OsakanOne
Retired Member
Lazarus Consortium Sponsored Housing & Research Complex 314 - Nyli System - Planet II
Somewhere Damp
Click Click
Click Click
Click Click
Such a simple sound. A sound that kept echoing down the hall from the open hatch which light spilled from.
Click Click
Click Click
Click Click
There were other sounds. Less pronounced. The steady hum of cooling fans - a small airport of processors humming away. The subtle clatter of a single hand dancing over oldstyle manual input tools. In the background, the omnipresent drone of atmospheric processors and the droning reactor. But there was no light down here, deep beneath the surface of Nyl II, deep beneath her oceans - tainted in silver rendering the water close to sterile, despite the vast swathes of fish, each adapted or immune to its effects through an odd course of evolution.
The silver had however, crystallized around the edges of the research station - climbing like arms towards its ominous center on bonds of silver, pyrite -- fool's gold in Nepleslian tongue -- and oxygen. This stuff grew in fields, as far as the eye could see.
Inside the synthetic shell, occupants were battered with an assault of florescent light or candy-red bathed areas - designated not for entry, most of the complex - like everything Lazarus - automated - with the exception of but eight people. There were of course less punishing sources of light but they were unofficial resources, brought into the housing and research facility by occupant residents.
There were, however, windows. Small portholes that they were, tiny pinpricks of light from the outside. On occasion, they became signalling markers to provide navigation a courtesy to Lorath maritime undersea ships.
Dark. Dreary. But private. Very private.
Their little home sat on the lowest emission source readily available on a fault-line, soaking up geothermal energy driving the intricate processes in action at the research facility, which was almost constantly expanding. It resembled a mass of coral triangular polygonal structures in a massive ring shaped crown, lacking the jewels which would render it complete.
Low emissions meant low-observability.
The jewel in question was still under conceptualization, with a splot for it to be placed. Indeed, that was the purpose of this facility, to dream and develop on a limited scale under everyone’s noses without anybody ever knowing. Specifically, this place was devoted to volatile reactor technology, which an atmosphere couldn’t soak up if anything went wrong - demanding the immense pressures of an ocean.
A muffled cacophony of noise tickled beneath the deck plating onboard - of automated machines scuttling maybe twenty or thirty meters beneath the disgruntled white haired researcher, who sat bored at his work-station, steadily clicking a pen between his fingers between bouts of even more clicking.
He was waiting for the Lazarus server-farm to finish rendering the visual representation and chemical constituancy tests of a set of genomes once subjected to radiation produced by the “demon core” as researchers have called it, though Aurora was her proper name.
"Unnngh... you would think they'd allocate more of those walking computers to this... did I really tick them off that much with that joke a few months ago? I mean really... stealing all of their jumpsuits while they were in interface mode was not too much of a joke, was it?" Miles mused, to his progress-bar before opening a readout to see how many ARIA had been dedicated to his task.
“…A quarter of one!? Out of five thousand… Oh come ON!”
There was a sigh that followed his gripe as he pulled off a pair of slim headphones, the rumble of the things below tickling his ears before he tossed the band aside, moving into the kitchen corner of his little dormitory.
The years had been somewhat kind to Miles Gunn. He had retained his figure from his military days, though his once young and arguably boyish features had been overturned somewhat by age and stress, as the faint hint of white hair follicles that graced his jaw and chin said. It gave a strange intensity to his accented grassy green gaze. None the less, he remained a fine example of a Nepleslian man, as he saw it, justifying this as he reached into the refrigerator for the nectar of his kind:
A beer.
Not that far, two figures sat either side of a kitchen table, a checkered table of black and white with various figures dotted in strange patterns between them. While they seemed so radically different (one a polarized artificial take on the other), a second look would reveal their identical features.
She with the sea-green hair sat staring at the board infront of her.
She with the snowy white sat impatiently.
"Are you going to move or not?" the albino grumbled.
Sana's eyes rose from the board.
"I'll move when I'm ready, Rebbie."
"When you're ready" Rebeka mirrored in rich visceral disappointment, choking on it. Every turn Sana took was so much longer than her own. To her,”ready” never came.
Sana looked aside, regarding Miles with a smile as he joined them that illuminated her features.
"Back so soon? I thought you said it was going to take a while."
“It is taking a while. But its out of my hands. This is why I hate sentient computers. They can be choosy about how they allocate their processing power. Remember the incident last month?”
“Uhhuh?”
“They’ve decided to punish me by choking back my rendering speed to the stone-age” he grumbled, a flick of the lid of his beer-bottle against an attachment of the refrigerator popping his bottle open.
“Now, about ‘taking a while’…How are things here?” Miles quizzed, sat between the two on a bean chair, suckling the froth that rose from his bottle as he took in the game.
“Oooh~ Sana… Looks like you’ve really got her now!”
“Have I?” she stared up. She was pushing a strong position but her expression said she hadn’t realized it. Rebeka biggest problem here was reading the intentions of an inexperienced player.
"Oh goodie." the Sourcian grumbled again.
"...You are joking, right?" Sana smiled, trying to make sense of her position.
Miles turned to Sana and delivered a classic Nepleslian sign of trickery: a wink.
“Not joking at all. I mean, you’ll have her in check within three moves. If you keep this up”
He was of course, spouting total bullshit. To him, it was clear Rebeka would pick up on her position and pull the rug out from under her. Mostly due to those nodes floating within her body, at least some of them devoted entirely to tactical calculations. Afterall, it was one of the few things she was good at.
"So what exactly are you playing with today?" Rebeka asked, her arms crossed. She seemed disappointed in something as she stared at the board.
"Radiation effects on naturally occurring genetic material." Miles explained, as he took a sip of his beer and let out a sigh. "Nothing as fun as I'd like to be doing. Though, it's my expertise, so I can't argue."
"And you'd like to be doing what exactly?"
"Well… I was having fun designing cybernetic components for niche applications, as well as working on biological-mechanical interfaces for that project they've been pumping most of the efforts of the server farm into." Miles spoke, as he gave a shrug; "That, or something really fun, like a gun, or something perverse."
"Perverse?" Sana mirrored. Rebeka decided to keep her mouth shut in this case.
She knew better.
"Perverse. I don't know, maybe some new biological augmentation technology, or I'd really like to revisit that pico-jelly stuff - my own invention, naturally. Maybe embed it with some new materials that would make it more fun. Perhaps even give it some sentience so it could anticipate the user's wants."
"You won't replace me that easily" Rebeka laughed inwardly. It almost hurt.
There was a chuckle from Miles, as he took a pause thanks to Rebeka's commentary. "Hrm.... I don't know, that, or just design a really nice set of cybernetic tits or something." Miles mused, as he let out a laugh.
"We’re perfectly adequate in our aesthetics, thankyou" the Sourcian almost spat, the two returning to the chess-board.
"Who said they were for either of you two? I mean, I can augment Sana the old fashioned way, as for you Rebeka... well... I don't even think that most cybernetics would work on you if it were not for that embedded endoskeleton we added." Miles explained as he scratched his stubble speckled chin.
Rebeka smiled, almost fondly. "Its nice not to wake up in the morning and ooze out of bed." Rebeka thought for a moment. "Not that I sleep. Or have a bed. Oh~! You could give them to that supervisor of yours. The short one who hates shoes."
"She is not my supervisor." Miles spat, almost as if to mirror Rebeka's clearly insulted stance in response to his talk of cybernetic tits.
"I don't like her" Sana grimaced. "...But to be fair, she is a Lorath."
"Now now, that's a bit catty of you, isn't it?" Rebeka leant forward, pinching Sana's cheek. Baby-talk followed. "Youww supposed tow know bettew, bein’ in ~such~ enlightened company, aren't you~?"
"Catty? Don't you mean that guy who followed us around? The small one?" Sana spoke through tightened lips. She grinned, knowing the can of worms and consequent shitstorm she could stir up with this one question. "What was his name?"
"His name is - ..."
"Dico" Rebeka jumped in, speaking over Miles.
"-...Dico. And speaking of him in the past tense is not really accurate, he is still around, he just avoids her." Miles spoke, as he thumbed his finger in Rebeka's direction.
Rebeka's features froze before melting into something of a frown. She was still thinking about him. "He probably has better things to do than put up with the three musketeers" she said, featureless for the moment, her fingers cradling a clouded glass of water.
"Not really, he is still our liaison to the Lorath Matriarchy. Though, I think he just steers clear of you Rebeka because he likes his feathers intact. You did kind of have a thing for plucking them when you were teasing him... and you did that often." Miles recalled, as he gave a soft shrug. "I don't know, leave him a nice note or something, maybe he'll come around."
Rebeka's gaze rose skyward, thinking of the one feather she chose to keep - a particularly large one that sat in an envelope. in a small box under her ribcage. Under lock and key.
"A nice note..."
"Well, its not like you can read" Sana laughed quietly. "Let alone write."
"...So I don't see the same way you do. That doesn't mean I couldn't learn to read."
"So no note, then?"
"I ... Didn't say that."
"But you won't write one, will you? You need to get off your backside and stop feeling sorry for yourself." It seemed Sana's manner matched her chess-game.
Rebeka's shoulders slumped, thinking of the Maras. As they always did. Why did humanoids value such useless skills as reading glyphs encoding phononyms? Couldn’t they read and write a genome, like any intelligent species?
"Why don't you verbally dictate a note?" Miles suggested, his latent engineering mindset lingering into the conversation with the urge to fix the problem.
"...Because I wouldn't be able to proof-read it." Rebeka grumbled, remembering the utter distaste Sana had for dictation - something that she'd inherited.
"Have the computer read it back to you." Miles recommended, as he gave a light sigh. "I mean, that is if they'll be nice enough to do it without giving you trouble."
"I don't think he'd read it anyway." the Sourcian said quietly, watching Sana's hand slide the piece across the board - a queen moved into a position ready to attack a pawn at D7.
Immediately, as if she hadn't even thought about it, Rebeka simply stepped a pawn forward to block whatever advance the queen would have made - a knight defending the position so even if Sana did take the queen, the knight would have her.
Miles gave a laugh "He's a New Tur'listian, all they do is read." with those words though, Miles put his gaze back on the chess board, as he worked out the implications of Sana's move.
"Two moves, seventy three ways." Rebeka stated flatly as she waited the long wait for Sana again. "Your move."
"Hrm... do you two have anything wagered on this little game?" Miles asked, curious if any meddling would result in a dire circumstance.
"Wager?" the two said together. As much as they had their idiosyncrasies, sometimes they were the same person.
"You know... any sort of arrangement of the exchange of some sort of prize which would be awarded to the winner, or some sort of penalty for the loser?" Miles elaborated. "Though, I don't see what we could really wager around here... since money does not really amount to much when you're locked in a can on a sea floor."
"How about...” Rebeka's eyes began exploring the room. They settled, locked squarely on Miles'.
"You."
Sana's posture visibly stiffened. She almost gasped - mouth agape. "Whaat?"
"That simply won't work. Sana has me, and she is keeping me. Plus, I'm not registered with the Lorath Matriarchy's database as a person who is a commodity to be traded or exchanged." There was a laugh from the Nepleslian, as he gave a shake of his head.
"Not an exchange of ownership. Just one night." she said, wondering how Sana would be affected. The green haired girls' knuckles were white. Miles could see she wanted to hit Rebeka.
And then the Sourcian peeked up at Miles.
"Or don't you have faith in your ladyship?"
Miles' face became a bit less amused, as he saw how Sana was affected by Rebeka's rather cruel jabbing. "It would be foolish to place 'faith' into this matter. Especially since you have her at a technical disadvantage due to your ‘unique anatomy’ retaining trace data regarding Sana's problem solving capacity."
'What problem solving capacity?', Rebeka thought to herself.
"Then let's make this fair: Gestalt chess: You and her, implants and all and whatever computing power you can muster, verses me. If I win, I get you for a night. Nothing unsavory - I can’t even act in that capacity - Just talking and maybe something to eat. If she wins..." Rebeka began pondering something to offer in return to keep this interesting.
While Rebeka spoke and pondered, Miles decided that he was going to skip the affair all together, as he picked up the sugar container and gave it a good firm shake in Rebeka's direction. "I politely decline." he spoke as nearly powdered granules of sugar leaped into the air.
Rebeka blew sharply - the granules twisting and flowing away like wind - though they covered the chess-board - Rebeka's black pieces now dotted with flakes of sugar - like the silver pyrite crystals growing on the sea-floor outside.
The Sourcian wrinkled her lips in frustration at the untidiness. Miles had picked up on this obsessive compulsive behavior and had taken to abusing it as of late - since Rebeka didn't respond to verbal threats or sarcasm as a Nepleslian or Yamataian might.
"...We could beat her, though..." Sana grumbled. It was now a matter of pride.
"Then you come up with what you want as a prize if we win." Miles suggested as he looked to Sana. He knew there was going to be almost no arguing with the woman, since she did have a distinctive trace of Nepleslian stubbornness to her.
"What does she even have that we want?"
"Nothing that I can think of."
That stung.
"Charming" Rebeka quietly said.
It was a slow night.
Somewhere Damp
Click Click
Click Click
Click Click
Such a simple sound. A sound that kept echoing down the hall from the open hatch which light spilled from.
Click Click
Click Click
Click Click
There were other sounds. Less pronounced. The steady hum of cooling fans - a small airport of processors humming away. The subtle clatter of a single hand dancing over oldstyle manual input tools. In the background, the omnipresent drone of atmospheric processors and the droning reactor. But there was no light down here, deep beneath the surface of Nyl II, deep beneath her oceans - tainted in silver rendering the water close to sterile, despite the vast swathes of fish, each adapted or immune to its effects through an odd course of evolution.
The silver had however, crystallized around the edges of the research station - climbing like arms towards its ominous center on bonds of silver, pyrite -- fool's gold in Nepleslian tongue -- and oxygen. This stuff grew in fields, as far as the eye could see.
Inside the synthetic shell, occupants were battered with an assault of florescent light or candy-red bathed areas - designated not for entry, most of the complex - like everything Lazarus - automated - with the exception of but eight people. There were of course less punishing sources of light but they were unofficial resources, brought into the housing and research facility by occupant residents.
There were, however, windows. Small portholes that they were, tiny pinpricks of light from the outside. On occasion, they became signalling markers to provide navigation a courtesy to Lorath maritime undersea ships.
Dark. Dreary. But private. Very private.
Their little home sat on the lowest emission source readily available on a fault-line, soaking up geothermal energy driving the intricate processes in action at the research facility, which was almost constantly expanding. It resembled a mass of coral triangular polygonal structures in a massive ring shaped crown, lacking the jewels which would render it complete.
Low emissions meant low-observability.
The jewel in question was still under conceptualization, with a splot for it to be placed. Indeed, that was the purpose of this facility, to dream and develop on a limited scale under everyone’s noses without anybody ever knowing. Specifically, this place was devoted to volatile reactor technology, which an atmosphere couldn’t soak up if anything went wrong - demanding the immense pressures of an ocean.
A muffled cacophony of noise tickled beneath the deck plating onboard - of automated machines scuttling maybe twenty or thirty meters beneath the disgruntled white haired researcher, who sat bored at his work-station, steadily clicking a pen between his fingers between bouts of even more clicking.
He was waiting for the Lazarus server-farm to finish rendering the visual representation and chemical constituancy tests of a set of genomes once subjected to radiation produced by the “demon core” as researchers have called it, though Aurora was her proper name.
"Unnngh... you would think they'd allocate more of those walking computers to this... did I really tick them off that much with that joke a few months ago? I mean really... stealing all of their jumpsuits while they were in interface mode was not too much of a joke, was it?" Miles mused, to his progress-bar before opening a readout to see how many ARIA had been dedicated to his task.
“…A quarter of one!? Out of five thousand… Oh come ON!”
There was a sigh that followed his gripe as he pulled off a pair of slim headphones, the rumble of the things below tickling his ears before he tossed the band aside, moving into the kitchen corner of his little dormitory.
The years had been somewhat kind to Miles Gunn. He had retained his figure from his military days, though his once young and arguably boyish features had been overturned somewhat by age and stress, as the faint hint of white hair follicles that graced his jaw and chin said. It gave a strange intensity to his accented grassy green gaze. None the less, he remained a fine example of a Nepleslian man, as he saw it, justifying this as he reached into the refrigerator for the nectar of his kind:
A beer.
Not that far, two figures sat either side of a kitchen table, a checkered table of black and white with various figures dotted in strange patterns between them. While they seemed so radically different (one a polarized artificial take on the other), a second look would reveal their identical features.
She with the sea-green hair sat staring at the board infront of her.
She with the snowy white sat impatiently.
"Are you going to move or not?" the albino grumbled.
Sana's eyes rose from the board.
"I'll move when I'm ready, Rebbie."
"When you're ready" Rebeka mirrored in rich visceral disappointment, choking on it. Every turn Sana took was so much longer than her own. To her,”ready” never came.
Sana looked aside, regarding Miles with a smile as he joined them that illuminated her features.
"Back so soon? I thought you said it was going to take a while."
“It is taking a while. But its out of my hands. This is why I hate sentient computers. They can be choosy about how they allocate their processing power. Remember the incident last month?”
“Uhhuh?”
“They’ve decided to punish me by choking back my rendering speed to the stone-age” he grumbled, a flick of the lid of his beer-bottle against an attachment of the refrigerator popping his bottle open.
“Now, about ‘taking a while’…How are things here?” Miles quizzed, sat between the two on a bean chair, suckling the froth that rose from his bottle as he took in the game.
“Oooh~ Sana… Looks like you’ve really got her now!”
“Have I?” she stared up. She was pushing a strong position but her expression said she hadn’t realized it. Rebeka biggest problem here was reading the intentions of an inexperienced player.
"Oh goodie." the Sourcian grumbled again.
"...You are joking, right?" Sana smiled, trying to make sense of her position.
Miles turned to Sana and delivered a classic Nepleslian sign of trickery: a wink.
“Not joking at all. I mean, you’ll have her in check within three moves. If you keep this up”
He was of course, spouting total bullshit. To him, it was clear Rebeka would pick up on her position and pull the rug out from under her. Mostly due to those nodes floating within her body, at least some of them devoted entirely to tactical calculations. Afterall, it was one of the few things she was good at.
"So what exactly are you playing with today?" Rebeka asked, her arms crossed. She seemed disappointed in something as she stared at the board.
"Radiation effects on naturally occurring genetic material." Miles explained, as he took a sip of his beer and let out a sigh. "Nothing as fun as I'd like to be doing. Though, it's my expertise, so I can't argue."
"And you'd like to be doing what exactly?"
"Well… I was having fun designing cybernetic components for niche applications, as well as working on biological-mechanical interfaces for that project they've been pumping most of the efforts of the server farm into." Miles spoke, as he gave a shrug; "That, or something really fun, like a gun, or something perverse."
"Perverse?" Sana mirrored. Rebeka decided to keep her mouth shut in this case.
She knew better.
"Perverse. I don't know, maybe some new biological augmentation technology, or I'd really like to revisit that pico-jelly stuff - my own invention, naturally. Maybe embed it with some new materials that would make it more fun. Perhaps even give it some sentience so it could anticipate the user's wants."
"You won't replace me that easily" Rebeka laughed inwardly. It almost hurt.
There was a chuckle from Miles, as he took a pause thanks to Rebeka's commentary. "Hrm.... I don't know, that, or just design a really nice set of cybernetic tits or something." Miles mused, as he let out a laugh.
"We’re perfectly adequate in our aesthetics, thankyou" the Sourcian almost spat, the two returning to the chess-board.
"Who said they were for either of you two? I mean, I can augment Sana the old fashioned way, as for you Rebeka... well... I don't even think that most cybernetics would work on you if it were not for that embedded endoskeleton we added." Miles explained as he scratched his stubble speckled chin.
Rebeka smiled, almost fondly. "Its nice not to wake up in the morning and ooze out of bed." Rebeka thought for a moment. "Not that I sleep. Or have a bed. Oh~! You could give them to that supervisor of yours. The short one who hates shoes."
"She is not my supervisor." Miles spat, almost as if to mirror Rebeka's clearly insulted stance in response to his talk of cybernetic tits.
"I don't like her" Sana grimaced. "...But to be fair, she is a Lorath."
"Now now, that's a bit catty of you, isn't it?" Rebeka leant forward, pinching Sana's cheek. Baby-talk followed. "Youww supposed tow know bettew, bein’ in ~such~ enlightened company, aren't you~?"
"Catty? Don't you mean that guy who followed us around? The small one?" Sana spoke through tightened lips. She grinned, knowing the can of worms and consequent shitstorm she could stir up with this one question. "What was his name?"
"His name is - ..."
"Dico" Rebeka jumped in, speaking over Miles.
"-...Dico. And speaking of him in the past tense is not really accurate, he is still around, he just avoids her." Miles spoke, as he thumbed his finger in Rebeka's direction.
Rebeka's features froze before melting into something of a frown. She was still thinking about him. "He probably has better things to do than put up with the three musketeers" she said, featureless for the moment, her fingers cradling a clouded glass of water.
"Not really, he is still our liaison to the Lorath Matriarchy. Though, I think he just steers clear of you Rebeka because he likes his feathers intact. You did kind of have a thing for plucking them when you were teasing him... and you did that often." Miles recalled, as he gave a soft shrug. "I don't know, leave him a nice note or something, maybe he'll come around."
Rebeka's gaze rose skyward, thinking of the one feather she chose to keep - a particularly large one that sat in an envelope. in a small box under her ribcage. Under lock and key.
"A nice note..."
"Well, its not like you can read" Sana laughed quietly. "Let alone write."
"...So I don't see the same way you do. That doesn't mean I couldn't learn to read."
"So no note, then?"
"I ... Didn't say that."
"But you won't write one, will you? You need to get off your backside and stop feeling sorry for yourself." It seemed Sana's manner matched her chess-game.
Rebeka's shoulders slumped, thinking of the Maras. As they always did. Why did humanoids value such useless skills as reading glyphs encoding phononyms? Couldn’t they read and write a genome, like any intelligent species?
"Why don't you verbally dictate a note?" Miles suggested, his latent engineering mindset lingering into the conversation with the urge to fix the problem.
"...Because I wouldn't be able to proof-read it." Rebeka grumbled, remembering the utter distaste Sana had for dictation - something that she'd inherited.
"Have the computer read it back to you." Miles recommended, as he gave a light sigh. "I mean, that is if they'll be nice enough to do it without giving you trouble."
"I don't think he'd read it anyway." the Sourcian said quietly, watching Sana's hand slide the piece across the board - a queen moved into a position ready to attack a pawn at D7.
Immediately, as if she hadn't even thought about it, Rebeka simply stepped a pawn forward to block whatever advance the queen would have made - a knight defending the position so even if Sana did take the queen, the knight would have her.
Miles gave a laugh "He's a New Tur'listian, all they do is read." with those words though, Miles put his gaze back on the chess board, as he worked out the implications of Sana's move.
"Two moves, seventy three ways." Rebeka stated flatly as she waited the long wait for Sana again. "Your move."
"Hrm... do you two have anything wagered on this little game?" Miles asked, curious if any meddling would result in a dire circumstance.
"Wager?" the two said together. As much as they had their idiosyncrasies, sometimes they were the same person.
"You know... any sort of arrangement of the exchange of some sort of prize which would be awarded to the winner, or some sort of penalty for the loser?" Miles elaborated. "Though, I don't see what we could really wager around here... since money does not really amount to much when you're locked in a can on a sea floor."
"How about...” Rebeka's eyes began exploring the room. They settled, locked squarely on Miles'.
"You."
Sana's posture visibly stiffened. She almost gasped - mouth agape. "Whaat?"
"That simply won't work. Sana has me, and she is keeping me. Plus, I'm not registered with the Lorath Matriarchy's database as a person who is a commodity to be traded or exchanged." There was a laugh from the Nepleslian, as he gave a shake of his head.
"Not an exchange of ownership. Just one night." she said, wondering how Sana would be affected. The green haired girls' knuckles were white. Miles could see she wanted to hit Rebeka.
And then the Sourcian peeked up at Miles.
"Or don't you have faith in your ladyship?"
Miles' face became a bit less amused, as he saw how Sana was affected by Rebeka's rather cruel jabbing. "It would be foolish to place 'faith' into this matter. Especially since you have her at a technical disadvantage due to your ‘unique anatomy’ retaining trace data regarding Sana's problem solving capacity."
'What problem solving capacity?', Rebeka thought to herself.
"Then let's make this fair: Gestalt chess: You and her, implants and all and whatever computing power you can muster, verses me. If I win, I get you for a night. Nothing unsavory - I can’t even act in that capacity - Just talking and maybe something to eat. If she wins..." Rebeka began pondering something to offer in return to keep this interesting.
While Rebeka spoke and pondered, Miles decided that he was going to skip the affair all together, as he picked up the sugar container and gave it a good firm shake in Rebeka's direction. "I politely decline." he spoke as nearly powdered granules of sugar leaped into the air.
Rebeka blew sharply - the granules twisting and flowing away like wind - though they covered the chess-board - Rebeka's black pieces now dotted with flakes of sugar - like the silver pyrite crystals growing on the sea-floor outside.
The Sourcian wrinkled her lips in frustration at the untidiness. Miles had picked up on this obsessive compulsive behavior and had taken to abusing it as of late - since Rebeka didn't respond to verbal threats or sarcasm as a Nepleslian or Yamataian might.
"...We could beat her, though..." Sana grumbled. It was now a matter of pride.
"Then you come up with what you want as a prize if we win." Miles suggested as he looked to Sana. He knew there was going to be almost no arguing with the woman, since she did have a distinctive trace of Nepleslian stubbornness to her.
"What does she even have that we want?"
"Nothing that I can think of."
That stung.
"Charming" Rebeka quietly said.
It was a slow night.
