Bitches' Parade
Athena was at a "Daughter's Temperance Union Lady's Lunch" when she heard the news, which is to say she was drinking and smoking and gambling with a gaggle of other orphaned Harpies just outside of town. The "Daughter's Temperance Union" put on this social event once a week. In an informal parade they'd all march with card tables and plastic lawnchairs and bottles of wine and dirty streamers and crackling sparklers, wearing outrageous hats and tribal approximations of ladies' high fashion from 1890 to 2077. According to the Temperance Union it was a "Bitches' Parade" and everyone involved was encouraged to sing rude songs together as loud as they could. Once the parade gathered on the "lawn," a bare patch of ground where the earth was packed hard and flat, they set up the tables, chairs, and three poles from which they hung two banners, one declaring "LIPS THAT TOUCH LIQUOR SHALL NOT TOUCH OURS" and the other announcing "WOMEN'S TEMPERANCE UNION- UTAH 1956," under which they gambled on bridge games, smoked cigars, and drank wine.
In truth the entire Daughter's Temperance Union was the brainchild of Sybil Yvana, who along with a few other high-ranking Sybils, scared and unsure why Hecate had not taken steps herself to improve morale among her Daughters, had taken it upon themselves to rectify the problem. In the last month alone three Harpies had taken their own lives, but the goddess had sat on the information without so much as acknowledgment. It was an unprecedented abdication on the goddess's part. Although they were not given expressed permission to work on solutions without her input, the Sibyls who served as priestesses and her closest advisers did so anyway. The only one that hadn't been present at their councils was the high priestess herself, as no one could find her. In response to the growing crisis the Sibyls had formed the Daughter's Temperance Union, an organization within the church whose sole purpose would be maintaining morale. The name was chosen as a joke, based on two banners Sibyl Olaya used for decoration. She found them in what was once the community center of the small Utah town of Cedar City, on the Long 15. Olaya liked to joke that the Women's Temperance Union was an arcane secret society that had been pulling America's strings behind the scenes for centuries, like a women-only Enclave.
Ultimately, the Daughter's Temperance Union was only a temporary stopgap. Though the group sponsored events, taught classes, and provided entertainment, the priestesses of Hecate were still waiting for the goddess's final say. Ideally, Hecate would enact the next stage of her plan (the details of which were only sparingly meted out) and every Daughter would be called upon to deliver her divine vengeance upon the barbarous Legion and their false god Caesar. After almost two decades the goddess's Children were numerous and plenty of them were battle-ready, but the cleansing Hecate promised wasn't coming, and no amount of welding classes, live music performances, and Lady's Luncheons would keep the Daughters busy forever.
In the meantime, though, they seemed to be doing the job. Satisfaction and emotional well-being were anecdotally up, and since the Temperance Union was formed there were no more suicides. Even with their success, though, the priestesses were terrified of Hecate's response to their unauthorized initiative. At best, Hecate might take credit. At worst, the goddess might see it as a threat to her authority and have everyone involved tortured and murdered and erased from history.
Athena liked the camaraderie of the Lady's Lunch. Ever since their confrontation in the Maenad bar, while Julia was in Ouroboros Athena was dedicated to observing her every movement, tracing her and keeping a log, waiting for her to slip up. Perhaps it was so she could expose her, perhaps it was so she'd know when the end was coming and could steal away, like at Dry Wells. Athena didn't really understand her own intentions, but she knew that it was important to keep tabs on the one person she hated and feared above all else. Since the high priestess left with the goddess, though, there wasn't anything to occupy her time and energy. The lewd songs and colorful streamers of the Bitches' Parade was her call to arms, the herald of her rebirth. For weeks after Julia's departure she was anxious and paranoid, constantly anticipating her bane's return, constantly praying for the safe return of her goddess. She worried herself sick, slept little and had painful stomach cramps. When she did sleep, she often had disturbing nightmares. The most commonly recurring nightmare saw her climb to the top of Hecate's temple and open a door into the goddess's private chambers, then pass into the room she could only dream of entering in waking life. In the dream the goddess stands hunched in a corner, facing away from her, but Athena only feels love and warmth when she sees the woman for whom she has given everything. Yet, something is wrong, and she can feel it, and the feeling only grows as Hecate's braids fall away one-by-one, revealing a bare metal scalp with Julia's face, and then Athena would wake up screaming. Ever since that first Lady's Lunch with the Daughter's Temperance Union, the nightmares stopped, and even though she was still anxious, it was bearable so long as she was surrounded by her peers in silly hats, laughing gaily at absolutely nothing at all. And when Sunflower went looking for her, that's where she found her.
"She's back," Sunflower whispered in her ear. Athena did a poor job of disguising her alarm. She'd quietly spread the word to all of her friends that should any of them see the high priestess, she would like to know about it, although she'd been so low-key and casual with her request that Sunflower was taken aback by her apparent distress at its being fulfilled.
"When and where did you see her?" Athena asked quickly and quietly, hand shaking but still clutching her cards as if she still meant to finish the game. She and her partner were betting a jar of perfume against a ball of yarn, rare and expensive commodities in the isolated community.
"I was babysitting and when I woke up she was there. Uh.. a few, a few days ago," Sunflower stammered, uncomfortable and embarrassed for reasons she didn't quite understand, "I couldn't find you until... until now."
"Take my place," Athena ordered as she jumped up and shoved her hand into Sunflower's. She was already on the edge of the Lady's Lunch when Sunflower plopped down in her seat and gloomily mumbled, "I don't know how to play."
"Good!" Soledad made up one-half of the other team, "I really want that perfume."
Athena hurried to the temple, ignoring the few stray Hounds and Daughters loitering around the grounds. Some of them gave her strange looks or cocked their eyebrows at her dress, a ragged facsimile of a pink poodle skirt complete with fuchsia neckerchief (conveniently obscuring her Legion jewelry, the broken slave collar she'd cheerlessly worn for most her life) and tortoise-shell glasses with the lenses poked out. She shuffled into Hecate's pyramid sheepish but determined, and made a beeline straight for the Sibyl command center. The door was locked with a keycard-reader, and she did have a keycard that might get her in (leftover from Project Remus), but she didn't have it on her, and in any case she knew a way in without it. When Remus was at peak data influx there were so many Daughters involved with inputting the collected Legion records that there wasn't enough time to get all their clearances approved, so instead security protocol was overwritten and the reader was just flat-out disabled. Although security protocol should've been reinstated once the furor died down, the Sibyls didn't bother. Athena thought it an enormous oversight, especially for an organization that trafficked so heavily in espionage, but even still she happily profited from it as she merely removed the reader from the wall, disconnected it from the network, and slipped through the doors that eagerly slid open for her.
The control center was an intimidating labyrinth of servers, wires, printers and terminals, powered like the rest of Ouroboros by unknown means and lit mostly by the flickering glow of monitors and vacuum tubes. Most of the temporary stations established for Remus had been disabled, but rather than removed from the room they were instead stacked upon each other and pushed against a far wall, adding to the clutter. In the center sat a miracle of pre-war technology, a living map of the southwest, a three-dimensional model that simulated the weather and politics with colored lights. Territory belonging to the Daughters was bathed in purple, the Legion red. Almost the entire map was bathed in red light. Most of Hecate's faithful were unaware of how sharply her power had declined, or at best had only a sneaking suspicion. If any one of them were to stumble across such an alarming depiction of their goddess's loss of influence as the Sibyls' map, all of Ouroboros would rise together in a call to arms so fervent and afraid that it would be impossible to ignore. As it was, though, Athena herself wasn't interested in maps but people.
Most of whom were at the Lady's Lunch, or otherwise preoccupied, which was fine, as it played right into Athena's hand. She combed the machine alleyways for stray Sibyls still at their stations.
"Oh!" Yvana was startled when she found her, "Are you from the Luncheon?"
Athena realized she was still wearing her ostentatious sun-hat, purple with a whole bouquet of pink paper flowers tucked in the brim. She snatched it off nervously and tucked it behind her back before admitting, "Yes, yeah, I was just there."
"Do I know you? Are you supposed to be in here?" Yvana had her feet up on a server taller than she was when Athena surprised her, picking her teeth with a carpet tack. As was her hobby, she'd been reading up on pre-war American history from the archives. An essay by someone named Samuel Clemens titled "Comments on the Moro Massacre" caught her attention as she was browsing the archives. As Athena came upon her she had just finished up a paragraph reading:
"There, with six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men killed outright, and we had thirty-two wounded—counting that nose and that elbow. The enemy numbered six hundred—including women and children—and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States."
A statement, she noted, that was only true in 1906, when the essay was written. The broader subject of the essay, America's war in the Philippines, was almost completely unknown to her, and in fact the only reason she had access to the essay at all was because high priestess Julia had taken great pains to recover and upload it, seeing as it was censored and banned in America in 1966 by the House Un-American Activities Committee, for portraying the country (and especially Christians, at least as interpreted by the HUAC) in a bad light. Julia herself had only chanced upon the work by accident, while going toe-to-toe with super mutants in the ruins of Brigham Young University. Why BYU had a collection of banned books was lost to the ages, but likely didn't have much to do with the school's administration.
"Well, I've been here... before, uh," Athena gave Yvana a chance to recognize her, or at least realize she had been a part of Remus.
"Oh, that's right! Yeah, you were one of the girls for, uh," Yvana hadn't been directly involved with Julia's brainchild, but she had spent considerable time setting up all the terminals for it, and considerably less time taking them down and pushing them to the side.
"Yeah," for a moment they spoke over each other awkwardly, and then paused in nervous silence.
"So... what are you doing here now?" Yvana backed out of her essay to the history archive's menu, then casually propped her feet back up against the server in an affable gesture. Athena had been very lucky to find the most friendly and open of Hecate's priestesses, but the question still begged an answer.
"Olaya, uh," Athena leaned in and lowered her voice, even though they were almost certainly alone, "She wanted to know if there was, uh, a change. With the, uh, with the... Goddess."
When Yvana's face drained of color, her pupils shrank, and her eyes widened, Athena knew her lie had struck gold. She wasn't totally sure just how the goddess communicated with the Sibyls, but she knew that for more than a month it hadn't been in person.
"What did she tell you?" Yvana sat up in her chair and whispered, as though she didn't know they were completely alone. Sweat was already collecting on her brow. As much as she was scared that Hecate's recent obtuseness might make the gossip mill of Ouroboros, she was just as desperate to share her fear that something was wrong with the goddess, to lean on someone else for emotional support. As much as she loved her sisters in the command room, sometimes she felt she couldn't honestly express her feelings around them.
"Just that you were waiting for a message from Hecate," Athena quietly guessed. Then she added, "Why, is something wrong?"
"No!" Yvana blurted a little too loudly, especially for how close they'd gotten. Athena jumped back in surprise, "No, no, I mean... Well, uh... I mean..."
"No, it's okay. It's not my place, if you don't want to tell me," even as she smiled and said the words she hated herself for it, "I mean, it isn't like I'm important or in charge of anything, or whatever."
"No, no no," Yvana backpedaled as Athena declared "I'm just a messenger" and shrugged her shoulders, "I just- I just don't want to worry you. You know? I don't, ah, I don't want to... cause any alarm..."
Athena mimed zipping her mouth shut and locking it with a key.
"Well," Yvana sighed and ran her fingers through her hair, suddenly exhausted, "It's just... It's been strange, kind of. Recently. I'm not sure how to put it. The way... the way we interact with, uh, with-with the Goddess mostly, um, I mean, generally- we input intelligence gathered by Maenads into the computers, and then She analyzes it and sends orders back to us through the computer."
"It used to be intelligence gathered by Harpies," Athena mumbled sadly, with a small half-smile. Yvana sadly smiled back and nodded her head in solidarity.
"Although, if there was something important, or if we personally wanted to get her input on something, she'd come down and talk to us. It wasn't often, or anything, but..." Hecate was always gregarious and warm on her increasingly-infrequent visits to the command room. Yvana secretly felt that she'd always especially valued her counsel, but when any Sibyl spoke she always patiently and intently listened. Her absence over the past month-and-a-half had been acutely felt, "But we haven't seen her in a long time. And her orders are..." she struggled to find the words, "The orders she sends us through the machine have been... like, repetitive? Do you know what I mean? Like she isn't reading what we're uploading. 'Stay the course,' that's what she keeps saying. It's really starting to freak me out."
Athena feigned confusion and ignorance, despite perfectly anticipating everything Yvana told her. She tilted her head quizzically and tried her best to obscure just how important was the answer to the question, "But there's been no change?... Like... like Olaya asked?"
"No," Yvana glumly reported, "She's still refusing to make any real decisions. Keeping us in a holding pattern."
She absently slid her chair up to the monitor and backed out of the history archives to the root menu, from which she loaded all of Hecate's most recent missives, ignoring the unconcealable expression of pure terror that bloomed, brightly, across Athena's face. As she idly browsed the goddess's pre-programmed automatic messages Athena's head spun. She felt sick, like she was about to faint. She grabbed onto the computer-bank to steady herself as acrid bile surged up her throat and lapped the back of her tongue. She blinked, and rubbed her eyes, and pulled at her dreadlocks, and tried everything she could to wake up, but it wasn't a nightmare, it was real. But if she's back, and the Goddess isn't... It was a thought so terrible, she couldn't finish it, even though it was true and real and there was no denying it. The monster that haunted her, who betrayed her and destroyed her life had done so once again, had once again burned everything that mattered to her to the ground. And for what? Why?
"I think there's a reason," Yvana suddenly spoke and shook Athena from her own dark thoughts, "I've been looking over everything she's told us in the past few weeks, and I think... I think she's waiting for something?"
Athena wanted to scream. She wanted to grab Yvana by the shoulders and shake her and scream, "She's betrayed us! She's killed Her and she'll kill us all!" She wanted to run. She didn't know where, but they had to leave. We have to stop her. We have to do something, she thought. But she couldn't speak. It felt like her entire body was petrified.
"See, the Legion is upping their campaign against the Californians. Just as She predicted it's coming to a head in the Mojave," Yvana carried on, oblivious, "While the main force under Graham targets Hoover, smaller forces are headed to the Cali/Vegas divide on the Long 15 and Hopeville- to cut off the bear's way home- and I think- maybe- she's waiting to see how that'll all play out? I think, maybe... maybe she thinks it'll be the end of Caesar. She's always saying Vegas will be the end of him. I think she's waiting until that comes to pass."
She caught her breath. The argument Yvana was proposing was so appealing, and the alternative so unbearably terrible that she couldn't help but be convinced. And it wasn't so irrational to believe that Hecate was keeping the Daughters on autopilot because she was waiting, in her divine omnipotence, for the perfect moment to strike. The goddess was calculating, and sometimes cold, and it wasn't against her nature to keep her followers in the dark. It's all part of her plan, Athena reassured herself, and she almost believed it.
"That's... Yes. I think you... that sounds absolutely right. Absolutely," she declared lamely. Yvana allowed herself a real smile in relief. Confronting her fears about the goddess had yielded more positive results than she expected. She felt refreshed, and confident, "Hey, I'm keeping you from the Luncheon. You should head back and tell Olaya no change."
"Yes. Yeah. Thank you. I will. I will do that. Thanks," still in shock, Athena spun on her heel and made her way back through the labyrinth. At the door she re-connected the keycard-reader, and the door slammed shut. Yvana went back to her historical essays, wrapped in the darkness of Hecate's command center.
Rather than rejoin the Lady's Luncheon, Athena walked in a daze back to her living space, outrageous hat clutched blindly in her fingers. So long as she didn't think about anything, she couldn't poke holes in Yvana's theory, or contemplate the likelihood that Julia had secretly murdered the goddess out in the wastes. Back in her shared apartment she was alone. She pulled her notebook out of the desk door she'd claimed, and without really looking at the words wrote Returns, one and ½ months later, then after a pause added without Goddess.