Egress Act 3: Labyrinthine

Prologue

Zeta (ζ, Ζ) — ze/zir/zirs
Viziergender, Antagonistgender

Iota (ι, Ι) — fae/faer/faer
Shrinekeepergender, Fairygender

🎶 card shark | HamHamBone

Virtual playing cards swim, staccato statically, across your retinal surfaces, projected in high-definition from the visorplate of your streaming-grade RZ headset. The quality of the gear only makes the eyestrain worse. Your horns itch. Timeline connections jump frantically from card to card, scrambling your sense of causality. New timelines burst forth into writhing new life, only to be Omega’ed out a moment later. Your RZspace setup’s doll-sized virtual helper daemons scurry back and forth, attempting to assert order onto the chaos. It isn’t working.

You will try again. You’ll beat this stupid game and escape realspace for good. There is nothing for you there, anyway.

Your real body sweats under your really cool and stylish zetapattern jacket. Another flare from the shattered homeworld below makes the climate control dynamos elsewhere in the station wheeze and sputter and struggle.

Your face twists into a snarl. This sucks!

Indigo Daemon: You do know that this is suboptimal gameplay, do you not, my student?

One of the daemons has turned to stare at you from within RZ space. Faer indigo carapace glowing lightly, an island of pleasant calm within the spiraling lights of all the fucked up timelines. It is blindfolded and has fairy-wings. Iota-gender. A mockery of your old streaming RZsona. A facade of a facade.

You see through the provocation immediately, and you force your voice to a cool sneer.

Xzyona: ¡ $uppose you’re here to te@ch me some lesson?

You aren’t sure which of the Object, Link, or Node in your Regent grid came with this annoying little datalife hanger-on. Clearly some sort of memetic ephemera, something one of the prinsects of the Communion cooked up for fun, then abandoned for some other cruel game. It scares you a little that none of the tricks that you typically use to counter memesis work on fae. You want to do a full grid purge to rid yourself of the pest, but keep getting interrupted by being future-murdered in ways as variable as the timelines you seek to master.

The creature’s insistence that fae is your mentor gets under your skin, as much as you wish it didn’t. It reminds you of the bad old days of your first chrysalis, where you wished and wished for some assigned guardian. Some memesis impulse directed at someone like you that would finally let you know where you actually fit in. You outgrew that. You’re over that.

The daemon has fluttered over to hover a few meters from your face.

Indigo Daemon: Oh no. Oh no oh no. You, my little impostor, have already failed me. Utterly. I’m simply going to help you.

Indigo Daemon: I assure you, any personal growth for you that comes of this situation is ancillary.

Indigo Daemon: I had thought that, with my guidance, you might ascend to true mastery of the ludo-narrative

Indigo Daemon: Or at least a passible semblance of control.

Indigo Daemon: No longer. You are no more capable of changing your true nature than your genitor.

You grit your teeth. You hate that the daemon knows about… her.

Xzyona: Fuck off!

Xzyona: I$ thi$ really wh@t we’re do¡ng now?

Xzyona: @nd your “gen¡tor” (fuck¡ng we¡rd btw) L o o o ve$ chomp¡ng down on @$$.

Indigo Daemon: Just so.

Indigo Daemon: Ha ha.

You seethe. You can’t believe that are letting a fucking RZ virus tilt you this badly.

Indigo Daemon: Don’t you think that these toys are getting in the way?

The daemon’s sneer vanishes, replaced by the solemn clerical affect of the perfect Iota-Gender. A simple vessel of communication and control - God to Chimera, Chimera to God.

Indigo Daemon: The Panoply is already an artifact of penultimate power, crafted directly by the Titans.

Indigo Daemon: Mere chimeric inventions can only hope cloud the spark of light gifted to it therby.

You laugh at the Daemon, trying to dispel the panicking-rising-trapped-in-a-maze feeling you have been suppressing for the past month (or… how long has it been?)

Xzyona: H@h@h@h@! R¡ght, of cour$e. ¡’d love to see the l¡ttle heret¡c grub that made you @scend to the throne. ¡t’d be @lmo$t funny to see the whole Commun¡on f@ll apart.

The Daemon doesn’t say anything, just smiles widely, as wide as the trickster yoka wolf, then vanishes in a glittering puff of fairydust.

You are left alone in a dizzying hell of cards.

You close your eyes against the collidescopic glitter being beamed directly into your retinas. After a long moment, you yank the headset off of your head, returning your awareness to your cramped and messy respiteblock, strewn with useless streaming equipment, compute-screens wired directly (and illegally) into the station’s circuits, old instameal containers, and dirty laundry. Your old iotaplume robes lie crumpled in a corner, contrasting with the messy hard-edge stylish zetapattern you currently sport.

You turn the RZ visor over in your hands. It is stylized as an ancient helm, like something 3D modeled by an historiRealplay enthusiast, etched with indecipherable symbology and punctured by custom-fit horn-holes.

You form an RZ command with your hand.

~ ~ All linked orbs will be lost. ~ ~
Are you sure?

It only takes a few commands to the Regent game interface to decompose the visor into its component Objects:

You ignore the RZ and the core and pull the Panoply off your desk. Holding it in your palm, you feel the slightest prickle of electrostatic charge as it probes your nervous system.

The daemon wasn’t lying, the Panoply really is titancraft. It is extremely illegal for you to even touch this artifact — if you were found out, you would be executed ­— or worse. You are pretty sure that you can’t be Entombed, but with enough time, some faceless Pi in the ministeriat could probably find a way. Good thing that you’ll never get caught!

And besides, you found and claimed the Panoply fair and square. The deck belongs to you now.

You’re angry. The panoply is sensitive. You know the frustration you are exuding will interfere with the draw, drown out the other factors. A malformed draw is how you die. Again.

You take a deep breath. You stare blankly at the wall, at the corrosion spots. Another deep breath. A light flickers. You close your eyes.

You feel marginally calmer. Whatever. Close enough.

You shuffle the deck, concentrating on your goal and desires as you methodically shuffle the cards. You will try again. From the beginning.

You draw the top card. The Acorn. When you release it, it wobbles a little before stabilizing, suspended against the stations rotational agrav. You pull another card, and according to the rules of the ancient arts of ludo-augury passed down by the iota from ancient times, place it adjacent to the first.

A labyrinth of cards grows. With the spread of the cards, your understanding grows as well. You place a finger on the root card, and, with the maze splayed out in front of you, trace a path to victory.

It starts with the Acorn. You know exactly who that is.

You jam the now mundane RZ headset back on your head, connect to the Rhizome, and select miniaturizedAdjutant from your friend list.

On a world orbiting a star some tens of lightyears distant, in the pocket of another weird teen, an aging and dented pocket RZ vibrates with an incoming message.