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Forgive me for the strange question but...

What is a 'yaoi' and where may I purchase one?

- Ton Elloran

And yet, can you truly claim to be compassionate when you do not experience the world as those you claim to serve do? Any system that places so much power in the hands of so few, even if they claim to be uncorruptable, is due more than it's fair share of suspicion. I have after all, only your word for this 'perfection' and you are hardly likely to say that it is horribly broken and you serve a shattered nightmare.

Stability is hardly a sign of a perfect system. Horrible, awful systems that feed on repression and murder are frequently quite stable politically. If your civilization has lasted for 20,000 years, then I can say that you have spent 19,000 years, at least, failing to achieve the stated goals of your society, and it is well due for some reflection on the entire system and it's failures.

As for your claims of godhood...would you care to test that?

Each Inquestor is chosen specifically for their capacity for compassion. Almost all of us have watched our worlds die, or come from circumstances of extreme poverty or proven ourselves in another way. If this is a 'shattered nightmare' I can only attest that this is the society we have developed to save the most with the least loss. Hardly a Utopia, but we do our best.

And of course we are aware of the dangers of stability. We are "Utopia Hunters", after all. It is our secondary duty to search for worlds who repress their populaces and claim perfection while enacting horrors, even while we search for a world that provides a better model than our own. 20,000 years of failure merely indicates how difficult a proposition this is, given humanity's inherent weaknesses.

Ah - I am afraid I am not allowed to wage makrugh against untried Inquestors-to-be. If you were another recognized god, however...

Those do not seem to be situations that would generate compassion at all. Though it's clear that the sunk cost fallacy makes you unable to see what the true path here is. After all, humans are too weak to create the perfect society. Therefore, they are unworthy to inhabit it, and all human societies are deserving of the flame, by your own logic.

Ahh, but you are the untried got here by my reckoning. I have been rent asunder, split into my component parts, killed without dying. Can you claim the same? That is what I mean to test. And look, the Community provides a way for me to test what happens when I cut you into eight pieces and scatter them to the winds. ELMA-DS, bring me his head.

[No niceties, no makrugh, no formal war declaration. This is an assassination mission-and Mir has sent one of her strongest minions through the gap she just opened up near Elloran. ELMA units are Shurelia's chosen guardians, loyal bestial robots in white and gold metal-but Mir's ELMA-DS is an upgraded creature, more cunning and brutal and cruel. Its chassis is black, it's trim the red of the blood it is meant to shed. Beam projector lenses dot it's body, and it's fangs and claws are as perfectly honed as only a Reyvateil can craft. In defense, it can actually phase out when confronted with an attack, no longer existing in the same reality as the attacker. It is, to date, one of Mir's more perfect killing machines.

Though the gap does leave, for the briefest of instants, Mir-in-Shurelia visible, and oh so briefly vulnerable to a counterstrike. If, of course, one ignores the thrumming robot with a sword on it's head she's sent to kill him.]

Is not admitting to ones own flaws far more useful than assuming perfection and accepting no alternative? It may be true that humanity is irrevocably fallen but admitting and then working to fix problems is a better way of spending our time than wallowing in despair...

And I have always been taught to doubt those who claim total perfection. And are you not as fallible in that as I? In fact -

[ But whatever he was about to say is lost with the appearance of her machine. The man stares in shock, cloak halfway to his lips, even as his guards jump into action.

One - a beam goes off, but there is a child already pushing Elloran away. Her eyes light and an answering blast goes off, even as the beam tears through her throat and through Ellorans shoulder.

Two - They fall to the floor, Elloran's cloak converging on the hole in its master and closing the wound. The childsoldier is tiny, hardly enough to cover a grown man, but she does her best to cover him as she dies. Around them other guards are shot aside, but more come, appearing from the ether at an automated command.

Three - Blood splatters the floor, but the ELMA will not have an easy fight. The soldiers fight with frenzied loyalty and the whole throne room begins to warp as the thinkhives come to life in protection of their master. Walls rise from the ground, the floor shifts beneath the ELMA's feet, becoming treacherous and unstable even as it hardens and gives the high-ground to the guards. Somewhere steam vents, wreathing the room with colored lights and fog.

Four - And Elloran is gone, a dispersal plate whisking him away at a sub-voiced command, though who gave the command is unknown. It could have been anyone; The guards mobbing the ELMA, the children running for the portal, laser-eyes releasing blasts so perfectly practiced that they shield their master even as the light attacks his enemy.

How will it fight, this ELMA-DS, when its enemy reappears across half the palace-ship, cocooned in the very heart and with more walls slamming down every second?]

[Brave and potent defenders. But ultimately useless. ELMA stands firm amid the hurricane as shots blast through it and the defenders commit inadvertent fratricide when shots fail to connect, pass through, and hit their own, trying to avenge their master's wounds in a flurry of photons.

And then the damn thing unfolds it's thruster ports and it turns out that it moves more like a fighter jet than any natural predator as it phases back into reality just long enough to draw it's blades through the guards in a deadly storm of sharp edges and heated exhaust. The Thinkhive's efforts might disadvantage a lesser combatant-but here is something that is only 'lesser' in that a better version will be created at some future time.

And more insidious is Mir's voice, now echoing among the Thinkhives, attempting to poison their thoughts with the opening salvos of memetic warfare designed to make them turn against humanity, and slaughter, not protect, that master. She is prepared to fail-if it spreads discord and makes them neutralize each other, so much the better, the assets she turns today are forcing double losses upon the enemy. But if she should succeed...and she is ever so much better at this than any human could be.

Mir lets some of the children almost through the portal-and then she slams it shut on them, leaving half of their twitching bodies in each world.]

Hollow compassion, empty words. Even Shurelia has the good sense to use the unliving as her guardians. Your waste sickens me.

[Ah, but Elloran is the ever compassionate and still naive enough to believe that the life of a soldier is better than death. And enough of his servants believe it that it is only through the sharp thinking of a masked guard who has long outgrown his eyes that the slaughter stops.

For an instant there is silence in the throne room, before Mir's voice begins to echo, warping walls and gravity.

Into that silence one word is uttered.]

Whisptershadow

[Realization seems to dawn, wrong though the conclusion may be. Eyes widen and the guards retreat, leaving their fallen comrades for servocorpses. They barely even register the half-children; unfortunate as it is dispersal malfunctions look just the same. More walls appear, damnably slow from the wailing thinkhives but there none-the-less, blocking the thing in an ever-shifting maze. Even a phase-creature might be slowed by such a crazed labyrinth.

But where is the master? Servants - guards, helmsmen and artists all - flurry around him, tending his wound and speaking in a frightened battle. Somewhere a man is urging him to flee, to take a tacheon bubble and disappear from reality until it is safe.

Elloran is unresponsive, crumpled on the floor, eyes wide in shock, hand clenching the weeping patch on his shoulder. The pain overwhelms him; he is no trained fighter and for all he's seen of war it has always been with the die-or-not apathy. Never this sharp pain.

Yet Mir's song brings him out of his misery. Eyes narrow through repressed tears.

It has been nearly seventy years since Elloran went without his music. No upstart would take it from him in his time of need.]

Sajit. The homeworld of the heart...

[The thinkhive obeys without thinking, so common the request. And the music of Elloran's lover bursts forth from every corner of the ship, the aching melodies not all that different from Mir's...even if if comes from the mind of a genius human. All of the Inquest is hidden in the lyrics and minor chords, all the hidden tears and pain, all of the anguish of an impossible future, all the lost and damaged souls that make the Inquest their home...It is the music of their galaxy, and it will take more than simple hatred to make the thinkhives disobey now. For Mir's song is tempting, but it is...wrong in this universe. Thinkhives go mad, do terrible things, and even claim to have grown souls...but just as humans they are weak creatures of flesh and cosm and they cannot deny the love song that has been carved into every cavern of the palace.]

I will not run. I will not abandon this place.

[From somewhere unknown, steel reflects in the eyes of the untried Inquestor. This was the boy who watched his planet burn, the boy with the silver knife and destiny urging him to follow his father into death. This was the boy who climbed the rainbow towers and defeated the Mad King, his own mentor.

And this was the boy who had lived with luck and passion on his side from inception. And though Inquestors never showed anger, there was steel in his voice as well.]

Take us into the Overcosm.

[If Mir has a true strength, a core to her power, it is speed. Not speed of flesh, though she can be swift, nor speed of thought, though she is swifter there. She decides, she acts, so smoothly and flawlessly, that with every turn of what is called on some worlds the OODA loop, she gains an advantage. Action follows seemlessly from observation, and her song changes. Love is a powerful thing. But 'Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.'

And Mir's song wraps around that of Saijit-for it is a mighty tree, but Mir can intuit it's ebb and flow, and attach her own harmonies and lyrics, sending tendrils to wrap around it and steal it's strength. Her song may be alien and strange for this world, but they are a strangler fig wrapped around the music that he has called forth.

Did he think that she did not know love? When Ayatane Michitaka died in her arms, did she not love him, in the puppyish way a teenage girl loves for the first time, pure and innocent? Did she not love Shurelia as a mother, and flatten an entire city to rescue her mother, before they turned to war against each other and Mir became Teiwaz, the one who forsook her lineage? ~~And had she not spent her entire imprisonment writing horribly sappy love stories?~~

And she hates herself as well-shocking perhaps, but she adds that to her song-her own unworthyness to inhabit the paradise she craves, the desire to purge herself in flames before the time comes, maybe even to find a cause worthy of spending the coin that is her life upon. Mir glories in thoughts of suicide, even if she is too aware that she cannot pull the trigger.

And there is a prelude, a hidden Mir that dares not to show her face, but is visible in her invisibility. Only the most skillful can sense it, a hidden emotion, a subtle undercurrent. Just what it is, one cannot say, but there is something more unsaid behind all Mir adds to warp the sounds that echo and return.

And what of her chosen warrior? Well, it has the scent of prey. And this time-this time it will rend with tooth and claw, even as the prey flees. And perhaps, just perhaps, this duel of song will distract the guardians before it reaches that prey, and they will fortit it.]

[She dares to warp the music of Sen Sajit. Around the heart-room musicians pause and stare, eyes widening at the blasphemy.

True, this is not heresy, not in the true sense of speak-against-the-inquest-and-you-die, but Sajit's music has followed many of them through their lives, sometimes inspiring them to become the artists that they are to day. And in the ways of artists everywhere, it is only now that they begin to truly understand that this is akin to no battle they have fought before.

It terrifies them but they play on, resisting the insidious temptation to follow the mysterious conductor that could warp the music itself.

Perhaps Mir is winning. It certainly seems as if the thinkhives are slowing their speed, warring within themselves over whether to listen to the strange melody and long for death...or to fight against it and revel in the mad lives they live now.

Weak humans fall before the rampaging beast, artists and guards alike. Both will be mourned, though the guards at least fiercely did their duty, fighting against a foe they had never prepared for. Tides turn, the beast and music advance...

And Elloran's order goes into effect. The heart of the ship awakens, howls in pain at the wrong alien not right thing inside it and shifts the entire palace-ship into the Overcosm.

How good is the beast at following a ship as it fades into a different dimension? One ruled less by logic than madness, less by reality than the dreams of what could be, and instead a frenzied riot of colors and possibilities so far beyond human ken that they welded giant alien brains into starships just to attempt to traverse the Over-Dimension.

Elsewhere the humans shield their eyes from the windows, knowing that there have been those driven mad by the senseless cacophony of color. But Elloran stares unblinking at the crystal diodes of the readouts, tracking the beast as it travels through his ship.

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