would be some big geographical secret."
"Wait! But you said there was something about another one of them 'getting their chance soon enough'."
"Okay, so there were more after Sydney." She huffed, cast her pencil onto the table. "That means we don't have enough information to solve whatever's going on. So there is something happening, there's just no way to find out what it is. Well, this was pointless."
"Hey! Heyyy." Danika laid a hand upon Marie's shoulder. "Chin up! Better knowing that we don't know than not even knowing that, right?"
"Objectively," Mækiu interrupted, wolfing down a mouthful of something that smelled almost like food. "Actually, there's a lot more objective karmic good to stuff than most people think."
"When did you get here?"
"Two million years ago. Oh, here? Forty-one seconds. What was I...? Right. Yes. Funny story. Everyone talks about, say... the prison system, or immigration, or abortion all around the world like they're these big controversial things, but the funny part is each of these arguments have an optimally good side."
"And those are?"
"I thought you'd never ask. Seriously, I was worried I annoyed you with this kind of thing."
Marie smiled softly. "Not at all!"
"Right. So I've talked to you about threads of fate, right? The more influence you have, the more are tied to you, the more magical potential you have."
"Of course, it was a favourite analogy of yours."
"Not an analogy! It's actually - Danika, could I have a hair tie?"
Danika released her ponytail and threw its binding to Mækiu.
"Lovely!" She pulled it taut between her index fingers. "So there are two attributes to what I like to call a karmic tensor, and those are autonomy and knowledge. If you provide both of these to other people, then the potential for rational choices to be made, just... generally, it goes up, the universe tends toward goodness, and your power upon it grows." She pulled her fingers wider. "Buildup of elastic potential energy. Now it's much easier for one of my hands to pull, or exert influence over if you'd rather, the other. But if you imprison someone or otherwise deprive them of their autonomy, deceive or misinform someone," now with her fingers together, "look at that. Slack. Wasteful, can't store any energy, can't influence the universe around it at all."
"Err, question." Marie raised a hand. She wasn't sure she understood why she did.
"Shoot!"
"If there is an objective good, why are you so against making decisions that affect other people?"
"Oh! I love good, make no mistake. I recognise its importance, and I would like to practice it. But the problem is I always have. And I always thought battery farming human misery was a great thing to do, too. And, well. Like I said, I made a lot of mistakes because I didn't understand emotion, so what if I'm missing something else that would make me understand that good is not the right thing to do?"
"I don't understand."
"And for that, I envy you. I really do."
Even with her own lack of understanding, or perhaps because of it, the wisdom of telling Marie all this in the wake of recent crises was questionable. Which crises? Well, take your pick. Ultimately, what she had said reinforced strange and esoteric biases.
The Attendant offices of Sydney's first impression upon Marie was that they were the minimum requirement to be called offices, plural. This proved practical enough; between them, their occupants almost never totalled the intelligence of more than two workers.
Surprising nobody, one office was cluttered with some outskirts-of-town-warehouse-stocktake-sale's worth of desks, cabinets, all manner of paraphernalia one might assign a station deemed less important than their own to be passed off to some unsuspecting, fresh-faced fool and subsequently forgotten, while the other was the sparse, modern head office of one Lara Macquarie - and if one should ever assume such accusations of immodesty were in bad faith, an oversized, well-polished name plate on the front left corner of the desk would put their worries well at ease.
From the very start, Marie naturally did not entertain such concerns. What did concern her were the silence and disinterest with which she was regarded upon stepping into the latter, and whom by.
Behind the desk, Lara gestured for her to take a seat next to Whitman. Without any suitable rationalisation to her response, she took it, just as a puppet on string.
"What do you need both of us here for?" was not what either woman this side of the desk asked, but each expressed the general question in their own words fluently enough. A moment later they stared at one another like startled, wild Pecora.
Lara kicked her boots up onto the desktop. Transformed, it fit not out of the realm of possibility that her heels would take someone's eye out, and only probably someone in the same room. She rubbed her hands together and shrugged. "We're all going to be working together, right? Best we all get along, then. Why don't we go around and see if you two have anything in common?" It did not escape the attention of anyone present the emphasis with which she enunciated the word 'we' every time.
Everything about this situation was specifically engineered to bother Marie, she decided. Talking about herself. Being compared to Whitman. Having her time wasted. "I hate you, you know that?"
"Okay, besides that."
"All due respect, Macquarie, negotiations come with the station of Marquess, which aren't bestowed upon me except in the event of your absence."
"I... actually, you know what? You're completely right. This arrangement was terribly presumptuous of me, and of no practical use to-"
A metallic buzzing stirred in her pocket. She dismissed her costume, lifted her phone to her ear, jumped to attention.
"Sorry, sorry! I have to take this. I'll be right back, you two talk amongst yourselves."
Left to just herself and Whitman, Marie grit her teeth. "It's 'between' when it's only two. Not 'amongst'."
Whitman smiled. "I take it her personality hasn't won you over, either."
Marie ignored her.
"Is something the matter?"
"Is something the matter?" she parroted, in the whiniest voice she could muster. It occurred to her midway through that it was uncomfortably approximate to her regular speaking voice.
"I'm not sure I follow."
"I take it you know what my power is by this point."
"Well, sure."
"I've been around to my old house, and the flower shop, and where Sonia Vu died."
How did she expect Whitman to react? With shock? Fear? Remorse? She found none of these things.
"Oh, I imagined you would eventually. If people have reacted to my words and actions in a way that made you feel hurt or aggrieved, you have my deepest condolences."
"Is that all you have to say for yourself?"
"Why, should I say something else?"
"I want an apology."
"I completely endorse you going and getting one. I'm sure it would do you well to talk about your situation with your father, or Fearnley, or Antonio."
Marie's greatest fear was that her first impression of Madeleine Whitman was correct. It had somehow never crossed her mind that she could be worse. If anything, she was almost offended that nobody had staged an intervention on... all that. She was offended yet further to consider that of all the people who could have tried, she herself was probably the most reasonable.
Reasonable? Marie would wonder. Moi? Alright...
"So, what, do you figure it's all coincidence that all these terrible things stemmed from your own actions?"
"A lot of things stem from my actions. If they didn't, I'd be a pretty terrible police officer, right?"
"I don't follow."
"I've done security work for charity drives. I've walked drunk women to bus stops late at night. I've even done the stereotypical saving-a-kitten-from-a-tree thing. The full Monty. The thing is, I've done so much, the way other people respond to half the things I've done is out of my hands."
"At least two people are dead."
"I know. I know, I was a mess the day Deckard passed away. Why do you think I wasn't at the investigation?"
"Guilt?"
"Mourning. My conscience is clear."
"I thought you told me you kept your conscience deliberately in balance."
Whitman adjusted her glasses. "Are you deliberately misunderstanding me?"
"I-"
"I understand that maybe you don't agree with my methods, or my ideology. I understand that maybe you hate me. Still... being viceroy's hardly a popularity contest, is it?"
Could Marie kill her, right now? Would anyone be able to stop her if she could? Forget what Hope said, forget what Thalia said, would it be morally respectable to let someone who had learned nothing from two accidental deaths stay at large?
"No, I guess it's not."
Safer to presume she couldn't.
"Well, I think this entire team-building exercise has been designed by Macquarie to waste our time, because clearly we aren't getting anywhere." She extended her hand. "Still, as a strictly professional courtesy, I look forward to working with you."
Marie grit her teeth and shook her hand. "And the same to you." Whitman's grip felt disturbingly much like it could crush her.
"I'll be going now. Look after yourself. Especially working with... her."
"You too," Marie blurted, before being hit by the same wave of panoptic ignominy one might if answering the same to farewells like 'have a safe ride home', 'enjoy your meal', or 'get well soon', which was then cancelled out by another reminding her that giving Whitman such a warning was, in fact, appropriate, which was, in turn, cancelled out by a third hand-wringing and whining, yeah, but you didn't really mean it like that, did you, it was just an automa- and then all of these thoughts were ambushed and shot down by an absolute beaufighter of a thought reminding her that she neither cared about Whitman's opinion of her, or indeed, her personal safety.
That was the last Marie saw of Madeleine Whitman for some time, a period of her life she would later come to dub 'not long enough'.
This much, of course, was her own fault.
Though it was, inarguably, important to accurate characterisation of her, elucidating what Whitman's ringtone was and why it was what it was would be an exercise far too lengthy to contain within this text, and for the sake of brevity, is left to the reader's imagination. It only bore mentioning because here she excused herself from the local church fête to spare everyone in the vicinity from hearing it.
"Talk to me."
"Hey! Whitman. Are you busy right now?"
"Crawford?"
"Yeah, I know. Got off on the wrong foot, whatever. I'm calling about work, so let's just put aside our feelings for a second and focus."
Whitman smiled. She had heard of this side to her, but the pleasure had seldom been hers to meet it. "What's the situation?"
"There's a shopping centre in your neighbourhood, isn't there?"
"That's right."
"Now, I don't know the severity of the situation here, but I have caught wind of someone turning a quick buck passing grief seeds off to a bunch of jewellers."
"What?!"
"Look, all I'm saying - give your local... I don't know, there are like a gazillion different franchises that pretend to be big names. Give them a look in."
"I'm on it. Thanks for the heads up."
She stowed her phone away. Her heart brimmed with the longing for her old flip-phone, the definitive knocking sound it made when she ended a conversation.
With some quick excuse, something about a friend or a pet or a toilet or really anything, maybe all three, she scurried off to make herself useful.
The shopping centre was only two streets down - in fact, it took her less time to arrive than it would to find the shop in question. She cursed herself for not knowing her way around as well as she ought to. Every second she wasn't trawling directly though display cases of precious stones was another second that someone's life could be in peril.
Alright. Alright, she told herself. Better to stay focused than panic, circumstance be damned. Whoever owned the building (come to think of it, who did? Clearly individual companies bought and/or rented out their own spaces, but from whom? Who owned the rest of shopping centres? Huh. She'd never thought about that before.) has the decency to provide an information desk no great distance from the entrance.
"Excuse me!" she shouted. "Excuse me! Are there any traders in jewellery around here?"
A man as broadly twenty-something as was humanly possible spun around to face her, bewildered. "A couple. Why, what are you looking for?"
"I'm supposed to help bring down a counterfeiter, apparently selling to whoever's buying." Technically, none of that was a lie.
"Oh! Well, I thiiink there's only one place that does trade-ins. Up on the first floor, just next to the Myer. Can't miss it. It's cal-"
That was enough for her. She sprinted as fast as she could without the draw of human attention, down halls, halls, into a sparse hall housing the occasional car sale, or film promotion, or Christmas activity that would somehow mark itself with all manner of snow motifs on forty-degree days, escalator, those walkways that run through upper floors in shopping centres with the big gaps across the middle, which she knew definitely had a name but that wasn't where her focus was!
Around the corner, the wide black "M Y..." - this was it! Off to its right, there it was, as pretentious and nondescript as any. She skidded her way in, huffed, came down to a walking pace. Sure, she caught a few odd looks for it from the couple of people who at all times seemed able to afford coming to a place like this, but what a small price to pay.
Now where the shit was that grief seed?
Whoever stocked the shelves had the decency to colour-coordinate, at least, so it didn't take long to find. The challenge would be in neutralising it. The refraction of the glass case made it hard to tell, but her timing was stellar. Already it looked agitated, although it hadn't embedded itself in the base of its display - someone was less than amused by its gyroscopy and had balanced it on its side by a combination of a small weight and soft padding.
Alright, then. Time to kill this thing. Already it was erecting a barrier in response to her presence. She raised a hand. With all her strength, she could suppress the force of its emergence, and ensure nobody else would come to any harm. The glass, not so much. But if the witch was going to break the one thing protecting itself from her, why would she want to get in the way of that?
It was powerful enough that no alarm sounded at the shattering of the cabinet. Madeleine was breathing heavily now, almost shivering, at the birth of a new barrier right before her eyes. Her chest was aflame with tingling nerves and flaring axons. Guard up, Daniel puts the wax on, now her strength was waxing, waxing,
Wax, poetic drips afloor tripped up like seven-four,
The mixed semiotics downright triplicate semaphore,
The sophomore cop knocking something on heaven's door -
Verbal couture; parkour with the metaphors...!
Surface deforms like a fork strikes a pork parm
Worn 'pon the forearm uniform with the store's charms,
The calm and the storm and the norms she writes false dharm
-a, light but not hot, warm a roar of a firearm;
The fire alarm congener in aspiring for energy,
The shine that consigns on its enemies' penalties -
On off-gold pauldron folds of a flowing white centrepiece
While her hair resembled peddlers of plenary remedies
There's plenty of these seen at the scene of the labyrinth
Apophatic, apathetic to a tragedy's absence
A kinetic pack of action for the badge and the maddened,
"Go ahead, make my day." Who would say that she hadn't?
The magic dispatches and careens down the rabbit hole,
Imagine the phantom here who gleans the sheens tapetal
Unfathomed, its actions, but deeds she's deemed capital -
Her draped-cape-and-gauntlet captor's unflappable
Battle stance, actual; death rides perceptible
Forget its treasures, witch turned dead-set on her better jewel
Forget its better sense, let it test: was she edible?
Regret whatever, eaten, she shreds a getaway ever cruel
From intestinal agrafe and a skin of steel pendants
To see the rest of it strafe like the pirate's apprentice
Asking are the jewels safe, because she's not a real dentist,
But she'd not finish the sentence, as it sent her relentless
Down the halls of such excess, and the riches all plundered
While it stitched up that which would have torn most witches asunder
And yet a flick of the wrist restored the hunt and the hunter,
Never hit by the blitz, but still stung by the thunder
Of a hundred cotton-light binds - she'd got in her hands as
Hot as her sight line, these stop signs, these hamsas
By time of white wine, one rots and one stands at
The bottom of the ninth of the four line-
The witch was dead. "Ding dong, bitch," Whitman whispered to herself, as if that was almost cool.
The staff seemed too taken by the breakage of the glass to notice her reappearance, and in the confusion she slunk back off to the local church, nobody any the wiser save for a very, very dead monster.
It was the afternoon of the day which had birthed the witch Marie would later come to know as Maleen wherein she understood - not consciously, such was beyond her yet - the enormity of her antagonism.
Cliché though it may have been, she didn't even notice what was happening at first. The pepper grinder had the most obnoxious habit of becoming jammed nowadays, and demanded of her about as much torque as was practicable. It was only once she set the instrument aside to massage her palm that she discovered her pain intensifying. No rash, cut, bruise, or blister, but it felt as if every joint in her hand was being violently compacted. With her other hand, she traced along the tendons and found no such thing occurring. She trusted her proprioception dearly, moreso even than Terrans do by instinct, because now her vision was consumed by water pooling in her eyes, concentration, by the clenching of her jaw. For one minute and thirty-six seconds, she locked in a state of mild seizure, and three things crossed her mind during that time.
Sonia screamed again. "There isn't. I'm sorry. It - everything - burns, even if I retreat into my gem it still burns..."
"Wh- wh- what can I do to help?"
She tore the soul gem off her midsection and slammed it onto the floor beside her. "Healing doesn't work. Ice doesn't work. Just be quick."
"I know, right? She was going to be out of that pain in just a couple hours. All they needed to do was wait it out."
Marie faltered. "You seem... very sure about that."
"Obviously. Whitman may be powerful, but I don't think she can concentrate that long."
"...What?"
Lara gasped facetiously. "Did I say that out loud? Look here, Crawford. She may be all about 'the law' and 'protecting people' and calling herself 'high empathy' or whatever else, but she's a genuine scourge."
Marie grit her teeth and shook her hand. "And the same to you." Whitman's grip felt disturbingly much like it could crush her.
It was, unmistakably, the same sensation of touch, now with the additional wiring across into the sensation of unbearable, soul-crushing pain.
Lara had waved her off, of course, but she had a horrible feeling she understood what drove Sonia to her death. She could run, but from what? A remote agony? An enemy that never needed to pursue her?
How stupid. She should have run anyway. Where had her defeatism gotten her? To the exact place it told her she already was.
"I take it the time for professional courtesies is over now, then?"
Whitman snarled at her.
"Oh, come on. Nothing? You're coming out of this situation so much better than I am. I'm actually a little disappointed you aren't... lording it over me, or something."
"This is all one big joke to you, isn't it?"
"Yes, I- oh! Sorry. We probably weren't talking about your outfit, were we?"
Whitman stormed across the room and lifted Marie by the neck. The ties on her wrists tightened with the weight of the chair. It felt like being pulled apart.
"Everyone is dead, because of you!"
"Whkh pkh-"
She dropped her. The feeling of the chair clattering across the warehouse floor was not a sensation to her teeth she would be quick to forget.
"Repeat that."
Marie spat. "Was it because of me, or because of how people responded to my actions?"
"You don't get to pull that shit! You don't know what it's like to lose everything like I had!"
"Really?!" The floor was suddenly, unquestionably Marie's, despite her restraints. "Because you've been a real fucking good teacher, you know that?!"
Whitman took a step back. "Is that what all this was about? What, did you just want revenge?"
"No, but I sure as hell will once I'm out of this chair!"
"Then why...?"
"Does that power of yours give you a resistance to biting? Because if it doesn't, I'm gonna be excited to see what I can tear out before it does!"
"Why? Why did you-"
"Because you needed to understand. Understand what it is to be me. Be anyone around you."
"And that drives a woman to let innocent people die?"
"Funny. I was going to ask you the same question."
"You can't just act like I don't care about-"
"Can't I?! Fucking can't I?! Because here you are, acting like just feeling compassionate is good enough. Like you can 'care'," she sneered, again in whined mimicry, "without lifting a finger."
The room fell silent until its soundscape was overtaken by the signature clicking of the spiked fence finials Lara Macquarie happened to call her heels. As she spoke, the lack of humour to her cadence was enough to bring tears of panic to Marie's eye.
"Whitman. Your conduct in this interrogation is inadequately professional, and you pursue your own interests in your line of questioning. For that, you are dismissed."
"But-"
"Crawford is the most important person in this room right now, excepting your marquess. If I must bring someone to harm to make a point, it will not be her."
"I... I'm sorry. It won't happen again. All I ask is-"
Faster than anyone could see, Whitman's glasses were under her superior's boot, ground into the concrete floor. "-That you be allowed to live. Now leave. And if you want to make yourself useful, bring me a mop and whatever gets blood off concrete." She glared down at Marie. "As a precaution."
The commonality of lost dignity, forceful dismissal, and the honor of being allowed to live bore a half-minute synapse of meta-alignment with another high-ranking attendant.
Annika had a much harder time than she historically had done in slinging a bag across her shoulders, owing to the absence of one.
"I'm beginning to think one of those suitcases on wheels would have been wiser."
"You don't have to make this so hard for yourself," Hüriye reminded her.
"Later, I'm telling you."
"Are you still afraid of Attendant law?"
"I don't know. Possibly. Does it matter?"
"I can't imagine how it wouldn't."
Annika frowned. She was as German as they come, but she nonetheless held dear a sense of penance that would fluster the most devout Catholic. The irony was that she could believe all she liked that suffering would make her a better person just as dictated by Attendant praxis, but she was suffering now and it certainly wasn't making her feel any better.
There was a Brownian quality to the crowds of Berlin Hauptbahnhof, flowing past each other in forms with clear rules, and yet completely unpredictable. One could not disappear into the crowds - one simply did, to enter the station was to become part of the machine, spend a moment awed by a place in something bigger than the self.
And in the face of all of this, in the fish-school uniformity, Annika's pride was too wounded to live outside of herself. Hüriye didn't want to express as much, but this worried them. Not the absence of this transhuman euphoria specifically, but that despite all of her mistreatment, Annika's loyalties remained to her empress. It wasn't right that she still thought that way, but what could they do?
"I'm sorry that you ended up getting pulled along on this so soon after your exile."
"Oh, what difference does it make, how soon it is? I've got the entire rest of my life to spend glancing over my shoulder."
"So you're afraid we're being watched?"
"It's not a concern. It's a certainty."
Hüriye glanced around. In such a nexus of constant human pother, how would they even begin to verify that?
"Do you think we're in any danger, even in such a crowded area?"
Annika shot around so quickly she almost lost her bag. "Of course! Disruptors," she explained, as if that answered anything at all.
"Should I ask?"
"It's a particular kind of enchanted weapon, for assassination in public areas. Its projectile passes clean through thin tissue like skin and bone-"
"Like gamma rays?"
"Precisely! But they can break soul gems just fine. I don't know why I hadn't considered it. There could be as many as four of them placed around the station."
"Alright, so how do you protect against that?"
"You don't. We're dead."
"Even with...?" They nodded toward her bag.
"I still don't... better to die honourably than live a disgrace."
Hüriye jogged to stay by her side, only to immediately need to file behind her again upon an escalator. "I don't think that's even a little bit true."
"No? I thought you were supposed to be spiritually enlightened?"
"I like to think I am, at any rate. It'd generally explain a lot about me. But I don't see any contradiction here. Look at the beauty of the objective world around you. The purring of a kitten. Sunlight through morning frost. Your local park at the changing of the season. Would you really trade a life full of these things for..."
Annika blinked, and took at Hüriye. "For what?"
"Well... for that."
An obvious attendant, about the duo's age and wrapped in a black trenchcoat, impeded their escape.
"Schneider."
"Triebel."
"Any further than this, and you are to be executed. I'm sorry. Empress's orders."
"Under what jurisdiction?" Hüriye, for their part, towered over this agent Triebel. Although the vanity of appearance was generally meaningless to them, they at least hoped their stature was intimidating enough, if not the fact that they literally fused a metal plate to the lower half of their face.
"By the Attendants to the Deep Light, of course."
"I see. An organization, if I might ask you to clarify, my associate has lost all affiliation with?"
"All standing. Not all affiliation."
"I see. So your law still binds her, then?"
"Hüriye, don't-"
"That is correct."
"Of course, you understand that an expatriate is not a citizen."
"This is true."
"And that only citizens are bound by law."
"This is not true. For example, there are laws governing the behaviour of domesticated animals."
"I see." They nodded thoughtfully and stepped back. "Well, I expected an answer like this."
"Then why did you even ask?"
"Oh, I only wanted to get close enough to set your coat on fire."
Agent Triedel looked to her anterior and caught an undeniable whiff of smoke. She panicked, struggled out of the coat, and only alerted more stationgoers to the sudden presence of the flame. Within two seconds, this entire platform was cast into disarray, metaeclyptic superstructures within superstructures, the Brownian substance excited by the introduction of heat.
Hüriye caught Annika's wrist and ran back the way they came, barging urgently down the escalator, the latter desperately blurting a chorus of terrified "entschuldigung"s to any poor sucker they barreled over.
"That was terribly rude of you, charging through all those people like that."
"You were paying attention to the part where the assassin was talking about murdering you, yes?"
"Yes, but..."
The ellipsis of three points was strikingly less semiotic than most other punctuation marks. Their alignment was syzygial in nature, the indication of metaeclyptic potentiality, set against the limitations of gestalt. To end a sentence with... implies that any connection may be made, that anything is possible.
"Come on. To the bathroom. You say these assassins are carrying powerful guns?"
"That's right."
"So let's draw them into a closed space. Are you still any good with lightning, given...?"
"No, my accuracy while channeling has decreased drastically."
"You should change that."
It pained her to admit they were right.
Susanne Triedel was not having a good day.
She had received a job directly from her old mentor, who told her that she'd be "completely willing to do this job" were it not for the Empress giving her new duties.
So, this put Susanne in charge of a three-woman unit, tasked with apprehending a girl who had once stood many rungs above her.
"It'll be easy," she was told, "she's an amputee now, can't hold her rifle for anything."
Still! She was nothing if not cautious! So when she saw Schneider and her new friend, or boss, or valet, or concubine (noncubinery?) or honestly who-cares-what run into a bathroom instead of out of the building, she sent her underlings in to investigate.
Within seconds, radio silence. Oh, well. She'd get someone to send for one Thekla Kahnwald for backup.
Everyone she would ask to send for Kahnwald was in the bathroom right now, likely unconscious.
If you want something done right...
No quarter. She stormed into the bathroom, disruptors akimbo, blasting anything that moved. Immediately, any magical girl who dared confront her should have been dead.
Annika didn't look all that impressed, though. Her bag was at her feet now, unzipped, and her arm - no, just left arm now - held the wrist of a wickedly ornate prosthetic right over the gem on her chest.
"Done? Now it's my turn."
A few electrical sparks contorted the prosthetic, joint by joint, into a new pose. Across it, and with her left, she conjured her hunting rifle. A burst of lightning from its tip knocked Susanne out cold.
"Hüriye, are you alright?"
Hüriye slowly crept from a cubicle and nodded. "They're all still asleep."
"So, should we board that train now?"
The unfurling of Berlin into Brandenburg was so otherworldly, it felt as if the train was being dragged along more than just one, visible, dimension. The German countryside had birthed countless fairytales, and to pivot from the ever-evolving cityscape to something so ancient, so historically shrouded in mystery and magic... the change in feeling was not describable, as nobody felt the same person on one side as they did the other.
"I'm still not used to how this arm works. It's clunky. Inconvenient. Not to mention its presence is ontologically uncomfortable."
"It sounds like one of your problems is causing the other." Hüriye sat back and nodded along to an IDM (generic nomenclature they found as objectionable as anybody else) beat playing through a pair of headphones seeing use upon only one ear. "If you can't accept it for what it is, it's not going to feel like a real arm."
"So what should I do?"
"I've heard this particular type of prosthesis uses such weird shapes because they're more receptive to enchantment. I think it's supposed to take a really skilled enchantress to get one that looks like a normal arm working."
"Is that so?"
"It could be worth trying."
"If you say so."
Annika closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
"I'll tell you what, though - I need something to drink first."
She grabbed ahold of the edge of her seat and lifted out in search of whoever was providing refreshments. If Hüriye could still smile, they would, but they weren't exactly going to bring to Annika's attention which hand she just leaned on.
The following- Hey, it's me. The Understudy. You know how it is.
UNDERSTUDY: Hey.
NARRATOR: Can I help you?
UNDERSTUDY: I was talking to the Abyss earlier. I think she wants to see you?
NARRATOR: Oh, what have I done now?
UNDERSTUDY:I was sort of afraid to ask.
NARRATOR: Well, at least let me finish writing.
UNDERSTUDY: No, you go on ahead. I'll handle it.
NARRATOR: Are you sure...?
UNDERSTUDY: Yes! Of course, of course! Shove off, man.
Alright, let's see here.
Can I just write anything?
Oh, cool. Let's give this a try.
SO I WAS TALKING TO NEDJEM ABOUT HOW ANCIENT EGYPTIANS WORSHIPED CATS AND I THINK IT'S REALLY INTERESTING.
Oh, crap. That's the header.
The worship of cats in Ancient Egypt (I'm just rephrasing the header, is that allowed?) appears to originate from an agricultural problem circa (note: look up the date later and put it here). Grain farms along the banks of the Nile proved excellent nesting ground for
It doesn't say what kind of snakes. Hold on, let me look into this.
Wow, there are a lot of kinds of snakes in Egypt. Vipers and cobras and stuff. And spitting cobras have neurotoxic venom? That's freaky. Now I'm looking into neurotoxins and it turns out they can cause brain damage.
Damn, a snake that can cause brain damage, that's-
Hold on. I wonder if, like... if a snake ingests its own venom, will it get br/
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It goes on like this, for a while.
Hello again, by the way. I'm not staying long. I just needed to drop by, ensure you're still around.
I might need your assistance in... well, it's probably nothing. I only thought it best to take precautions, and I wasn't sure quite how else to reach you.
I see this narrative has only grown into more of a convoluted nightmare of a troubled mind with time. Just a passing remark, you understand; I'm not insinuating anything about your personal tastes. I'm only saying I'm glad I dropped off where I did.
Actually, it's late. I should be going. I apologize for not keeping in touch, I just need to find a better place to do it than here.
TTFN!
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/il he was found dead in his apartment the very next day.
I should probably go run this past the Editor, or something. This is a mess.