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Save Point: Flight

The Stair Of Waters

High above the Stair Of Waters...

...and Briseis streaks through the cold upper airs, the cold steel blades of the wings-for-the-dream folded symmetrically about her into a minimum aerodynamic configuration like the pointed tip of a spear cutting through the air, a bennu-phoenix with feathers of steel. The fused-sinter blades, though lovingly polished across the facing edges, do not shield her face and muzzle, and the air burns freezing over the standard thin-layer thermal suit she wears underneath the frame and straps. She twists the control yoke that looks like a blackened teardrop abraded to silver at the front, and sweeps downward like an archaeoptryx.

The dream of personal flight is the oldest one of all, from the first moment a creature trapped on the ground looked up to see another on the wing, and it is she who has made it possible, solely by her existence. Without her, this technology could never have even been conceived, and they still don't understand fully how it works or even exactly why it should. But any sethuress who learns the knack can put on the wings, the lightest flight-capable equipment ever devised, and by belief alone take to the skies.

She stretches her fingers in flight, in the old patterns, and the blades of the wings comply. The motion brings back so many memories, the thousands of hours of futile testing done by the supposed authorities and experts... and then, after he captured her, the hundreds of hours of brutal and extraordinarily effective experimentation done by Kilseth, who had already thrown out the live subjects testing rulebook and called in a whole team of bizarre people she'd never have voluntarily let anywhere near her. He'd made it clear that he would literally do anything to find out how it really worked, and he had. Pain, trauma, psychological manipulation, forced intercourse and all sorts of terrifying and awful things, and yet somehow he'd clawed his way down through everything that was her and found out all her triggers, until she could induce the required mind-state on demand and he could finally measure the effects of its operation on the world around her.

She still hated him, but she was forced to acknowledge his brilliance. He'd given her this, after all. After he'd finally broken her enough to get conclusively clear readings, he'd scoured the world for a suitable materials technology to mimic the effect, and had finally found it in the hardened wing cases of a species of rare insect that was claimed, in a long out-of-print volume by a group of deranged conspiracy theorists, to reduce the weight of anything in its immediate area by about twenty percent. And it turned out this was actually true, too, just as long as you knew how to believe in it in just the right way. He'd studied the micro-structures of the wings, incredibly intricate biologically mediated forms full of cavities far beyond the requirements of mere weight reduction, and had rapidly devised a way to produce something similar in bulk by flash-sintering an assortment of powdered metals. The resulting components looked like crusted black iron, polished up like the blade of a sword, weighed almost nothing standing still and then less then nothing when convinced of their own levity.

After that terrible night when he'd finally gotten inside her head (she still shied away from the memory, all the terrible things he did to her and just how much she loved them, how she had begged him to keep going and it was like he knew what she wanted even before she did, oh the joyful pain) and cracked open her mind and made her fly for him, floating above the bed as he ate her out, their relationship had changed in a way she was still reluctant to try to explain or understand. He'd been nice to her, he'd even treated her in a way that could only be described as kind. She'd helped him with the tests as he designed the first wings-for-the-dream, fitting the pieces to her and determining the limitations, how close it had to be to the skin, how much material of what type could be in-between before the effect collapsed, how long each blade should be. They'd talked and she hadn't fought back at all. What would be the point, when he'd already seen into her bared and filthy soul and knew her as well as she knew herself? He seemed to be content with knowing that he'd broken her, that he owned her, and once that was done he had no reason left to continue with his cruelty.

She'd met his wife Kirstine, and they'd talked. He seemed to truly love her, and she in her turn appeared to be basically a good person despite her unlimited yearning for domination and for being dominated. The whole thing was quite clearly and conclusively fucked up. One night she had shared her bed when Kilseth was away, and had realized that she loved her too and would never be able to hurt her, even when Kirstine finally begged her to with small piercing cries. She should have been taking advantage of this unexpected freedom to try and strike them down and flee, but she found that she simply couldn't.

When the basic design of the wings was complete, and she'd shown others how to use them to the best of her ability, to her surprise nothing at all happened. It turned out Kilseth had been paying her the whole time, even down to all the hours and the sessions, and she wasn't sure whether to feel like a whore or just be grateful to him. The contract she never signed specified every single thing she'd done as part of her job, with no end date, and she somehow found that she had no reason to leave. She'd gotten used to living in the really quite spacious and modern room that he'd provided, and no-one treated her as anything except another employee, admittedly a very significant one.

She was dreadfully nervous the first time she stepped outside after her work session, past the secretary on the desk, but nothing happened. Once she had the wings, she could have fled at any time, she now realized, but it was already too late by then. On some level, she'd wanted to see what would happen. So she just dropped by her old apartment, unsurprised to find he'd covered the nominal rent, collected her favorite possessions and simply came back.

The wings worked better for sethuresses, for some reason, although anyone who could grasp the right sort of conviction in their own ability to fly could do so. The only difference was the effectiveness, which seemed to drop with degrees of separation. Those sethuresses she taught herself were the best and fastest, and the ones they taught the next so. Like any skill, just a few people were really good at it, and she was the first and only.

The dream of flight was a profitable business. Before she knew it, the wings-for-the-dream were being sold as aviation backups, to thrill-seekers and the security meant to stop them, for tourists to try out in suitably scenic hillscapes, and she was at her desk using the screens to sketch out a second version, and then a third. On weekends, she went out and flew and let the painful memories dissolve in the rush of the cold wind.

Kilseth recruited the best of the best to be his team, fitting it in-between all the other political and business activities he was now involved in, and of course she was the leader. They were all sethuresses, all attractive in their various ways, and they got special wings-for-the-dream that were the latest, the most streamlined. The others got elaborate patterns painted on theirs, got built-in features of every imaginable sort, sported advertisements, company logos and decals. Well, they were an advertisement for their product, in a sense, but she left her suit plain and entirely dedicated to flight, and that made her even more of a contrast, appearing even more remarkable against the gaudy plumage of her wing-sisters.

They appeared at shows, at extreme sports games, at opening and promotional events. The others bathed in fame and adulation, at being known, at accepting offers from the wealthy males and females of their dreams. She just flew more and more, seeking to outrun herself.

One day she landed in the middle of nowhere, and was surprised to find herself on the well-maintained and grassy grounds of a monastery, where the practitioners of some ancient but still-relevant philosophy performed meditation on coarse bricks under the shadowy eaves of a temple that retained the original design and layout from its long gone heyday. She'd intended to simply rest for a while in the sun, drink some water from the fountain and then get a good run-up to sail back toward home (strange that she should think of it as home) but her fingers kept twitching and she realized that she was making the flying gestures, again and again, as she watched a small raptor ascend in the thermals, high above in the mountain.

The monks, both male and female, were naturally fascinated by this visitor from the sky who had intruded into their remote and purposefully simple lives, and when the caretaker of the grounds, a gentle soul known to use his mastery of the sword-spear art to mow the front lawn, saw the motion of her hands, he ceased his practice, came over and indicated to her that he had something to show her. Still wearing her wings-for-the-dream, he pushed her down into the same folded-limbs meditative position that he had been holding before, then spread her arms wide as though she was holding something out to either side. Last of all, he pressed her agitated fingers into alignment, and she realized that the gestures she had been making in her distress were almost the same as those being held by the monks, as they performed the many and various styles of meditation they had embraced.

She closed her eyes for just a second, and when she opened them, several hours had passed. A small bright yellow flower had been placed at her left hand, and a small burner with several sticks of scented incense at her right. Some of the monks were humming together in a low-frequency chant that resounded like the base of the mountain. Behind her, the shining blades had drawn upward and were suspended around her like celestial wings.

She set a way-point and came back to the monastery whenever she could, bringing such small things as might be useful to the monks and providing them with a touch of the outside world. Performing the chants and meditations made her feel better and fly more strongly, she told her wing-sisters, but it also helped to weave her frayed thoughts back together, easing the painful disturbance of her mind. Somehow she never bothered to mention any of this to Kilseth, even as she found herself drawn more and more into his activities, and began to realize the scope of his ambitions. What was not concealed was not a secret.

~*~

There are other things Kilseth does not know. He does not know about

And this is how Briseis finds herself above the Stair.

~*~

Halfway up the flight, things are getting harrowing.

The plan, such as it was, called for intercepting Kilseth as he approached the Stair, to try and take him out before he ever manages to complete whatever act of spatial mayhem he seems to be planning (yet possibly may be destined to complete, if the current conditions are anything to go by). Whilst Terrowne has plenty of personal experience with breaking destinies, Kilseth seems to have been expecting something of some kind and has bought a better class of backup then they'd expected.

There was, ironically, no way of knowing that he'd choose to use the Stair of Waters as part of his route, but Sethkill had insisted that he would. Something about symmetry and the spiral stair and the straight stair, perhaps derived from an understanding of how his brother thinks.

The Stair is appealing as an ambush site, apparently open but with a row of thick decorative pillars on the outer edge, Corinthian in a society that never had a Corinth, to support a roof to keep the weather off travellers ascending along the outside of the ridge. The fact that it's some sort of historical site that no-one would ever dream of desecrating, the sethura equivalent of the Parthenon, is even better than the defensive cover.

Presumably Kilseth is trying to make some statement by his chosen progress. Unfortunately the statement in question seems to be that he is well-prepared and has no intention of letting a few last-minute kinks disrupt the outcome.

Crouched in a sort of anti-prone position next to him a couple of pillars down, digitigrade legs sprawled out longwise down the intervening steps to stabilize his aim and his muzzle against the scalloped cutouts, looking down the scope, Sethkill's newly-acquired and illegal weapon makes a sort of whining, droning sound as it powers up for the next shot. Internal segments spring outward in a sort of aggressive sheaf from the outer end of the barrel, showing ceramic components that have been heated red-hot by the previous burst, making the air ripple around them in distorted waves as they spin up to shed the heat, then are slowly drawn back in as they cool. Each of the segments folds out and forward, creating something that looks like nothing so much as a peculiar angled seven-fold claw, acting as a spinning wave guide in which the extremities move and twist on their own, stabilizing the output on the fly.

Sethkill fires again in a liquid flash of cherenkov-blue light, the scope automatically darkening to near-opacity to try and protect his eyesight, but once again the burst fails against one of the aegis shields braced to deflect it. Kilseth's eyes appear almost mirror-black as his own contact lenses try to stop the flare.

Kilseth seems to have bought along what can only be described as his own personal heroine addiction, an all-sethuress, not very Super Sendai for the bad guys. They're all wearing similar yet not quite identical variations on the same outfit, slim polished blades of a metal that still looks matte except where burnished perfectly smooth, with narrow racing stripes appliqued around the edges in a different primary shade each. The colours aren't as impressive to human eyes as they would be to a sethura, but they make their point, which is that there is no 'i' in team, or some similarly pithy sethura equivalent thereof. More importantly, they seem to have no respect for gravity and move as though the metal weighed nothing, casually pulling high flips or diving downward off nearby objects toward the floor with total disregard for their own personal safety.

The wing-bitches seem to have been trained as a sort of security detail, because they each have an aegis shield-generation bracer on their left wrist and move with a sort of uncanny synchronicity such that there's always one or more of them blocking the shot at all times, often in a sort of contrived defensive pose with left fist extended upward vertically braced atop right right palm. The standard aegis shields were never designed to take hits this big, shimmering in symmetrical yet non-repeatable destabilization patterns after each hit like one of the older flickinger shield models they replaced, and each take a significant amount of time to recharge and rebuild after each shot. But by constantly covering each other, the sethuresses form what is effectively an impenetrable wall.

This is the least of their worries, however, because on the Stair of Waters itself a pack of enraged bitey-things has been let loose on them to try and disrupt the attack. There's really no other word for the creatures, which are sethura-like in size and shape but seem to have been designed with an emphasis on clawing and biting at the expense of all higher thought. They're all ropy braided muscles and low cunning, unlimited slavering and hunger tightly packed into one compact, hard-to-kill body with leathery skin and spiky protrusions.

On the upward step, Terrowne has gathered a ceremonial lantern on a chain, a reproduction of some long lost original, one of which is supposed to hang every so many pillars along, and just to try and keep things to some semblance of sanity and not just annihilate half the Stair, is going loose on the creatures with it, launching it at them in terrible sweeping sine waves that shatter stone, and take chunks out of pillars. Its original would have been destroyed by now, but this is some sort of perfect copy designed to stand for all time, and the cut piece of solid-state crystal inside it keeps glowing as it crunches into slavering biters in bursts of dark blood, breaking bones and flesh, occasionally twining around limbs to yank one of the creatures from their footing, slamming them into a pillar or sending them tumbling off the stairs entirely. It's an efficient area defense weapon, so he sticks to it with grim determination.

On the downward step, the Lady Hornbreast has adopted the sort of dynamic crouch required to use her sword-spear as a more ranged, stabbing sort of weapon, and has it raised over her head in one hand as she glances about, taking in the positions of all the creatures as they approach, trying to move in from the sides and angle their way in, gaining ground until their weight of numbers will let them attack with certainty. Her fighting style is unique, constantly working around the two curves of bone that rise out of her firmly uplifted nipples, and she launches herself in graceful stabbing motions at the bitey-things, hammering them down like lightning to progressively drive them back, then retreating with the blades of the sword-spear twirling around her defensive circle again, until she is ready for the next attack. The chakrim she borrowed from Cleo's pack slaps ready against her bare thigh, shaving away fine traces of her body fur in a crescent pattern with each collision.

Sethkill shoots again, hits another aegis shield, curses with an obscenity that quite compactly suggests the results of a sexual assault on the Wolfmother's tailhole.

The main and only reason that Terrowne hasn't already gone full Dragon already to end this now is that Cleo has already taken matters into her own hands when, the very instant after the first shot distracted everyone, she performed a suicidal leap of faith off the edge of the stair, executing a barely planned sequence of terrifying tumbles and flips off scarcely there outcrops to plummet down toward Kilseth from above. The first shot was at full power but missed, the weapon progressively harder to aim as it powered up, due to the flexing manipulations of the ever more rapidly spinning adaptive wave guide.

When Sethkill saw what she was doing, he cut the subsequent charge-up sequence short and fired early, hoping the flash would buy her the brief moment to complete her audacious attack. The much shorter cycle did wonders for his aim and this time his shot was dead-on, but the sethuresses with those fantastical flashing wings draped around them were already flanking their master, running some sort of defensive shield drill even as Cleo hurtled down from above into the middle of it all.

She had a dead lock-on and was heading point-first for the back of his exposed neck until one of the crazy flying bitches smashed into her, sending her tumbling off course sideways, barely able to snatch at his upraised wrist with her free hand, sword-arm swung outward and away from him by inexorable forces of momentum. She kept her grip on the blade somehow, but being dragged off-balance by something so suddenly unexpected and heavy prompted Kilseth to clutch instinctively back, giving him a firm grasp on the material of her jacket that bunched it up tight at the front and pulled it tightly up around her neck, until something tore and her engorged breasts were quite suddenly on display. Typical Cleo, no grasp of the appropriacy of the moment.

So now Cleo is trying to claw her way up Kilseths arm topless to get a decent swing at him as he spins madly about and tries to throw her off, mostly flailing but getting enough speed as he does so to keep her from successfully lining up a solid shot with constantly being hurled back. Sethkill keeps shooting but there's no time to let the weapon cycle up fully to a power level that might be able to punch completely through any individual aegis shield. The waste heat is starting to scorch his fingers on the hand that is still made of flesh, and more importantly he has to keep shooting to tie up all the crazy flying bitches and stop them from falling on Cleo en masse, not to mention the inconvenient fact that at full power his aim would once again trend toward the non-existent and he'd probably hit her as well.

This is, in the correct technical terminology, a complete fuckup, and so he just keeps shooting. It's all one big standoff, but this one collapses as soon as someone stops the fight instead of starting it. If he can just think of something quick enough he might be able to do something about it, but nothing is coming to mind...

~*~

Suddenly, another winged figure shoots out over top of the stairs from behind the ridge, pulling into a tight turning arc and then sweeping towards them. There's no time to tell the friendly from the hostile in the couple of seconds it takes or by the brief glimpse they get at the oncoming, but this one, also female, is somehow different from the others. The wings seem more plain and lack the colorful stripes and advertising symbols, far more practical, smaller but with better lift. The support armature is more sturdy, less forcibly streamlined to show off her figure, with sensible accessories that are lacking from the others, lightweight knee and elbow pads, and boot-like foot-wraps capped over the top of the toes with the same metal as the wings.

Terrowne and the Lady, almost as though they'd practiced it, each fold back against the inside of the nearest pillar. He still has the lantern chain firmly grasped in both hands, which is redundant without the room to swing it in, so pulls one of his trademark daggers instead as he stirs the air with his left wrist, looping the chain firmly around his arm like a barricade. The Lady holds her sword-spear raised precisely over her head as though she was going spear-fishing, a position as closely held as the movements of a dance.

He could toss the other end of the chain to her and try for a miracle wireline intercept, but the new sethuress veers off at the last second, despite seemingly heading straight for them, flings it to the outside with wings tilted all the way to the vertical like a fighter jet banking, loops again and then flits effortlessly between the pillars near the top of the steps with the reflexes of a swallow, no clearances whatsoever, in the most amazing piece of precision maneuvering he's ever seen.

It almost looks like she's trying for a landing, but there's no way she could possibly slow down enough in the time remaining to even avoid breaking her own legs. Then he realizes what she's trying to do and attempts to get even further out of the way, if possible, as she back-strokes the wings, and flings her armoured knee-pads out ahead of her point-first with her feet folded back underneath her ass like landing gear, metal toecaps facing downward to take the grinding abrasion of the impact.

The wings fold down to either side of her, edge on like an array of cutting blades, yours now for only ninety-nine ninety-five, and sparks spray from the abused metal of the improvised brake-pads on her knees and feet as she hits the downward slope of the stair at speed, leaning out backward and far too low for anything in her path to hit her. It's the vanquish maneuver, something which Terrowne honestly thought he'd never see outside of an excessively stylized third-person shooter, but with those wings it makes for a perfect emergency landing.

It still probably wouldn't work, but the gradient of the stair is relatively shallow and, being a sethura design, doesn't have sharp angles at the outer edges of each riser, but instead a sloped drop to the step below. It's made of soft, extremely historic marble and plenty of wear over the centuries has already ground back anything that might resemble a corner.

As she leans back, just because it is that fucking cool now, the sethuress simultaneously pulls out dual assault pistols from a waist holster across the underhang of her lowest pair of boobs, and fires forward on full auto.

Terrowne swings out around his pillar toward the drop to take cover, and the Lady does the same, but it's not them that their unexpected surprise visitor is shooting at. The snarling pack of bitey-things, which are all still milling around and have just about got themselves psyched up to attack, are collected by a hail of some kind of explosively energetic discharges that tear them apart and send pieces flying. They try to flee but there's nowhere to flee to, and then the bladed wings slice through what remains like tumbling scythes, the burst-firing only aimed at what's directly ahead of her to clear a path.

Blood splatters spray all over the place, sluicing across the pristine ancient marble walls and coating the wing-blades, bits of bitey-things bouncing off of her like a car wreck. Sethkill keeps firing as the outermost wing-blade slips past the back of his ear and misses by the width of a piece of paper. Sparks fly and the flash of the multiple discharges lights up the stair. Terrowne could swear that the sethuress is screaming something surprisingly coherent which sounds a hell of a lot like a high-pitched war-cry in sethura as she hurtles past on her knees.

When she finally grinds to a halt a significant distance further down, leaving a distinct pair of matched bloodstained grooves taken out of the classical marble, rather than hobble slowly to her feet, she uses the wings again to simply lift herself up again, dragging her legs behind her as she takes up a defensive position behind the nearest adjacent pillar, then starts firing with her arms to either side of it, raining down surprisingly accurate small arms fire on the shield formation of her wing-sisters below, trying to disrupt their perfect formation. Either she likes pain or she can really take a hit.

Now with a free moment to try something a little more subtle, Terrowne concentrates and pulls by pure touch out of nothingness the matching weapons Romeo and Juliet, which he can still feel leaving a path of trailing significance behind them, even though whatever history they come from seems to have been cut short by the temporal machinations of the Night of the Eye. They now have exactly one less bullet each, because they always did, in every timeline, but he remembers Sethkill saying long ago on that shattered wharf outside the ruins of Azatlan City that sethura shielding systems are susceptible to large mass-impacts. Which is presumably why they prefer stasis-field systems as a general protective measure.

Cleo's special clip, blue-marked rounds of depleted uranium and tungsten, failed to penetrate Kilseths aegis shield last time, but these rounds are a hell of a lot bigger.

One is zero is some is none is now...

He fires and the aegis shields still work, but are dropped instantly to zero and the washover of kinetic energy from the force of the impact sends two winged sethuresses sailing backward in a graceful, balletic backflip with complete disregard for gravity that drops them flat on their muzzles when they finally clip the ground.

Eat that, you Super Sendai wannabe wing-bitches!

Sethkill readies to fire again while Terrowne recovers from the recoil. If Kilseth is true to form he will now try to bail the instant he thinks he might actually lose, but his new objective limits his options, because they know where he's going and he has no choice but to be there.

Still, blasting one of Kilseths limbs off would be a well-deserved lesson and would slow him down considerably. He waits patiently while the weapon recharges.

One is zero is some is none is now....

Terrowne drops the hammer again and two more sethuresses are blasted flat. The ones that are already down are being pinned by their wing-sisters small arms fire, which is preventing them from effectively covering one another or recharging. They are hunkered down low under the faint remains of their shields, twitching at each hit.

One wing-sethuress remains, shield-arm carefully interposed, and she is shouting something urgently to her boss, still all completely composed despite the sudden reversal. It seems to be something to the effect that he needs to end this quickly so they can run away, and then maybe call in an air-strike, civic monument be damned.