10:27 PM | Last Respite, Thyellikos | September 30th | 1608 COVENANT

Instincts. That was what had made people call her a genius, once; probably most the world named so, she assumed. In many regards she doubted she was even that smart. Her memory was middling, her interpersonal intelligence was blatantly subterranean, and when she actually made a conscious effort to consider problems rationally, the result was rigid and frequently disappointing. These qualities, which people tended to think of as the aspects of cognition that separated men from beasts, were ironically not that important. Possessing them in excess could make someone exceptional, but only as a perfectly-crafted, frictionless gear for the machine of the world.

'Genius' was baser than this. It was animal-- No, insectile. She saw things - shapes, numbers, concepts - and just knew, by the power of some overtuned function in the ancient part of her brain. The composition, the invisible threads that connected that which cohered and that which didn't. And when she saw them, reality narrowed to a single line, one strung along only her and that which she perceived. It was closer, she believed, to what someone like Gudrun did than the academics with whom she'd spent the majority of her life.

The thread extended between her and the man behind her as she turned her head sharply. His appearance was forgettable, almost to the point of being conspicuous. Handsome but average features, dark brown hair, tan skin, heavy brown coat over a black tunic. The only thing that came close to standing out was that he wore a leather cap. She could have seen him every day and never remembered.

Her first thoughts were not of who he was or how he knew, but more practically-minded. He was taller than her, but not especially bulky, and more importantly was unarmed. The bar, especially at this side, was almost completely empty by now. For a moment she envisioned a ridiculous scenario where she grabbed his coat with one hand and pulled him towards her, smothered him against her stomach before he had a chance to react, then used the other hand to quickly break his resistances. After that, she'd be spoiled for choice in terms of arcana capable of killing someone in complete silence, but the cleanest would be the Matter-Annihilating Arcana. One minute he's here, the next he's not. No one would even notice until the Censors did their next sweep with the Anomaly-Divining Arcana at dawn, at which point she could be long gone.

She didn't have a scepter, but she carried a few vials of eris in case of an emergency, which ought to be enough. Her hand was already clasping them without even having made the decision. Her eye darted to confirm there was no one looking in their direction in this particular moment, and for an instant she felt absolute confidence that she could make it happen; a sequence in predetermined, mathematical grace, over in less than 10 seconds.

But of course doing such a thing would be the height of stupidity. The whole thing was predicated on the flimsy idea of 'before he had a chance to react', when she had no knowledge of this man. And besides, what if he wasn't working alone? The building could already be surrounded, the gate back to the Diakos sealed. What then?

She stared at him, unblinking. Still. The rest of the room faded away.

"You needn't be worried," the man spoke, with a formal manner but a frustratingly friendly tone. "I am not your enemy. I have no intention of reporting your presence here to the police or the Censors."

"What do you want?" She asked quickly. Instinct, too, guided her lips; the words, emotionless, left her mouth a little louder than she meant them to, like when she was young.

"Only to deliver a message from my patron," he said, reaching into the coat. He produced a small papyrus envelope, dyed black. "I've been told only to inform you that it is not a threat or demand. Please feel free to review it in your own time."

"Who is your patron?"

"I'm afraid I can't divulge that, though there may be information contained in the letter," he explained. "Though I assure you they have no association to any governmental authority."

"Who are you?"

"My name is John of Tel-Girtua," he answered. "I'm no one of note."

The two stared at one another. After about a few moments passed in which she failed to take the envelope but also didn't ask any further questions, he reached to her side and left it on the counter of the bar.

"My job is done," he said. "If you'll excuse me."

He turned in the direction of the front door. The bartender wasn't looking - she could still kill him, now almost effortlessly. Shred his resistances, cast just as he reached the door, gone. A ghost. She did not do this.

He opened the door and left. She stared. She did not emotionally or rationally process the situation until he was long gone.

𒊹

"Will you look for another team?"

"Nah, don't think so. I've saved up enough that I'm close to affording a shitty class 1 buy-in for one of the new Freeholds springing up on the Atelikos. Might just try to scrape the rest together doing private security out here."

"I see. I can't-- I can't picture you in a domestic life like that, honestly."

"Eh, I dunno how long I'll stick with it. But I'm gonna lose my fire sooner or later! That's how it goes. Might as well get things in order now that this fuckup has soured me for a bit."

"Right. Yeah, I understand."

"What'll you do, Lamu, eh? Now that you've got firsthand experience with the mortality rate of this bullshit."

"I don't know, really. I'll have to think about it."

"Hahah! I bet you'll be back at it in a couple months. You've still got the thirst for blood now. I can see it in your eyes!"

­Lamu of Harsadaar, aka Lilith of Eshkalon, spent the last half hour of conversation in a different sort of autopilot state, one where her brain wasn't really involved at all-- Though fortunately Gudrun was too drunk at this stage to notice. After that, she left the bar and, as she walked home through the wide and dusty streets, finally had time to properly panic. For her, this manifested as her mind and body feeling like it was going rigid as a corpse.

How did they know? How the fuck did they know?

She'd been so careful. Tracks meticulously covered, records overwhelmingly wiped through bribes and blackmail and outright bridge attacks. Her face wasn't famous, and even still she'd changed her hair and barely taken off her veil in public for the past 10 years. She'd learned the incantations to travel here herself, so there wasn't even a record of her arrival, just a name circumspectly slipped into the books! Who had they talked to? What had they found?

The man had said it wasn't a threat or demand, but that was a meaningless platitude. Even if it was true, she wouldn't be able to stay here; the information was out in the open in ways she could never be fully aware of. Unless she was willing to place her life in the hand of fate, she'd have to shed everything she'd built here; name, reputation, even the money she'd just brought in from their mission. The money that she'd--

Ugh. What a waste.

She cursed the futility of it all. The sense of being driven further into a corner. But of course all this was the lesser of the two bad outcomes, the worse being that it wasn't true. And the noose was already on her neck.

She hurried across town (a swift process, there wasn't much town) and arrived at her apartment building, a nondescript, four story structure of red brick, like everything else here. She climbed to the mid-point, where the tiny room/bathroom combo she rented was located, and opened the door. The place was a mess, a fortress of canvasses and rolls of parchment, plus a half-disemboweled logic engine she'd been working on, though this didn't particularly bother her as there was an order to the madness, and besides which she'd never had guests. It was one of the few advantages of living like this; she didn't have to pretend to be ordinary in her personal space.

She sat down at her desk, half-covered with a sketch of a centipede-warthog creature she'd seen a few weeks ago, and opened the envelope. Despite what the man had suggested, the contents were extremely unhelpful, largely repeating the same things he'd already told her: That they knew about her identity and situation but hadn't told anyone, that this was not a threat (which began to feel like a case of protesting too much), and that they wished only to have a friendly, stakes-free discussion that could be to 'Lilith's benefit'. It concluded with an address on the other side of Last Respite, where most of the researchers and other relatively respectable personages lived, and an invitation to visit at any time during the following week between noon and 4PM.

She attempted to consider the situation rationally. While it was understandable why they'd have opted for in-person contact rather than the logic sea - nowadays surveilled so closely you might as well have screamed what you were doing from a rooftop - there was no obvious reason to have sent someone to deliver the message in person rather than, say, slide it under her door. It was a display of power. 'We don't just know where you live, we have eyes on you. We know what you're doing at all times.'

That had two implications they probably wanted to project. The first, clearly, was that they meant business. The second was that they were well-resourced. This wasn't just a couple of people acting alone to extort her, or something, but some manner of influential organization. 'Take us seriously. We can help you.'

If there was one thing that she had grown to despise above all else, it was having her fate taken out of her own hands by ostensibly benevolent interests. Being made dependent.

Even so, they had her. She would have to go because, at this stage, there was no rational reason to avoid it.

And so the next day, after sleeping for nine hours (even when she was stressed she never had trouble sleeping; thinking of nothing came naturally to her) she went, after spending the morning packing and making other preparations in case she needed to make a quick escape. The town's sole tram line took her past the bustling delver's market to the silver-grey Magonaut's office - the only building in the town large enough to class as any sort of landmark - and the rest she walked, watching the architecture slowly shift from bulky-and-utilitarian to still­-bulky-and-utilitarian-but-sometimes-painted. She couldn't stop her gaze from darting around in response to any suspicious movement on the way, almost physically feeling the eyes that had to be on her.

Finally, she came to the address, almost at the exact opposite end of the landmass to the Drop. It was a newly-built white residential property with a slanted roof, one of that type that was erected on little stilts rather than being attached to the ground. Several other, identical properties sat in a row, most of which had prominent 'SALE' writs hammered to the door frames. Even though Last Respite had seemed like a stagnant and unmoving place compared to the world above, it seemed even it was expanding at the corners.

How long before even this place became state territory or another Freehold? How long until there was nowhere one could go to escape the order of the world whatsoever?

Lamu knocked on the door. A woman answered a few moments later, and she... frowned.

It was said that you couldn't judge a book by its cover. On account of her unusual way of perceiving the world, she'd always considered this adage to be, in practice if not in substance, bullshit. You could tell an incredible amount about a book, or in this case a person, by outward appearance. Taste and personality were easily indicated by fashion and makeup, yes, but even with modern medical technology, a great deal of a person could be written in the flesh and blood of their face. Were they happy? Self-conscious? Was their life easy or hard? It wasn't everything - obviously, considering how often she misjudged others - but it was far from nothing.

This woman, though, sent confusing signals. She was Saoic - short and small framed, with large, slightly upturned deep blue eyes - and at first glance looked as young as anyone else under 500 did in the modern era. But on the other hand, her lower face had, proportionally, a quality to it that something in her mind took objection to-- As though her jaw, petite and recessive, had been shattered and reconstructed imperfectly. Yet there were no scars, and it was otherwise symmetrical. Her front teeth and the tip of her nose were prominent, and she wore fashion that was a mix of modern and outdated. A white stola, a light blue cardigan, hard leather sandals that looked strangely cheap in a way that contrasted with the rest of her appearance. Her hair, just past shoulder length, was grey.

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Many of these signs pointed to her being very old but wealthy enough not to show it; the jaw was always the biggest giveaway for that sort of thing, so maybe she'd had cosmetic surgery. But something in her eyes caused Lamu to second guess this impression. Her gaze was bright and striking in a way you rarely saw in people over 100 or even 50, still filled with a fire that was at once excited and hungry. And though she didn't move much, the mannerisms she did came across as constantly improvisational. Animated.

"Good afternoon!" The strange woman said. "Wow, I send you a note with a whole week-long time window, and you come the first chance you can get. You're an eager one, huh?"

"I--" Lamu was thrown off for a moment by her attitude, then scowled and spoke in a hushed tone. "I just wanted to get this over with."

The woman nodded a few times. "Of course, of course. I completely understand." She glanced behind her. "Would you care to come in?"

Lamu frowned. She'd been expecting a group of serious people in formal dress - probably some underworld organization taking advantage of her circumstances to buy her knowledge and skill set for cheap along with a side of extortion - not... whatever this was. A single woman who came across more like a young housewife than anything else.

Said woman stepped back, making an inviting gesture, and Lamu followed despite the growing sense that this was going to be more than she bargained for. The interior of the house, while well-decorated by the standards of Last Respite, was obviously pre-furnished rather than actually lived in. Eyerollingly-predictably cozy wood and cotton furniture sat spaced apart with mathematical precision, all colored in pastel and earth tones. She was led through the central hall to a combination living room and kitchen that seemed to lie directly below the slanted part of the roof, which she then noticed as mostly glass. The plane's unending heavenly storm raged overhead, supplementing the gaslight with occasional bursts of strange color.

Lamu stared at it for a moment, though mostly just because it had been a long time since she'd seen a glass roof. They'd gone out of fashion over a century ago.

"Please, have a seat!" the woman intoned, gesturing towards one of three cloth sofas facing one another in the room's center. She kept walking, heading for the kitchen component. "Would you like any tea?"

"I'm not here for friendly socializing," Lamu said bluntly.

"Oh, I wouldn't be so conceited! Just to keep our throats dry while we're talking this through," the woman continued. "Some water, at least?"

Lamu didn't protest.

While she sat herself down on one of the couches - brand new to the point that they still had that inflexible quality that made it impossible to completely relax - the woman, apparently in no great hurry, set to work boiling at least herself some tea, withdrawing a pouch of leaves from a paper bag at the side of the sink.

Lamu wanted to demand she skip the bullshit and get straight to why she'd summoned her here, but even in a situation like this, that felt somehow like regressing. So she decided to satisfy a little of her curiosity instead.

"...you didn't buy this place," Lamu asked, "just for the purpose of this conversation, did you?"

"Oh, no," the woman said, smiling cheerfully as she poured water into a kettle. "I didn't buy it at all. I'm just borrowing it from the realtor for a little bit." She looked over her shoulder and smirked. "And no, I don't mean that I'm trespassing! We have a little arrangement."

Lamu narrowed her eyes. "Is that so."

"It might seem a little weird, but I find these types of conversations tend to go better if they're held somewhere comfy rather than a dismal grey office," she explained. "Well! Or at least that's how I prefer it. Not that there's much of that to go around down here either way. You certainly made me take more of a trek than I normally do, in terms of setting up meetings."

"And who are you?" Lamu asked. "What is this?"

"Oh, right, I didn't introduce myself yet." She glanced back at her as she lit up the stove. "I'm Nhi."

"That's not exactly what I wanted to know."

"I'm part of a group of rich busybodies trying to save the world, basically," she explained. "Though we're doing kind of a shitty job of it right now, between you and me. Real back-against-the-wall situation, and everyone's still clowning around!" She chuckled as she set the pot to boil. "I'm sorry for having called you out here in the way I did, by the way, but I couldn't see a better alternative."

"You could have minded your own business," Lamu spoke sourly. "Not gone looking for someone who very obviously did want to be looked for."

"True, true!" The woman said, giggling to herself. "Like I said: Busybody."

"How did you find me?"

"Oh, it wasn't too hard!" she declared, getting a teacup out of the cabinet. "We bought and dug through enough security footage from private businesses along the Iladian border to figure out what safe house you were using after fleeing Asharom, then went through the records of the local distribution center and logic sea data center to see what you were buying and researching. After that, it was simply a matter of firing blind with the Anomaly-Divining Arcana out in the nearby hills until we got a hit on your interplanar jump." She set it down, leaning against the counter. "Don't feel down about it, though! You did enough to throw off the Censors-- That's better than most. But there's not a lot you can do nowadays if somebody really wants to find you, unfortunately."

"That doesn't fully answer the question," Lamu insisted, although she knew it already answered enough. "I could have left the Lower Planes again in a completely different location."

"Our psych profile on you said you wouldn't," she answered casually.

Lamu twitched. "How does that-- What?"

"You don't do things in half measures," Nhi explained. "It's a pattern throughout your entire career, y'know? Perfectionism in your work, always cutting ties with former partners and friends completely, booking your medical checkups exactly on time or not bothering at all. You don't like being stuck in ambiguous situations. You never pick the semi-skimmed milk." The kettle began to whistle. "You wouldn't want to go back to the Mimikos, where your face is on file and you could make one good and get caught instantly. That means your options were either staying down here or making a bid for the Triumvirate. And we assumed you just wouldn't have the resources for that."

She scowled to herself, the words feeling violative. To have her life read like that, like it was just a golem who's head they'd popped open - what fucking audacity. Who did these people think they were? More than that, though, she felt foolish for incapability to think outside of the box, outside of what their expectations would be.

"Sorry, it's creepy for me to act like I know anything about you, I know," the woman added, throwing up her hands. "I'm just paraphrasing the report here! I couldn't have figured any of this out myself. I'm a total ditz when it comes to people stuff. Can't even figure when my cat wants to go outside!"

"And finding where I lived?" Lamu asked bitterly. "There are still millions of people in the Lower Planes. I even avoided using the Power so I wouldn't stand out."

"You're a pretty prolific golem scripter, and though I don't really get it myself, there are apparently fancy logic engines that can identify who wrote script through cross-comparison, even if they have to go through buckets of data in the process," the other woman said. The kettle began to boil, and she dropped a pouch of leaves in the cup. "We figured you wouldn't have been able to survive without using any of your skills, which probably meant you'd be doing freelancing. So we narrowed down where you'd be to a few spots where that was viable, then bought up second-hand equipment until we found your handiwork." She smiled. "And now here we are!"

Of course. Of course it would be a fucking gimmick of artificed intelligence that would get her. It was ironic to the point of farce.

"But anyway," Nhi said, finally pouring the cup and stirring it. "None of that really matters for why we're here today! I'm not going to share the results of our investigation with anyone. I can even order the records trashed after this conversation, if you prefer."

"You realize I can't trust you in saying that," Lamu replied bluntly.

"You totally can. I understand why you wouldn't, though." She picked up a thin white folder, carrying it over to the sofa-square along with the cup. "But hear me out."

She sat down on the sofa opposite Lamu, placing the file on the table between them. She took a sip from the cup, then smiled and let out a sigh, setting it down.

"Are you a believer in prophecy, Lamu?"

The part of her that was always striving to emulate a normal person half-gestated a low-hanging joke about horoscopes, but she vetoed it. "No. That's a stupid question to even ask."

"Well! In that case, consider what I'm about to tell you a merely well-informed prediction." She leaned forward, her grey locks falling over the side of her face. "The Remaining World will be destroyed in less than two years."

Lamu blinked. "I'm... sorry?"

"The seven planes anchored to the Tower of Asphodel will be completely obliterated." She clapped her hands together. "Collapsed. Undone. Smoked."

She stared at the strange woman, who so far had divulged nothing of who she was beyond the fact that she had a lot of money, blankly.

"Honestly, though? You probably don't even need me to tell you that!" Nhi continued. "I mean, it's not like you need insider info to see the state the world is in right now. The socio-political consensus built in the aftermaths of not just the Tricenturial and Great Interplanar Wars, but since the Covenant Schism and the start of the Mourning Period-- Well, it's falling apart at the seams, isn't it?" She laughed to herself. "Every part of society hates everyone else. The landless in the state reserves hate the land owners so much there's a prolific storming every other week, and the land owners somehow hate them back even more, to the point that they'd probably collectively opt for starving the lot of them rather than make any compromises at this point. They live segregated lives with in increasingly completely different cultures - so the chance of that turning around is basically nill - and 3 for every 4 governments on the Mimikos are in power off the back of this dynamic. The 6 Covenant Parties and their smaller factions all hate each other, old grievance boiled over to the point they'd be at war if they weren't busy fighting the 2 dissenters in a war that gets closer to a humanitarian disaster every day. And even they hate each other, just in ways that fly under the radar for most of the people down here."

'Fly under the radar', Lamu heard.

"It's all become a big joke. A pastiche of a real world. Sometimes I have to go through a military checkpoint with armed golems just to get breakfast. And everything that made things that way just keeps compounding on itself, over and over, like somebody making a wedding cake!" She leaned forward. "You can feel it in the air. Something has to give. It's only a matter of time."

"You're right, I don't need you to tell me this," Lamu said bluntly. "This is just low-grade political commentary. I could spend two minutes in the logic sea and see these same ideas enunciated more gracefully."

"That's just the thing, though isn't it?" She slurped her tea loudly, then dropped the cup back down with a loud clunk. "Normalization. Everybody can see how bad things are, but the world's too big and messy to do anything about it. So people just talk about it over and over again, paralyzed, until it all feels trite and stupid, naive to do anything but look after yourself. Just like the end of the Imperial Era. Crabs in a bucket."

"Do you have any actually compelling evidence that the world is going to end?" Lamu asked. "Anything beyond your own existential despair?"

"Oh yeah. Lots." She gave a confident, if somehow childish, nod. "The thing is, the world is like-- Well, people think it's like a house, right? Like, unless you go at it with a wrecking ball or set it on a fire, a house isn't generally going to collapse all at once. It breaks down over time. Windows shatter, ceilings start to slump and then cave in, some parts of the outer wall fall off. By the time the final collapse happens, it's already been functionally unlivable for decades. Right?" She shook her head. "The world's not like that. It's more like the human body. It can look invincible until it isn't."

"This still isn't evidence."

"Key people, right now, are keeping the governments of the Grand Alliance and the Triumvirate from doing something very stupid," Nhi explained. "Figures who are slowly falling off the political stage as it becomes occupied by idiots, the corrupt, and true-blue Idealist nutters. Meanwhile, there are forces in the background preparing a long-anticipated strike against the world's order. It's all leading to a crescendo of shit hitting the fan that'll be sprayed in our collective faces on November 29th, 1610.

"That's a pretty specific date for something so vague," Lamu commented.

"And there's a reason for that!" Nhi spoke cheerily. "That's when Ninsianna will enter its tentative colonization stage."

Lamu frowned. Ninsianna was the Inotian and Ysaran Parties answer to Deshur, following their last attempt at large-scale Empyrean colonization ending with disaster and the defection of the colonies to the Triumvirate. Like Deshur was a loose facsimile of the 4th planet in Humanity's original solar system, Ninsianna was to emulate the 2nd, Aphrodite. A world that by the time of the collapse had been a green paradise even more resplendent than Earth, famous for its artificial floating continents.

There was just one problem; compared to Deshur, the project was hopelessly overambitious and poorly-planned, having become an obscene financial drain on the core nations of the Grand Alliance for over half a century, with the timescale of the project pushed back over and over to the extent that many now believed it would never be finished.

Sure, now that Lamu thought about it, that was the current planned date for the human residency trial period. But six such dates had come and gone already-- No one with a brain cell was taking it seriously. Invoking it like this just made this woman's argument even harder to take seriously.

She decided it would be better not to even engage with it. "Whatever might happen, I don't see how it could end the world," she said instead. "If you're saying the Triumvirate is going to make a play to seize Ninsianna, then sure, I could see that leading to total war, or something. Half the cities in the Mimikos glassed." She knotted her brow. "But that wouldn't be the first disaster on that scale. The Interluminary Strife killed the greater part of humanity, but in the end the world kept going. Something like that wouldn't even touch the people down here."

"True again!" Nhi conceded. "But. Man's ability to fuck himself in the butt is limited by his knowledge, or at least his willingness to use that knowledge. We owe much to the consensus on technological research established by the Covenant of the Mourning Realms." She threw her hands to the side. "But alas, even that's unraveled! Since the Ikkaryonic Revolution, the Covenant's been slowly reduced to glorified lavatory paper. The Oathguard put under Grand Alliance authority and neutered, key restrictions handwaved, all in the name of keeping the wheels of progress spinning as we go careening off the edge of a cliff." Her expression grew slightly more serious. "That includes research into the powers of the Ironworkers. The Tower of Asphodel."

She pointed to it - always omnipresent on the horizon, even in this desolate realm - through the glass roof. As ever, it hung imperiously over everything, a seam in the world, a signature on the canvas of reality.

"Believe me in saying at least this much," Nhi added. "For the first time since we were confined to planet Earth, we are capable of destroying ourselves. Capable of destroying the world." And then, without lingering on the moment at all, she clapped her hands. "But that's where you come in!"

Lamu jumped, a little taken off-guard. "W-What do you mean?"

"There is a chance! A lost innovation that, theoretically, could prevent all of this. Harmonize and renew this broken world, bringing unprecedented reconciliation. Perhaps even usher in a new golden age."

This was, in her mind, a good example of the aforementioned ways in which Lamu could be profoundly unintelligent. Because despite it being in retrospect rather obvious, she did not until this last moment in the conversation anticipate its destination. And at once she regretted even showing up, of failing to look beyond the threat in front of her nose.

"You might even call it," the woman said, "a universal panacea."