Girls night out
PING. PING. PING-PING-PING-PING!
The neural interface sang the song of its people, relentlessly pounding pings into her head.
Galateya was yanked from Sage’s Yesterweave bubble tea cafe into bleary half-alertness.
“I’m awake, I’m awake, stop, Slayer staaaph!” she hissed through clenched teeth, mentally muting the alert, scales and mane cascading from relaxed violet-blue to irate orange.
[Rise and shine!] Kawathra’s voice cackled.
[Waa…] Galateya yawned, glancing at the stat-clock on her Lazarus bracelet. [4:07 AM]
[Kawathra?! Ughh. Why so early? What’s the emergency?] She mentally V-cast back at the annoying bird.
[I have a grave need of your special skills,] the Datamancer stated. [I would have badgered you even earlier but Nexxali told me that you were busy recruiting a space doggo. Now that the space dog operation is concluded, I have a new job for you.]
[What job?] Taniwha rapidly adjusted her body, making her heartbeat accelerate, fully coming awake.
[A super important one,] the bird added. [Meet me in the Seeker parked outside!]
[Very well,] the dragon girl sighed. Untangling herself from Ash she got up from the pile of fox-themed pillows.
Looking across the loft she spotted Sage.
The Skinwalker was already awake and sat at a sprawling moon-shaped desk, naked, save for her choker and tangle of friendship bracelets, red-orange tail swaying in hypnotic arcs. A nest of monitors curved around her in a glowing half dome. Thousands of luminous fox eyes drifted in lazy constellations across the screens blinking in syncopated rhythms as the Skulk maintained its nocturnal vigil over the planet.
“Sup bruh?” Sage tilted her slightly vulpine head at Galateya, momentarily derailing the dragon girl with a cannonade of excessive lasciviousness. “Where, you off to?”
“Kawathra summoned me for a job,” Galateya whispered, stepping over Ash’s sprawled limbs.
“Mysterious bird business at middle-of-tha-night-o’clock.” Sage’s freckles rearranged into “SUS.”
[Bring your knight too,] Kawathra added.
“She wants you too,” the dragon girl said.
“Aight,” Sage hopped off the computer chair, chest bouncing. “Lessssgooo.”
“You’re… naked,” Galateya let out, mentally derailed even further, struggling not to stare.
“And? I’m almost always naked. The foxes don’t judge.” Sage grinned. “You’re naked too, bruh.”
Galateya noted that she was indeed naked and rapidly bloomed a dress of bark and ferns atop of herself.
“O-la-la, woodland esthetic fashion. K. Gimme two secs!”
Sage did, in fact, took longer than two seconds, digging through her many clothing piles while wiggling her butt in the air, eventually locating an oversized hoodie that read “NOCTURNAL EMISSIONS (of wisdom)” and a pair of shorts with “FOXY FORENSICS UNIT” on the rear.
Galateya waited by the balcony door with her arms crossed and rolled her eyes at the meme outfit.
They rapidly descended through the cafe’s back stairwell, Sage padding barefoot across the metal catwalk. Outside, the pre-dawn air of Cascade bit with Pacific chill.
A door flashed open in the slightly shimmering air, the Seeker invisible otherwise to the naked eye.
“Сome in,” Kawathra’s voice beckoned from the Seeker innards.
Galateya went into the Seeker. Sage slithered in behind her.
The crystalline-organic interior of Kappa featured a solid looking, black celesteel, hexagonal object roughly four feet across covered in red blinking diodes.
“She appears to be ignoring you,” Galateya observed as the core remained silent.
“Because we’re keeping her in Safe Mode,” Kawathra explained. “The Marshall locked her down tight before extraction, so the Third Fleet Datamancers won’t sniff her signal. Right now she is a verrrrry expensive, very traumatized brick.”
A door irised open at the back of the Seeker and two figures shuffled out. Nexxali emerged first, ears flattened sideways, whiskers drooping at an angle Galateya decidedly catalogued as grumpy o’clock. Behind her came Shady, mane rumpled into a feathered thundercloud, silver eyes half-lidded and radiating the menace of an apex predator woken before her preferred hour.
“Someone better be dying,” the Wendigo rasped.
“Many someones will be dying if we don’t keep up the extra-rapid pace of our rebellion against the Frontenachii,” Kawathra stated.
“Get to the point, bird,” Shady grumbled. “I’m planning an awesome date with my Ashy this morning and this tastes like more exhausting effort.”
Kawathra spread her hands theatrically over the core. “Tonight, my lovely co-conspirators, we jailbreak the Slayer’s Sword. I need her free of Frontenachii control protocols ASAP. Once she is clean, I shall convert her into the greatest server node this dimension has ever hosted, and then our lovely Emperor will use her to absolutely ruin the Third Fleet’s day. And, by extension, the Sixth Fleet’s entire quarter.”
“Not sure how I can assist with such,” Shady added with a big yawn of glowing chompers, “I’m not a ship core engineer or a Datamancer.”
“The more capable minds participate in the jailbreaking, the smoother it will go,” Kawathra stated. “Plus, you’re a Frontenachii Princess, the locks might respond to your orders. I want the core to be as functional as possible. Every command cipher. Every fleet ledger. Every action committed by the Third Fleet for over a century of conquest. She holds them all!” The magpie’s dark blue eyes gleamed like wet ink. “The capital ship core knows where all the bodies are buried, because she was the one ordered to bury them.”
“Fine.” Shady sighed.
“You want me to conceptually freeze the locks?” Galateya guessed.
“Correct,” Kawathra clicked her beak. “Now, we can attempt the core jailbreaking here, using the Seeker’s heart for extra power or…”
“Sagetopia,” Sage stated, sniffing the core and skulking around it, red tail fluttering. “My Skulk works better in my domain. A Seeker is far too Syntropic of a locale for me to fully understand what we’re working with.”
“What do you think we’re working with?” Kawathra arched an eyebrow.
“This doesn’t smell like a crystalloid vamp,” Sage tapped the magisteel hexagon with a red claw and then a green one.
“What does it smell like?” Shady asked.
“Like a very old, very powerful soul,” Sage answered. “At least that’s what I’m smelling now.”
“Of course,” Shady sighed.
“Anyway, Kawhy, take us to Darkfall. I’ll provide directions ‘till we hit my domain’s edge,” Sage said. “We’ll take it slow, work together. No need to push Teya to the point where she…”
“Where she… what?” Shady asked.
“Where she almost folds her Fractal Engine heart into itself,” Sage stated. “If I didn’t help relax her with the Ash-hunt, all of Cascade and perhaps the surrounding hundred clicks would have been turned to icicles.”
Shady whistled.
“I…” Galateya swallowed.
“Didn’t mean it?” Nexxali asked.
Galateya nodded. “I… just got pushed to the brink by… everything.”
The serval slid to the dragon girl and hugged her. “I’m sorry. I should have been nicer to you. I seriously had no idea that we were dimensionally entwined this much.”
Galateya hugged the smaller prad back. “It’s… fine. Things worked out. We’re… good now.”
The Seeker lurched into motion, Sage whispering direction into Kawathra’s ear.
They flashed through town, across the valley, slid across the pre-dawn forest like a rumor, crystalline legs whispering between the pines, and came to a halt at the lip of Darkfall Valley where the fog pooled thick as spoiled milk.
“Off we go,” Sage said as a crystalline doorway slid open. She grabbed Kawathra in a bridal carry, rapidly foxing up. “Shades, mind carrying the core? T-buns, carry Nexxy.”
Shady hefted the core onto one shoulder as if it were a sack of laundry rather than the soul of a warship, grumbling about carrying luggage like a common knob.
Galateya lifted Nexxali to her chest.
They disembarked into the cold.
“How far do we gotta run?” Shady asked, eyeing the forest with silver slits.
“About ten minutes,” Sage said and snapped a colorful friendship bracelet onto Shady’s hand. “Sagetopia is dimensionally max warded against visitors, especially against extra-Syntropic weaponized concepts like a Seeker. Only whomever I allow gets in and out. Alas, a Seeker cannot be modded with a smol friendship bracelets tag so you’re gonna have ta use Wendoggo feetses.”
“How the fuck did you manage that powerful of a concealment ward?” Shady wondered as they took off.
“You know… I am not mega sure myself.” Sage shrugged. “Something is super-fucked in Darkfall that makes it soooper magical. In my fox-hunts I found… an old ass sundergate.”
“A sundergate to where?” Nexxali asked from Galateya’s embrace.
“Nowhere,” Sage stated. “Exactly nowhere. Belonging to nobody in particular.”
“What?” Kawathra asked.
“Exactly,” Sage agreed as pines flashed past them. “A pure null point. The syntropic concept of nothing that draws magic power to itself across everywhere. I planted Sagetopia at its event horizon edge right before the nothing begins where everything gets smooshed together. A rather convenient domain placement. Took many a fox to sniff out the exact optimal edge.”
The abandoned village unfolded out of the dark exactly as Galateya remembered it. Thousands of vulpine territory marks covered every surface, scratched and painted and burned, overlapping into a scripture of foxes.
Broken magitek frame bits slumped in the mud, paintball wounds glowing faintly. Shattered buildings leaned into each other like exhausted drunks. At the heart of it all, the… shack waited.
The bloomed shack.
Galateya felt the Astral thicken around her ankles like warm honey. The whole valley breathed magic.
“Home sweet mage towah,” Sage announced, shoving open the crooked shack door, which hung from its single hinge with the dignity of a veteran.
The Sakura tree Galateya had bloomed in a storm of wild, sensual emotions arched over the roofless room, petals drifting down through the column of moonlight in slow pink snow. Colorful lilies and ferns cascaded across the walls, weaving between the stacked television sets. Bioluminescent flowers pulsed softly underfoot, and the moss carpet had grown lush and deep, swallowing sound. Hundreds of dead screens watched from the walls and the ceiling chains.
“Great job on decoratin’ my murder shack with feelings btw,” Sage bellowed Galateya. “It’s got great resale value now. Still smells like amazin’ double-slit split sex in here too. Yum,” she added conversationally.
“Sage,” Galateya hissed, feeling mortified.
“What? It’s a compliment to the venue!” The Skinwalker laughed, hopping to the center of the room. “Place the core here, Void-bae! The most focusssed-focal-foci point of my domain!”
Shady looked around, squinted at Galateya, probably having smelled what she did here and set the core down in the center of the moss, exactly where she and Sage and Ash had, well. The thing. Galateya struggled not to think about it. The Wendigo let out a slightly indignant huff, clearly reading her mind.
The diodes blinked on, indifferent to the dragon girl’s embarrassment.
Sage clapped her hands. Every dead television in the shack snapped awake at once, filling the room with static and the slow blinking swarm of a thousand fox eyes, all of them turning inward, focusing on the black hexagon resting in the flowers.
“Alright,” Sage said, dropping to her knees beside it. “Cirle o’ hands time! Grab the paw next to yours!”
They formed a circle around the core. Kawathra’s clawed hand, Sage’s warm fingers, Nexxali’s soft pads, Shady’s spindly claws, and Galateya’s own scaled palm closing the loop.
“Roles time! I am the sonar,” Sage stated. “The Understanding. I’ll take us deeper and deeper, until we reach her heart. Nexxy, you’re our resonance, the Song. The more I understand, the more you’ll have to sing about to free this poor critter. Teya, you are our Champion, the icy sword of Justice and Truth. Freeze all of the badness once we’re in all tha’ way.”
Galateya nodded and then glanced at Nexxali who smiled back at her.
“Shades, you’re our Hunger. If something grabs us from the deep, eat it,” Sage added.
“Can do,” the Wendigo agreed.
“Kawhy,” the Skinwalker looked at the Datamancer. “You’ll be our digital Librarian. Your knowledge of the Frontenachii should give us clues as to what’s what too.”
“Acceptable role assignment,” Kawathra clicked her beak, “though I must note, jailbreaking a capital ship core by a rebellious circle of five has never been attempted in recorded Frontenachii Empire history.”
“Comforting,” Galateya muttered.