The commercial shouldn’t have aired for another couple of weeks yet, Yuriko thought. But the odd thing was that the next day, Sunsday, as she browsed things on the Network, the ad popped out. She blinked at it in surprise. It was the racier version where she barely had anything on and the lightly tinted Mira-hi splashed across her face and bosom.
“Miracle Hydration. For those hot and sizzling days.”
Hearing her own voice coming out of the speakers was odd. There was something missing that made it sound not quite like her. She tilted her head and thought about it until she figured it out by reviewing some of the scientific knowledge she absorbed from reading.
It sounded different because she wasn’t hearing her voice from within her body in tandem with what she could hear coming from outside. Weird.
Beyond that, she was somewhat surprised at the camera close-ups the commercial showed. While she said the line, the camera focused on the droplets of Mira-hi rolling down the inside curve of her bosom and her flat tummy. It was quite the sensual display and she could already feel the pinpricks of connecting threads.
Unfortunately, while she knew how much Quintessence was needed to compress into Ambrosia, she didn’t know how much was produced by a single thread and at what intervals. It seemed random to her, but in the past week, she hadn’t generated enough to create a single drop of Ambrosia.
Scrolling past the ad, and a little bit curious, she followed the links that popped out in the comment section and found pictures of her while she was sunbathing on the beach. Someone had caught her while she was asleep and had one arm over her head while the other was over her navel.
The site was called Loookit, and the page was filled with stolen photos of her. There were hundreds of comments, and when she read some of it, she pursed her lips. They know her name, or at least, Lilibeth’s. A lot of the comments were of admiration of her, but most were some variation of thirst, lewd, or just plain degrading. Not in the sense that they were criticising her looks or anything like that, but more that they were objectifying her body and expressing the desire to have their way with her. All things she somewhat expected going into show business, but some points just seemed bizarre to her.
There were more than a few expressing a desire to rub their genitals on her feet. Others exclaimed a desire to nuzzle and lick her armpits. Some wanted her to pee on them, among other debaucheries.
She checked if her address of contact details had been exposed, and thankfully they had not been. She also saw photos of her face tacked on to naked bodies, but the stark difference in their physiques meant that the fakes were too easy to notice. In fact, many of the anonymous people from Loookit who had been spouting their lusts at her image complained that the fakes were too, well, fake. Images of Yuriko’s body were available, even if she had a bikini on. It was easy to compare and contrast.
‘I guess they hadn’t found anyone with a figure like mine,’ Yuriko thought with a chuckle. The more pertinent thing was that the page on Loookit increased the rate at which the threads formed, and when she took some time to examine it, those threads produced Quintessence at a faster rate, too.
It was an interesting observation, which also meant that if she wanted to accomplish her goals, she could either double down on the exposure or simply leave it be. In the weeks she lived in Astoria, she had discovered pornography, and it suddenly occurred to her that if she made such things, the connections would probably increase exponentially. But it would also taint her reputation, and the thought of others enjoying the sight of her carnal experiences through the separation of a screen made her feel a tiny bit uncomfortable. Some part of her also wanted to feel it, but the more logical side said that once she did that, especially in this world that had incredible means of sharing information, she couldn’t take it back. Perhaps if she took another form?
But she could quite manipulate her incarnation body as easily as her true body, so that wouldn’t work very well. More to the point, she could always do that later.
The day after the exam week was the turn of the Season. For Yuriko-Lilibeth, nothing of too great a note happened, other than the commercial airing earlier than she expected. For her true body, things finally started happening.
Ten days stuck inside the compound doing nothing but training annoyed Yuriko. That was because the training didn’t consist of physical or meditation. No, they had to review several thousand-page manuals about a ship called the Darlington Cross which they would be taking once they crossed the portal. Many things had been hinted at, but Yuriko figured it wouldn’t be much different from sailing across the Chaos Sea. The environment outside was hostile, though probably not deadly for her and her companions. Undoubtedly, it would be deadly for the baseline humans, or even those who had ‘Chronian Gear installed in their bodies. And probably they wouldn’t die just from a brief exposure but prolonged was the danger zone.
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Nothing else explained the care and meticulousness they had for making sure that everyone knew what to do to operate and maintain the Darlington Cross. The Voidship, as they called it, was nearly a hundred and fifty paces long, forty paces wide, and fifteen paces deep. From the illustrations, it looked like a spike, but it also had wings near the aft, not for aeronautical lift, but to hold and contain weapons, ammunition, and escape pods. Manoeuverability too, considering it had thruster jets that shot out plasma. Or what she assumed was plasma, anyway. She had no idea what powered the ship, but the source was at the aft, within the most armoured area.
Aside from the fifty two of them, two sponsors included, the ship would be crewed by a staff of twenty, and reinforced by another set of troops employed directly by Milstate.
So she and the other mercenaries were swarmfodder then. Not unexpected, but disappointing, really. It wasn’t stated directly, but why else hire a bunch of untrained help? Either way, she had no reason to rely on that, and part of the contract allowed the mercenaries to capture enemy ships as Prizes. Well, if given the chance, she would certainly aim for that.
On the dawn of the 1st Day of Fire, Stormdriven and Gold Flock left the compound. They were transported in a set of armoured personnel carriers, inside the hold with no windows. The APCs travelled for more than an hour and while Yuriko could have forced her perception to go past the hull, it was made of a mixture of Ossifrum, steel, and something else that energized the alloy, making it harder to perceive through it. Ossifrum attached to even rudimentary Anima was hard to grasp and perceive, but her Anima could interact with the bone-metal easily otherwise. Perhaps the fact that they could empower Ossifrum like this shouldn’t have surprised her, but she constantly found herself underestimating the ingenuity of technology-based civilisations. She should know better by now.
The trip to wherever they were supposed to go was boring, so she indulged herself in reminiscing about the past ten days. She fought a smirk from surfacing when she glanced at Heron. He felt her amusement and in turn, she felt his embarrassment. She had teased him several times and experimented with different positions she learned watching porn in Astoria. She liked some, didn’t like others, but all were quite the experience that both of her lovers enjoyed. She also found out how weak Heron was to being edged and watching him beg was a delight all on its own.
On a more serious note, the branch leader of Dragon Fall City’s Conclave of Authority had contacted Heron, pleading with her lover to help him look for and face together the rogue Ancient that assaulted a member of the branch.
Yuriko wasn’t sure if she should be relieved that the man had thought her action against Armando Malta had been taken as a rival’s attack. The man had his fingers on many pies apparently, and the branch in Chimeric Fields City had not been on good terms with Malta. Emmanuel Silva assumed that a hit had been ordered from abroad and conducted here so that the repercussions would fall on him.
Yuriko asked Gwendith if she minded not dealing with Raphael Erser, the Ancient she bowled over in her quest for vengeance, herself.
Gwendith had shrugged and said, “It’s not as if we won’t return here. We Ancient’s don’t age, right, so eventually, we’ll encounter him again. I’ll deal with him then.”
“How cool-headed of you,” Yuriko said with a smirk.
“My Ennoia is about temperature,” Gwendith answered with a smirk, “and you bet that sometimes, taking revenge when it's convenient is better.” She froze for a moment, her eyes glazed and staring at something far away. Yuriko stroked Gwendith’s arm, and her lover jolted back to the present.
The two of them exchanged tremulous smiles, and that night was spent in gentle lovemaking and cuddling.
For all that, Yuriko was somewhat excited to finally leave Dragon Fall City. The food was just terrible, although the last ten days had seen better fare. Something to applaud Milstate for. She was sure to return anyway since the Gate Consortium Tower was the only way she knew how to return to Bresia, where she had unfinished business.
There was that, after all.
She felt a strange and persistent connection that led towards that area. Muffled by the many different phenomena in between. Fifty thousand leagues was a great distance after all, even if such connections often went through the ever-present Realm of Thought. Huh, perhaps that was the way to travel greater distances easily, through the sub-realms of reality. If only she knew how to actually get there with her body…oh, wait, it was simple. Just use Fri’Avgi to cut a hole in reality. But the problem was in dealing with the repercussions and in actually navigating that realm. She could use her tethers to Heron and Gwendith to find her way back, but she had no such tethers to Rumiga.
After another hour, she felt it. She assumed they would have been driven to the site of the portal. She didn’t expect the APCs to drive through the portal themselves. The APC she was on carried a dozen people, and aside from her companions, nobody else noticed the change.
There was a moment of vertigo, but the clearest sign that they weren’t in Dragon Fall City was when she instinctively hooked herself to the fabric of reality. The resistance wasn’t gone, but it was at half the strength it had been. She unlatched herself before the APC’s inertia could drag her off her seat.
A few minutes later, the APC stopped and the door opened. Without being prompted, she and the rest of her companions climbed out.
The area’s gravity was a quarter of Dragon Fall’s. She could see many uniformed personnel jumping to cross distances quickly. They were in a hangar, she thought. There were metal grey walls and ceiling, and the sound echoed oddly across the space. At the far end, roughly a hundred paces away, the wall was made of something transparent. She was sure it wasn’t glass, but perhaps an alloy containing it? It felt as hard as metal, with circuitry embedded within.
It was the sight beyond it that arrested her attention. The Darlington Cross was there, looking identical to the holographic model they’d been studying over the past week.
But beyond it was an endless sea of black, without even a speck of light, as far as the eye could see.