In The Foxes Den

Posted on Thu Jun 6th, 2019 @ 7:00am by The Narrator

Mission: S1E3: Moments Of Consolidation
Location: The Apartments Of The Myriad, Sleepers Bazaar
Timeline: MD9 14.15AM (During the post 'Royal Court In Exile')

Bastion," the Myriad by the name of Nyessix

Far and away from the slave grotto’s of the Sleeping Bazaar, amid the trading floors and asset galleries where around the clock contest for advantage and profit polluted the air like smog, there were the apartments of The Myriad.

Like all of the structures attached to the Prior structure that contained The Mire, there was an organic quality to it. The walls were ribbed, the material between them stretched and thin at its edges and centre like the skin over a ruddy gore encrusted drum. But here and there were the mechanical advantages of the Harbour Master’s presence, providing structural integrity field generators and food synthesisers. All the comforts of home, minus the assurance of metal and ceramics.

And of course, decoration of the space was left up to the occupying tenants. A different Myriad every few years would take up residence within those walls, and the House Of Foxes prided itself on its taste and sophistication. Tapestries from the fallen metropolises of Perambulation hung from the walls, depicting the motive city-states of one of the Myriad’s former client races. If some of them were burned at the edges, soot-stained here and there, well that only added to their lustre.

Padded futons and chairs were scattered haphazardly around the chamber, each knot of them centred on one of a half dozen statues artful posed there. All of them were porcelain white figures depicting a number of body plans. Most were humanoid, some short, some tall, some with more eyes than others. Some had hair or chitinous strands like flattened knives. Some had feathers and beaks, others powerful musculature and claws.

But all were the perfected, idealised beauty for each species. Each would be looked upon by a member of that race, and wanton desire would be the expected outcome. Even if the colouration of each statue was so radically out of sync with the racial topography of the world.

Skin like comet’s ice.
Lips bloodied by harts blood.
Hair like spun sunlight.

And in each where eyes or ocular organs would reside, were a pair of dull orange gems. The Harbour Master made its proxies out of meat and metal, spinning them together as quickly as they were spent. There was no artistry in them, no eye to the viewer, just brutish utilitarianism. The Myriad preferred to take the time to invest in their proxies, to make beautiful being’s that would quietly speak to the minds of their clients that they were all the same.

Lady Nyessix arose with a sharp intake of breath, and one of the proxies awoke from its statuesque repose. She...well ‘she’ was perhaps a word best not used for a Myriad. ‘She’ preferred the pronoun, but being a genderless digital being did make it hard to hold on to it over the centuries. But something spoke to her when she went about choosing and growing her proxies, something of a kinship to the so often called ‘fairer sex’.

Natures meek and tender maid’s indeed. How often had a queen driven a knife into the back of a king? Or an assassins cordial found its way into a goblet from the hand of a serving girl?

She was brought from her revelry of awakening by a gentle tink of stone. Her bodyguard Bastion, one of the loyal and often poetic Ambulatory Hives, stood by the doorway to her conversation chamber. The hulking carved stone limbs hid the coiling mass of worm flesh within, and Nyessix was always pleased by how delicate the brutish being could be.

“You have a petitioner. The Chadrian scientist Talc,” Bastion said, hissing the words out through the rustling rasp of its rattling coils.

“Give me a moment to settle myself,” she instructed the loyal but brutish servant. She extended one elegant arm, executing the mental commands to have all of the internal monomer cables tighten against their bounds. It had the effect of making the musculature ripple, bulging in place along the limb as the single carbon molecule chains of artificial muscle reacted. In that single second she pinged the data trove of her thorn ship, Accession of Twilight, as well as the local node that was her home away from home here within the Sleeping Bazaar.

She smiled to her self as the piece fell into place so artfully. There was a cunning there that she could appreciate on a professional level. She then returned her consciousness to the formless digital nether space, resurfacing in corporeal existence across the room in another of her artfully posed proxies.

This one was similar to the human form proxy she had been considering wearing, but having accessed her security system she now dressed for her audience. She ran a hand along the edge of the curving ram's horns that abutted her temples, teasing the short locks of spun silver to sit correctly. The fur trimmed robes were far to warm for a native Chadrian to wear within the hothouse atmosphere of the Sleepers Bazaar, but they spoke to their homeworlds chillier climes. Someone viewing them would see a figure from their homeland, a fellow wanderer of the steppes of the Minowin Valley or mountain capital of Kharshok.

They’d subconsciously see someone they could trust.

“Bring them in,” Nyessix said as she moved to the centre of her apartment, taking a seat atop the backrest of one of the futons. Bastion made a little bow, truly the most the rocky shell could allow, and stepped aside to reveal her petitioner.

The Chadrian stepped in, wearing the flight suit he’d been ‘rescued’ in after the warp ship he’d been on had suffered an accident. Nyessix and her ilk in the House of Foxes found the gambit of framing the destruction of a first warp ship as an accident was a gamble. Better to have the ship vanish into the night of space, destroyed in some distant star system. Wait a few decades, make the next one vanish as well, and soon enough the idea of star flight will be distasteful.

This Chadrian was tall, thin, gawky. The hollow cheeks spoke to a long time in the slave grotto, and the sunken eyes were a perfect indication of a true loss of hope. She smiled warmly at him, his name and data file appearing in her mind as though it were a memory long in the making.

“Talc Gellerin,” she said, affecting both an accent and timbre of speech the man would find homely. She gestured to one of the seats. “Can I get you anything? Dire berry rum? Perhaps a pitcher of songstress ale?”

The names were as much nonsense to anyone but a native Chadrian. The dark berries picked in the winter, poisonous to all unless fermented and aged. The grass that formed the hops for a fine ale, that rustled with melodic perfection in the evening. Common knowledge for a local, babble from a deranged mind to another. Languages were such funny things. Talc Gellerin, Scientific Command Officer for the Caledon Federation Warp Ship Suma, licked his lips but said nothing.

“I offer you these as gifts freely given, without the threat of binding agreement or presumption of debt,” Nyessix said with a kind smile. From one of the tables, golden light fizzled and brightened above its surface, and within moments a condensation soaked pitcher of amber coloured ale and a small glass of purple fluid appeared between them. She leaned over, the robes throat opening just enough to display something tantalising as she took up the dire berry rum and held it out to him. “I give you this gift freely, as you have come to me to seek a boon?”

Talc reached out and tentatively took the glass, fingers coiling around it as he drew it closer.

“I…” he began. Why did beings pride always cloud the arrangement? Nyessix had been a student of biological behaviour for countless lifetimes, and yet they never seemed to break their patterns. “I do. I mean…”

“Take a moment,” she purred. “Your time here at the Bazaar has not been anything anyone in all of the spheres would call ‘pleasent’ Talc. Collect yourself, you are safe here. Both from your fellow Chadrian survivor, and their new acquaintances. The Harbour Master as well has no sway within these walls.”

“New friends?” Talc let out an embittered laugh, as he took a fortifying sip of the high proof spirit. “I had friends. Your Abborax caught nearly all of us when he set upon ending the Suma. 18 souls he carted off into the night, and now but a year later there are only two of us left alive. Fenris see’s all of this like a war, something to be fought to the bitter end! And now with these...humanni? He sees kindred, soldiers of the good fight he can enlist in his crusade.”

“But you never signed up to fight,” Nyessix said, cocking her head slightly as though catching a whispered comment. “You never signed up to the military. Your research though, your warp theories, they were born from civilian think tanks and corporations. But the funding for your ship, your beautiful superluminal vessel, had to come from someone with deep pockets.”

“And a military fighting a war will always have the deepest of pockets,” Talc grumbled. “Everything that led up to launch had a war footing to it. Uniforms, nationalistic chest-thumping, making sure the whole of Chadria knew the Caledon Federation was going to be the first nation to send people to another star. That we could do it whilst fighting a cold war with the Protectorate, and fighting a hot one with Lishtti zealots in the deserts. We should have left our war in the sand and the high steppes, but instead, we took it with us in the form of Commander Fenris. He won't be content until he’d died fighting, going out on his own terms and damn the consequences.”

“And the loss of mind like yours...such a waste,” Nyessix sighed.

“But what would...what would I need to do to assure that was not the case?” the horned Chadrian asked. He was forward about it, and Nyessix found that refreshing. So many of The Bound clung to their pride as a drowning man might a length of timber.

“Well, for starters, we would need to enter into an arrangement of sorts. Mutually beneficial of course,” she said. “As a client of the Myriad, I would be able to place you under the direct protection of myself and the House Of Foxes. You would be free of this place. And in return, I would ask you to relate anything you might overhear or know from these….humanni as you call them. This Starfleet. I do so love to collect information.”

She reached out to the table, and poured a glass of the amber ale from its pitcher.

Abborax had been a brutish thug, as befitted a shaper of the House Of Moths. Surgeons and genetic moulders to be sure, and they had crafted some of the finest biological simulacra the worlds had ever seen. But no subtlety, no artistry. The House Of Foxes would reward her greatly for such a gift as delivering more of Starfleet’s wandering souls into their cunning grasp.

And in the games of the Myriad, an advantage was always preferable to fair trade.