The nurse on the left finished injecting Ruvle’s shoulder with a glowing syringe the size of her calf, while the nurse on her right finished bandaging up her perforated arm. “That should finish it!” the left nurse said, tilting his head up in approval, his circular head mirror catching the light of the clinic. His medical apron only had a little of her blood on it, already being rendered sterile by shiny copper thread.
“...Thanks,” Ruvle said, smiling weakly. She was always impressed by how quickly a simple flesh wound or bleeding could be fixed; the injections available from M.A.D. technology had come a long way. Her broken ribs and snapped ulna from the fall onto hard concrete were a little harder, but that was why this had taken a few hours instead of a few minutes. “Any chance you can do anything about my eye?”
“There are prosthetic options available,” the left nurse said, in a tone of someone prepared to manage another’s emotions.
“Then, no thank you. Is Chain okay? He’s the person I came with—”
“Yo, Ruvle!” Chain slid across the linoleum tiles, down the row of medical beds, similarly patched-up—several wrappings of white bandages around his head like a headband, another set around his left leg, and a disposable patient’s apron wadded up in his hand. “Let’s go, I think we’ve got ‘em this time.”
Ruvle balked, staring for a few seconds while the left nurse commented. “You should think through any activities where this can happen to you.”
“Yeah, except, I won’t and it’s on purpose. Come on.”
Ruvle smiled. “I can try again. I need to get my fez back…”
“Nope!”
Chain tossed a bundle of black cloth at her. In a blink, she bent down and bobbed back up, catching the fez on her head; the tassel swirled around to a stop with her standing back upright.
“Cool,” Chain said, with a snap of his fingers. He gestured for her to follow.
It didn’t go so well the second time, either. The wind blew diagonally that night and Chain shifted his weight in the air mid-paraglide, banking in an arc towards the spire, with some help from Ruvle standing on the inner edge of the scarf’s turn—but even with her expecting spiked bodyslams and thinking ahead to how to dodge them, no amount of dexterity was enough to dodge literal laser beams. Getting a burn hole in her leg had a way of preventing her from sticking landings back onto the parachute, and then there was no one but Chain to be shot down, a feat she could observe from far below as she fell, his body silhouetted against the moon with the swarm of robots converging.
The third attempt was little better. Bandaged on all four limbs and around her left side, Ruvle brought a staff—a common long wooden dowel, from a craft store, as long as she was tall, and Chain brought with him a deflector: a large circular plastic lid, built for a children’s sandbox, sprayed with silver paint to as to reflect the laser beams. Success was marginal. Ruvle struck the swarm, insect after insect, with the fast sweeping end of her staff, and Chain could raise his legs with his feet hooked into the underside of the deflector in order to handle one laser shot at a time. But the spraypaint was only good enough to keep the shield from being penetrated, only burned-black where the lasers struck, and by the time they made it to the vault door—
“How do you plan on stopping!?” Ruvle shouted down to Chain, over the whirling wind and the buzzing of the swarm about them; she lunged to jab a drone with the end of her dowel.
“The wind wasn’t this fast the first time! I thought we could just step on—”
Ruvle tossed her dowel aside and leapt onto the upper lip of the oncoming vault door, this time accounting for the springiness of the parachute. The vault door only protruded enough from the spire masonry to balance her heels on, but she lay flat against the wall as best she could. To his credit, Chain flattened spreadeagle against the vault door instead of hitting his head, and could grab the lip of the door to avoid falling...but they were both trivial targets from there. The laser fire closed in.
They didn’t try a fourth time.
The next day, Ruvle worked at her office, her left arm in a sling. Her skin had grown puffy and red from all of the medical injections. She scribbled away on someone’s electrician certification with her right hand, consoling herself with the idea that writing with her non-dominant hand sort of counted as training, even though that was sub-trivial for Coarse hyperdexterity. Around her, the office was as alive as ever, ordinary citizens about—a trio of gender-ambiguous people were hanging around the gaming console today, in the subcultural style of dress Ruvle recognized as ‘ultimates’—cargo dresses, copper-plated crowns of beautiful triangles-within-triangles, boots splattered with a rainbow of painted colors. People that answered the question of ‘masculine or feminine?’ with ‘both and neither and piss off, too’. It reminded Ruvle of when she dressed like that as a rebellious teenager.
She’d rather reminisce on those days than think of current failures.
“Would you like to complete this with other members of your family?” Ruvle asked, putting on her usual smile for the unrelated pair at her desk, dealing with, supposedly, inheritance paperwork for tax reasons. “Settling what they’ll receive in writing will prevent any further disputes.”
The woman before her crossed her arms over Ruvle’s desk, her arms unsettlingly lean and narrow, elbows sharp, her body shrouded in a black cloak, gilded with Dye trim that must have cost a year’s income in vouchers and yet could plausibly look like just a well-off person’s status symbol. The scent of acid and machine oil stained air; the sounds of clinks and clockwork gear-grinding emanated clearly, quietly, from her. “Mmmmmm. No, no. We’re very settled.”
And the man next to her, a burly, hairy wall of muscle and fat, shivered while fidgeting with his full red beard. Everyone in the room gave the pair as much personal space as the walls permitted. None of them cared about the shivering man with the injection scars.
“Very well!” And with a few flicks of her pen to form her perfect signature, Ruvle filed away the Inheritance form. “Enjoy your estate!” They took their inheritance from someone anonymous, of course, and Ruvle saw no family resemblance between the two. There were legitimate reasons to declare inheritance from someone undisclosed, so the form allowed that option, but in practice, no one used it for anything but a successful raid.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
The kind of thing that Ruvle was nowhere close to accomplishing. On the most vulnerable target Chain could find.
“YEAH, YEAH BIG TIME YEAH,” the man shouted, loud enough to turn heads and swing the tassel on Ruvle’s fez. She kept her smile. The contrast reminded Ruvle of...the usual paths to power, and the ones out of favor. Major and minor. The yelling man had probably absorbed plenty of Dye, enough that he could start surviving those strange, maddening drug formulas that even the most enthusiastic chemists decided were not to be replicated and only persisted due to black/grey market synthesizers, the ‘throw buildings’ kind of strength boosters that would normally kill a person with one dose. This man would not make it another year without more and more Dye. But the woman was a clear dilettante of the big three—Consolidation, which Ruvle could pick out from those exaggerated sharp angles, M.A.D. technology, likely an apparatus under her cloak, and the most potent of all...simple wealth. It was Ruvle’s job as a notary to confirm a signator’s identity before they signed, and she had no doubt: this was a true citizen being halfway-subtle, collecting an ego boost by officiating her spoils in-person. Fygra, according to the signature. When you had money, you could buy jets, atomically-powered machines, entire labs, armies of freelancers. And, more directly, Dye to be absorbed. Money was power.
Being a notary public, the best of the lessers, was probably the only reason this woman permitted a conversation instead of a series of one-way commands.
“Marvelous.” The woman beckoned to her...likely fellow raider with one finger. “Come.”
“If I could ask you for your advice...” Ruvle interjected, her face turning soft.
“Oh?” the woman slid her hand back across the desk, a ring on her finger scoring the wood. She should absolutely not ask for time from someone so her superior, and the frown under that hood’s shadow reflected it, but she had to know.
“How did you do it?” she asked, quietly. “I know it was a raid. I’ve seen this before.”
The woman drummed her fingers on the desk. “Oh. Dear, you want advice on climbing the ladder of power?”
Ruvle nodded.
“Leave it to those who already have it.” Her matronly chuckle was barely audible, yet filled Ruvle’s ears more than the muscle-man’s bellow. “Can you imagine the chaos that society would be in if just anyone could compete?”
She knew better than to call that out as nonsense.
“The first rung is ten thousand feet high for a reason, dear. Let the people society is designed for play the game. The rest of you know your place already. Make clothing, machine parts, crystals, whatever it is you do for all the—” she waved a hand dismissively. “—details to work out. It’s much better for your mind to lose the aspirations.”
Ruvle clenched and unclenched her hand inside her sling.
“Good fortune to you in getting your...disability, fixed,” the woman said, with a gesture to Ruvle’s destroyed eye, that she wouldn’t be able to get revenge for unless she got enough power to challenge those fucking true cits and—
Stay calm. Willpower and self-control were the same. Her face betrayed as little of her feelings as the immobile wax covering her eye socket, because she desired it not to. “Same to you in defeating your rivals!” Ruvle chirped.
“YEAAAAH!” The large man whooped.
They left, and with the line very temporarily empty, Ruvle ducked away from the desk and into the inventory room. She pounded her fist into the wall and sniffled, a tear falling from her good eye.
In the evening, just past closing, Ruvle lay in the middle of the office, across the couch still cooling from the body heat of those who had left it. Her fez lay on its side on the floor, rocking left and right with each brush of Ruvle’s foot against it as she swung one leg. She shone the light from her pen onto the ceiling, conferring with Chain on the textwork.
‘Mielo ~ Have you found any easier glints to go after?’ she asked.
‘Chain Hydrapress ~ Nah, Othek is the only new money and dumb money like this,’ he answered.
‘~ Then keep looking.’
‘~ I think we just gotta train,’ Chain wrote back. ‘The mirror idea almost worked. I know a way to use my scarf as a weapon, hammer-whip, but I don’t know how to fit two sequences of tislets on there. What I have now are formulas for hang glider and acid immunity, but they’re super long. I could do more puzzles and pick apart the formulas I’m using until I can crunch them down.’
‘~ And if you make them shorter, you can fit more of them on your scarf.’
‘~ You got it. I want to fit this mirror coating formula for better laser deflection on there and hammer-whip. I have no clue how you get four different physia like that in just 5888 tislets, but it’s obviously possible, since people who know what they’re doing can figure it out.’
She let his message lie and just stared at the ceiling some more. Ruvle itched the seams where the trails of red wax fused with the skin on her face.
Chain eventually wrote again, as she started to nod off. ‘~ You only signed that paper for me going after Othek. I didn’t think you’d want to stick with me if I changed course.’
‘~ I’ve changed my mind,’ Ruvle answered. ‘I want to be able to take down any true citizen I want, not just the one that ruined my eye. If I have to beat every one of them, until they’re so terrified of me that no one tries to hurt me ever again, I will. I want THEM to be on the wrong side of a gulf of power they can’t ever cross for once. I want not even Thoughtless to be enough to touch me.’
She wiped the dried tears from her face onto her shoulder while writing with her only good arm. ‘~ I’m going to train nonstop between work and sleep. Get back to me when you’ve learned how to work the tislets.’
‘~ You scare me when you get worked up. But an enjoyable horror story kind of scared,’ Chain wrote to her.
‘~ I’m willing to be mean when most people aren’t,’ she told him.
‘~ You’re angry and determined, not mean,’ Chain told her. ’Try not to twist your fucked up arm too much!’
Ruvle snorted and clicked off her pen. But she WAS mean! Ruvle pouted at the ceiling, trying to think of what evil options she hadn’t considered for more effective training, but in her drowsiness, dreams came to her before an idea did.