Cloak and Dagger

The second drone’s explosion is much like the first. It bathes Dirt in a fierce light, sharpening the shadows of the cabin into razors. Dirt knows it would be physically impossible, but he swears he can feel the heat of the blast as surely as flames licking his skin and feathers. If that weren’t strange enough, he is certain that the sound of the blast (also impossible in the vacuum of space) contains something almost musical within it. Bells— it sounded like bells. Like chiming bells and someone giggling beneath them.

Now there was another sound, not musical but sharp and urgent and soft but growing louder, like a door-knocker or an alarm or someone yelling—

"DIRT!!!"

And then there is a jerk as Zrain briefly overrides the controls and makes a hard starboard swerve, narrowly avoiding a shard of shrapnel just big enough to clip their wings in a collision.

"Dirt, you good??"

There’s a beep and a green light on Dirt’s console as Zrain hands the controls back.

"S-Sensor data coming in… second drone came at us from the asteroid cluster. That must mean the flag is by the nebula. L-Laying in a course now.

Zrain is obviously as awed and impressed by Dirt’s piloting as ever, and likely more, but he is also obviously a little shaken by Dirt’s erratic behavior, almost more so in contrast to his uncanny skill. He’s always known his friend to be a bit odd at times, but the mission thus far has shown him, up close, a side of Dirt Ziawk he has previously only glimpsed from a distance.

This time, Yoshi’s table greets him with small, seated bows. Respectful, if not necessarily warm. They accept their food without complaint, and promptly forgot about Yoshi’s existence entirely.

All the better for Yoshi to eavesdrop on Sable while he works. At the moment, the bat’o seems to be reading back the "order" so far.

"So, we have… five pans of the crab, two swordfish, three of the red snapper… "

"The mushrooms," adds the guard.

"Yes, thank you, one pan of stuffed mushroom—ah, you’re gonna really enjoy those I think— and then, uh.. just the one unagi, yes? And you’re sure I can’t persuade you on more? A brace at least…"

"We’ll only need the one," Sable answers, rather smugly in Yoshi’s estimation.

The bat’o merchant gives a cold chuckle.

"Have you given any thought to the soup? Delicious and nutritious. And essential if there’s any chance of the party dragging on longer than anticipated."

Sable looks back at the menu, finds his place with a feather-tip, and reads silently for a moment.

"Right you are," he replies grimly, "Two egg-drop, and one spicy garlic. No, two of each."

"Excellent. And will you be needing any additional wait-staff?"

"No, we have our own people."

"Naturally," the bat’o chuckles again. "Well, then… I suppose that is that. Your order will be ready for you in two nights, at the kitchen in the old athletic club on Deck 2. Payment on delivery."

With that, the merchant holds out a dark-furred claw to Sable. Sable looks at it, takes a deep breath, and shakes it.

"But one last question," says the bat in a low voice, gripping the prince’s hand tight and drawing him in close. "Tell me truly. Why now? What was it finally opened up Old Corvid’s eyes?"

Prince Sable looks down at the table for a moment, saddened or suddenly weary, but then he grits his beak in anger and meets the bat’o’s searching gaze directly.

"The Lady Lyria was my grandmother’s favorite niece. And even if she wasn’t, the Corvidae always repay slight for slight. Always."

"Naturally," the bat’o says again, releasing the Prince’s hand. "Family is everything isn’t it?

"Everything."

And with that, the three men begin to rise and collect their things. The Blue Jay, taking note, drains the rest of his glass as well.

"Uh oh…"

It isn’t Yoshi’s favorite thing to hear come out of Mellie’s mouth.

"Oh come on, who the gila needs a closet that locks from the inside?? Bro, I’m trapped! I might could pick the lock but it’ll take a minute."

Dirt blinks and shakes his head. What the heck is that music? He had a strong urge to rip off his helmet and jam a finger in his ear to shake out the noise, but he had to admit, the tone wasn't necessarily as unpleasant as it was unwanted.

Wait. That ringing... Alarms. Shit, shit shit. Not good. And God damn, it is hot in here! Dirt realizes he's breathing in sharp, fast breathes, his heart hammering in his chest. What the fuck is happening to me!

He breathes. In through the nose, his training reminds him, out through the mouth. In through the nose...

The tightness eases in his chest and the ringing bell recedes enough for Dirt to hear a voice yelling—it's Zrain, only he sounds like he's shouting from the end of a long drainage pipe, his voice echoing over itself with overlapping duplicates.

Fucking hell, he thinks. Zrain... He's probably freaking out. And rightfully so. Was he having some sort of mental breakdown? Did he have time to think about this right now? Probably not. He tries his best to focus on friend's words. Yup. Not good, he thinks. Gotta say something smart. Something reassuring. God, his brain was so foggy.

Dirt takes a deep breath, and of all things, it's the music--that ringing bell--that slides the perfect solution into his mind.

Dirt holds up a gloved hand over his head so Zrain could see it behind behind him, then rocks out a set of devil horns. "Rock and roll, baby!" he shouts to Zrain. "Rock. And. Rolllll!"

For a moment, Zrain only stares, even wider-eyed than usual. Then, he breaks into a bout of nervous laughter followed by several seconds of vaguely hysterical hooting and cackling.

"Rock and Roll, Z-Hawk," he shouts, returning Dirt’s devil-horns.

Dirt sails through the great clearing toward the nebulae that mark the ultimate limit of the fleet’s training course. Due to the peculiarities of the ancient subspace pathways that brought him here, Dirt realizes that in this moment he is likely the furthest living thing from Cybele Station without a warp engine. Without the Emperor’s Roads, it would take Dirt days to return home from out here… but in the opposite direction, he knows that his very bones would have long crumbled to dust before his ship ever came within the reach of another being’s sensors. This was truly the end of the world, and the beginning of the gulf between worlds.

The surface of the nebula is a deep, undulating indigo, flecked throughout with micro-storms of hot violet. It reminds Dirt of the surface of the Terran oceans in the Human films his father loves so much. It isn’t hard for him to understand, pondering the nebula’s fathomless interior, how the seas had come to command such fear and reverence among ancient sailors.

"There’s an island of sorts coming up, Zrain reports, "a Class 2 asteroid half-in and half-out of the nebula. That’s where our flag should be. Coming into view now… hold on, what the hell?"

As the island comes into view, Dirt sees the issue: the flag is already gone.

"I don’t get it…" Zrain mutters, "they should have replaced the flag after Kwiark left with the old one. But if the flag and its beacon are gone, then what was transmitting their signal?"

A moment later, Zrain gets his answer. Something— a rock, a ship, no… a creature— breaks the surface of the gaseous ocean like a breaching whale, arcing its impossibly long, serpentine body over the island of the missing flag like a rainbow. Though silent in space as the exploding drones, Dirt can hear the beast’s shuddering, shattering roar deep in the foundations of his soul. Then, just as he feels that his heart can sink no lower, Dirt spies the fluttering tail of the flag, its pole jammed between two tectonic scales near the creature’s fiery gills.

"N-no way…" Zrain whispers. "No freaking way…"

Space Worm. Gas Dragon. Moon-Eater. The ancient reptilian empire had once bred them for warhorses and siege engines, supposedly. In Avian myth, it was these Hell-Eels which once devoured the light of the sun and drove the bird-gods into the caves seeking warmth, where some of them changed and became the first bat’o. A dozen names for the same nightmare made flesh, if flesh one can even call it. They had also supposedly been extinct for millennia.

"It— It must have brushed up against the island and caught the flag…" Zrain says at last, seeming to hardly believe in the reality of the situation. "We— we don’t have to get it. We can’t. No one could possibly expect us to."

Reaching the apex of its arc, the beast begins its descent. Soon it will plunge back into the darkness of the nebula.

Two cups of the soup and an order of mantis fritters — Yoshi drops them off at their table, thinking grimly that if this ninja music-producer thing ever failed to pan out, at least he could always fall back on fine dining.

Hardly an instant after Yoshi’s phantom cacophony breaks out across the restaurant, Prince Sable is shoved down into the booth by his first guard, the crow, who simultaneously spins on one foot and draws some kind of handheld weapon from the inside of his dark robes. The blue jay draws something similar, rising from the bar. Their attentions are trained entirely on the kitchen doors.

In the bartender’s hands, a military-grade energy rifle has appeared as naturally as if it had been a tumbler of scotch. He hops over the bar and creeps toward the source of the noise, to which has been added a chorus of confused shouts from the back of house staff.

The lock on the closet door proves tricky, but not tricky enough for Yoshi’s deft hands. He gets it open quickly and quietly, and feels more than sees the nearly imperceptible form of Mellie, darting past him and towards the front entrance. Yoshi follows him, his departure apparently unnoticed by the alarmed gangsters.

Several blocks from Mountain Bird, Yoshi finally pauses, ducking into an alley out of sight from the main road. After a moment or two of catching his breath, Yoshi detects a faint shimmer in the air. Mellie’s form materializes as if from nothing, and he too takes a moment to breathe.

"Holy Smokes…" he gasps, "that was pretty freaking close, bro."

Yoshi is just about to agree when it suddenly occurs to him what it is that’s been tugging at the back of his mind ever since they first got to the restaurant and couldn’t spot the third guard, the thing that’s been off this whole time that he couldn’t quite put his finger on: he’s casting one too many shadows. The extra silhouette stretching out from his feet, across the ground and partially up the wall, suddenly melts up into three dimensions, taking on depth and definition until the fully-realized body of a black-clad Shad’i assassin stands before him. Her wrists, face, and feet are all bound in dark cloth and decorated with fine silver chains, and her great leathery ears twitch to and fro, one following Yoshi and the other his companion at all times.

"You’re good, I’ll give you that," says the bat, "but I cannot allow to you to walk away with those captured images, or with the memory of my Lord’s conversation. Therefore, I will only take his camera… and your head."

"A shadowcaster," Mellie whispers… "no wonder we couldn’t spot her."

The assassin spreads her arms, and from the darkness of her sleeves emerge two wicked, jet-black blades.

"You— You’re crazy," Zrain says, "but you’re also the best pilot I’ve ever seen. The best I’ve ever heard of. Now let’s get that hooting flag."

As Dirt approaches the beast, it becomes increasingly difficult to hold the craft steady against the waves of radiating plasma that seem to surround the creature like a robe.

"Holy— Dirt, the wake on this thing could scuttle us, easy. I think if I can manually pulse our shields to match its frequency, I can nullify the force, but I won’t be able to assist with any other maneuvers!"

"Such arrogance…" chides the assasssin.

Mellie audibly gulps. "I don’t know, geck," he mutters, "she looks pretty tough. You know I’m no heavy hitter… what should I do?"

The assassin frowns, lowering her covered eyes and focusing her ears more intently in response to Yoshi’s illusion.

"So, this is how you fooled the others in the restaurant…I see that you have reason for your confidence."

Suddenly, her frown becomes a snarl.

"I will teach you the meaning of humility."

The assassins arms flash out like the twin tails of some awful scorpion, flinging her dark daggers at the two orochi with blinding speed. Yoshi barely has time to adjust his angle so that the blade only partially punctures his armored side, sinking into his flesh with a cold thud. Meanwhile, the dagger aimed at Mellie pierces the dead-center of his tail, pinning him to the ground and causing him to hiss in pain.

Dirt guides his craft closer and closer to the beast, penetrating the dangerous wake carefully but with all the power and endurance of a salmon climbing a waterfall. The cockpit is bathed in shifting waves of psychedelic light, and Dirt’s head swims with the surreality of it all. In the little round mirror in the corner of his dash he can see his co-pilot’s face frozen, beak agape, in a silent hoot of awe.

The flag creeps nearer and nearer.

Then, a shudder runs through Dirt’s body as he feels the ship’s claw close around the haft of the flag in an adamantine grip. He’s done it. Now, to the task of removing it.

"Roc damnit," Zrain whispers, looking down at the tension-dials with an expression of dread. "It’s in there good… somehow I don’t think it’s noticed us yet, but it sure might if we have to rip this thing out like a fish-hook."

Dirt tests the data with a gentle nudge to the stick. It’s true — the thing doesn’t budge. Getting it out without potentially causing a wound and drawing the beast’s attention could take more time than Dirt has before the whole lot of them plunge back beneath the brilliant and terrifying surface of the nebula.

And there’s something else… beneath the space-mites crawling and teeming within the moon-eater’s scales, past the cluster of beating dragon-hearts within the womb… But Dirt can’t quite put his feather on it. It’s a sensation that is totally alien to him. And wrong.

Yoshi’s feint works precisely as intended. The assassin parries an illusory head-kick and then spins to evade a non-existent lunge only for Yoshi’s knee to catch her full in the side, knocking the wind from her."‘Zilla, I hate doing this," Mellie moans with a sickened expression. Then, he separates from his impaled tail with a pop and scampers to collect himself.Hardly an instant passes between the assassin’s grunt of surprise at Yoshi’s landed strike, and the whisper of her dark sleeves as she throws a hand up towards Yoshi’s face, hurling a dark powder into his eyes…

…Or at least she meant to. Instead, the mysterious powder blows through one of the clones and adheres to the face of the alley wall behind it, obscuring one of Governor Zimius’s campaign posters. The lingering miasma of toxic shadow around the governor’s pompous mug makes Yoshi inwardly bless the teacher whose techniques kept it out of his own.

"Curse you," the bat hisses, "and damn your tricks. Who are you, and why do you haunt my Lord? You are no Imperial lapdog…

The assassin scowls as her ears flick confusedly between the two clones, but at the last second they both point toward the real Yoshi and she ducks beneath his blow, spinning on one heel and flinging another dagger out from the darkness of her robes at the fleeing Mellie. Time and Yoshi’s heart alike come to a complete stop as the dark blade crosses Mellie’s shoulder… but a moment later the blade has glanced away and clattered to the ground having left only a thin line of red along his neck, and his camera-strap dangling by a thread.

Mellie’s complex yelp of surprise, pain, panic, and relief is the last thing Yoshi hears of him before he once again seems to blink out of existence, his powers of invisibility activated. The assassin curses again.

"The empire is rotten to the core already," she says. "But if you truly do not serve it, then you are nothing more than common gangsters, making the biggest mistake of your careers. A pity. You likely could have made a real name for yourself someday."

The assassin’s bandaged feet slide across the hard ground as she wides her stance and raises her hands, squared-up facing Yoshi. She seems to have conceded Mellie’s escape, at least for the moment.

"Very well. If you will not answer with words, do so with fists. One language is as good as another."

Dirt’s scrutiny bears fruit as he follows the shadow of illness in the dragon’s body to its source: some kind of tap or shunt directly into the beast’s nervous system. But how to help? Was help possible?

The answer comes to him like a voice shouting from a great distance, telling him to pay more attention to the scale beneath which the flag is so firmly wedged. He realizes first that the scale bears an odd pattern in relation to its neighbors, and then that it is almost certainly —no, absolutely— related to the dark shadow over the spine, like a bad tooth to its rotten root. Finally, Dirt realizes that the odd pattern on the diseased scale is no pattern at all, but a design, and one that he has seen before — on the odd buckle pushed into his hands by the curious little crabling from the records office: the serpent-encircled eye.

Then, everything goes purple, as worm and ship alike plunge beneath the surface of the nebula. Behind him, Zrain stares goggle-eyed at his displays, making vague hoots of shock and confusion.

"I— this is— what?!"

But Dirt can only hear him in the most technical sense, his mind literally elsewhere, soaring not through space but through alien tissues and veins. Time seems to stand still as the problem and solution are revealed to him in one urgent flash of inspiration: the flag needs to come out, and it needs to come out now, while the force of their entry into the nebula is working in their favor.

Even as Dirt is going through the motions of carefully but confidently maneuvering his ship, he is also seeing a story spin out in front of him like a sequence in a film: an artificial device planted for the purpose of control… its partial malfunction, allowing the creature a limited range of freedom… and the collision with the flagged asteroid in a desperate attempt to be rid of the device completely.

At last, with a sensation like being sucked out of an airlock, Dirt’s ship separates from the space worm with flag in hand, and he sees for a single triumphant second the false scale spinning off into the depths of the vibrant sea of gas. Dirt feels the creature’s roar of relief shake the foundations of his soul, and soon even it in all its vastness has slipped into obscurity within the nebula.

"Dirt, our sensors are going nuts!" Zrain shouts, frightened. "I don’t know which way is up— I mean out— You gotta get us out of here!!"

Fuck the game…

Miss Liz was saving Yoshi’s ass even now, all the way from wherever-the-hell she was. Yoshi understands in a flash that any direct assault would be doomed while the assassin’s hands were raised like that. Those dark, voluminous sleeves surely contain many more deadly surprises… He refuses to take the bait.

The bat’o’s face sours in disappointment, and through this small crack in the emotional armor, Yoshi slips into her mind like a chill breeze.

It’s dark. *So* dark. Just… just a truly all-encompassing darkness. It swallows Yoshi whole.

Slowly… slowly… a picture of the world begins to form around him, not in words or images or even thoughts but of *sound*. Gradually… miraculously… the drone of the universe becomes a song which seems to conjure reality itself out of the shadows.

Yoshi is in a vast cavern, not empty but teeming with complex rock formations, lush strands of hanging lichen, and a dizzying honeycomb of rope-bridges busy with other Bat’o. So many bats packed into one cave… there was a time when the Bat’o could afford to *sprawl*, but now so many of the ancestral caverns were destroyed by war or off-world mining, or were still actively occupied by colonial mining operations (never mind that many of the worst mines had been opened by avians in the first place, long ago). Resources below ground were scarce, and it was often difficult to say exactly who was to blame. And if that weren’t bad enough, hunter-forager licenses for the surface and skies were getting harder and harder to come by. That’s why Yoshi was here now, standing in this ring about to fight and possibly maim another Bat’o for the honor and privilege of serving a noble house, instantly freeing their entire family from financial anxiety in the bargain. It’s different for Yoshi, though. Different because his devotion to this family, to this particular master, goes deeper than ambition or greed or even desperation. His is an almost spiritual kind of loyalty. What else to call it but love?

Yoshi’s opponent shifts their weight, knees creating the tiniest of creaks that Yoshi’s keen ears zero-in on instantly. The fight begins.

Yoshi snaps back to the here-and-now, mind reeling with new perspective. She fights like Miss Liz! Also, there is simply no chance of shaking her fanatic devotion to Sable. A strategic emotional attack would need to come from a different angle. "My place?" the assassin echoes. "My place will be where it has ever been: at my Lord’s side. And no, I don’t have warm blood. In fact, I think you’ll find it quite cold."

The assassin launches a furious attack at Yoshi. Although he leaps easily over the first kick, the face-gouge catches him by surprise. He is briefly dazzled by a flash of silver-capped claws and then aware of a searing pain in his cheek.