A girl stands in her bedroom on her 26th birthday. It's a small room, really just a cell with a bedtub in it crammed in behind the control room of her research station. The walls are bare granite, but she's livened it up with colourful handicrafts made from shells and bones. As she waits for the mail-centipede to arrive, her fingers twiddle with her long grey beard. The beard twiddles back.
The beard isn't a beard, or course: it's her tentacles, dyed grey with ash in imitation of the mysterious face-plumage of the Learned Wizards, figures from a scripture older than the Universe. And she's been alive a lot longer than 26 planetary orbits. Like any madrigog, she spent untold orbits mindlessly swimming in the darkness beneath the ice. Hunting, growing, spawning, living the life of a simple animal until one day she felt the urge to flop limply out of the water. 26 orbits ago today, her desiccated carcass split open to release a new form with legs, lungs, and a brand-new brain much larger than a walnut. The stage beyond adulthood: a Madrigog Guardian. Biologically speaking, Guardians are a bit beyond the whole boy-and-girl thing, but they inherited the idea from a long-dead alien culture. Newborn Urdra listened to the arbitrary lists of official Girl Characteristics and Boy Characteristics and she picked Girl, so she is Girl now.
Her name is Urdra and she likes to talk about zoology. A lot. She rarely gets the chance, what with living on an isolated crag sticking up out of an endless ice-sheet. She gets nervous around people, and that makes her talk about zoology even more. Urdra is an outdoorsy kind of girl. No flowing violet robes for her – she has sensible shoes and a comfortable dove-grey adventure-suit with pockets on the pockets. The only decoration is a tiny three-eyed skull, gold-plated and worn as a brooch.
An almost-audible voice in her head tells her to scream like a donkey-crab and do something unhygienic to her bedtub. She knows this is the voice of an Exile from the future, a sign that she's fated to enter the game she's been hoping to play. Or it could be hallucinations. Prophecy, psychosis: it's always a close-run thing for madrigogs. Still, her culture has an advantage in the game to come. They've been bred for this. They've got the cheat sheets. And their actual objective isn't to win the game.
Urdra ignores the voice, and heads over to the control room instead. Shifting holographic displays track the populations of various creatures: predators, prey and competitors of her mindless relatives in the deep. Beyond, the window shows a vista across the cracked sheets of sea ice that cover most of this huge moon. A bloated gas giant planet hangs eternally above the horizon, banded in swirling clouds of purple and green. The twin red dots of the suns glare maliciously over its shoulder. Welcome to Khthonn. Don't get too comfortable.
She sees an alert on Festerchum.
-anchoressUnbound [AU] began festering unrulyCreature [UC]-
AU: Happy birthday UC! Did you get my present?
UC: No, the mail is running really late. Should've come yesterday.
AU: So you didn't get the game discs either. Ugh. Listen you need to get out there and catch that centipede. But maybe wait 'til after the shockwave.
UC: Shockwave?
AU: Yeah, GU is going in.
UC: That's nice. He can livestream a tour of his mansion while we shiver in our respective cells.
AU: No, I mean into the game!
Strange lights are erupting all across the sky. Glowing orange dots, streaks of green fire, scarlet bursts like rockets going off but in complete silence.
UC: Are you seeing this? In the sky?
AU: Just the asteroid defences, no biggie.
The entire research station shakes suddenly, hard enough to knock down Udra's decorations. There's an aftershock a few seconds later.
UC: What was that?!
AU: Meteorite. Direct hit on GU's house.
UC: They let it through?!
AU: Yep, that's the plan. They'll let through one meteorite for each of us players, and (hopefully, she said) block all the rest.
UC: WHAT?!
AU: Oh boy. You didn't read the game notes, did you.
UC: I read the important bits. I know all about Consorts and Carapacians and Denizens and frog genetics –
AU: Get those discs. Now. And read chapter 1 of the gameFAQ. I can't believe this! We were supposed to get right in and kick butt, not mess around fighting monster-aunts or whatnot.
UC: sorry
AU: sigh Could be worse. UG isn't even in the right UNIVERSE.
-anchoressUnbound stopped festering unrulyCreature-
(All this was written in the Broodfester Tongue of the Madrigogs, but to preserve the sanity of your feeble non-madrigog minds we have taken the liberty of translating it. You're welcome.)
Urdra sighs and starts pulling on her ice-boots. She does a quick pat-down of her many pockets, and checks the contents of her Fractal Reticule sylladex. No further action needed – Urdra regularly goes out on the ice searching for dangerous creatures, so she's well prepared. On the prompting of the little voice in her head, she switches her Strife Specibus from "TranqGunkind" to "FlareGunkind." Time to go.
