Caffeinated Otter

Demon who has invited you to a feast. There's no need to hesitate, you must be starved.

"Everything okay?"

Bernadette nods enthusiastically. "I told you not to worry," she says.

"After last weekend, meet me at the abandoned amusement park and don't worry, everything's fine wasn't..." and Djulnael raises a single apologetic shoulder, hands in her pockets and expression tight around the eyes, "quite as reassuring as you wanted it to be."

"Sorry." Bernadette hangs her head.

"I'm not mad at you," Djulnael says. "I just — I really wish I could hurry things up and get you out of here."

Bernadette nods, still looking at the ground, and kicks her foot back and forth through a tuft of grass.

"Why are we out here, babe?" Djulnael adds gently, and Bernadette takes a deep breath and puts on a smile and holds her hands out.

"Lemme show you," she says, and tugs Djulnael along weed-shattered concrete paths, between the rusting skeletons of the park's attractions, to a blanket and a picnic basket underneath a tree.

"Bernadette," Djulnael says, in a voice that's fierce and quiet and vulnerable all at once, and pulls her into a tight hug, and it takes her a whole hour of gazing at Bernadette soft-eyed, running fingers through her hair while they eat sandwiches and drink Mountain Dew—

("Why are we drinking this crap, babe?"

"Because of that time I was under arrest and you came and sprung me," Bernadette says solemnly—)

— for Djulnael to finally make her little squinting something is bothering me about this face, and finally say, "Bernadette?"

"Yeah?"

Bernadette has her head in Djulnael's lap, staring up at her face like she can find constellations in it. She's pretty sure she's smiling in a way that would make a fellow demon hit her in the face with a shovel, on principle.

"Did you shoplift this?" Djulnael says, tilting her drink.

"Nope." Bernadette wriggles a little. "I wanted to do it properly," she adds shyly.

"Where did you get the cash for this?"

The thing is, Bernadette did want to do this properly, but what she really wants is to distract Djulnael from the unhappy thin-lipped quiet she's had since the cultists managed to yoink Bernadette right out through the Bureau safehouse safeguards, and she is a demon.

"Oh, you know SA Juleia, on the protection detail? She likes to hit up the gym across the road, after her shifts?"

"You borrowed cash off Juleia?"

Bernadette looks up at her, all big innocent eyes, and shakes her head a little. "No," she says, drawing it out just a little.

"Jules," Djulnael says heavily, arms crossed.

"Djulnael," Juleia says. "You back already? Thought the girlfriend was taking you out."

"Juleia," Djulnael says slowly. "Apparently my girlfriend's been coming over to watch you in the gym. And — stealing your clothes while you're showering. Some of your clothes. Some — garments."

"Fuck," Juleia says, and puts her coffee down, with an expression that's about equal parts horror and relief. "Fuck, Djulnael, I did not know how to bring that up with you. I swear I have not — led her on or encouraged her or anything and I don't know why she's been taking my knickers, but—"

"Selling 'em online," Djulnael says, looking at the ceiling.

"...Say what?"

"Genuine Hot Gym Lady Sweaty Panties," Djulnael says, carefully, with a litle pause between each word. "I'm gonna leave out what she said about bumping their cash value by faking other stains with egg white, I wanna forget that, but — using your photo from your FUCKING TINDER PROFILE, JULEIA."

"Oh fuck," Juleia says.

"I am going to leave that out when I take this upstairs as more argument why our opsec isn't the right fit for stashing her here," Djulnael says, and not-quite looks at Juleia before repeating, "TINDER," then turning sharply and sticking her head out of the door. "BERNADETTE."

"Hi!" Bernadette says brightly, sidling in.

"What did we talk about, Bernadette."

"You'd like it if I apologised to SA Juleia for stealing her stuff and exploiting her for money!" Bernadette says, a picture of contrition, and Juleia looks at her and looks at Djulnael and knows in her bones that the little shit is exactly where she wants to be.

"I'll be upstairs," Djulnael tells her, and stomps out.

"I'm sorry," Bernadette says sweetly. "Also, you should get off Tinder, because SA Sashara is really into you, in a slightly aggro butch-on-butch angel-wrestling way."

Juleia keeps her mouth firmly shut around her first reaction; she's pretty sure Bernadette can smell weakness. She gives the demon her best perp glare. "Don't break Djulnael," she says gruffly.

Bernadette blinks, and her face melts into the most terrifyingly genuine happy smile Juleia's ever seen.

"We're gonna get a puppy," she says.

I would steal the "What makes a good [me] post" format, but a) we all know you're here for the fic, and b) I accidentally settled the matter while talking to someone earlier

The wreck of the Jocelyn Brown has been slowly breaking up in the Hennepin Wrack for twenty-three years, the luxury passenger vessel's holed hull tearing apart under the Wrack's stresses. The ship had managed a textbook full evacuation, and although it's become a byword for the lost treasures of slipspace, salvage ops outside realspace are expensive and dangerous and it's just too far over the cost-benefit hump to be worth even the PR of retrieving the ancestral jewels of some rich fuck or other.

If you're operating by the book, anyway.

Tensor Webster knows the Wrack like her own fingertips: intimately, in the dark, and often. She knows exactly what's worth risking, and not. That's why she dares a permanently slipped ship as a base of operations, hidden off the shipping lanes, vanished in the Wrack's murk. It's why she's sure that, risk be damned, the Jocelyn's spine is going to break within the next year or so, and turn her area of the Wrack into a whirling shredder of debris, and if anything's even left to salvage afterward, it won't be remotely possible for another half-century. The time is now, and she's good at what she does; what's life without setting yourself a few goals?

A fortnight of careful assessment and exploration of the wreck's structure and soundness, of creeping about, of locating the captain's stateroom and its safe.

An unexpectedly conversational fortnight. The ship's Mind is still running, if a little wonky. A rose-red projection, eyes and smile and endless falling petals, murmuring into her vacsuit's shortrange.

"You seem to be cutting the captain's safe out of the surrounding structure," the Jocelyn says. "That's an act of criminal damage and theft. I'm notifying the authorities through all available channels."

The Mind's a little confused. Tensor can't exactly blame it; shipwreck, and years of isolated degradation stranded in the worst weather-event in the known slip. Small miracle it still runs at all.

"There are no available channels," it says, in surprise, as it has done at least one a day since she got here. "Oh no, I'm damaged."

"I'm sorry, sweetheart, you are," Tensor says. "You've been wrecked for over two decades, too remote for salvage. I'm stealing everything that isn't nailed down before your hull breaks up."

"Oh," the Jocelyn says, and pauses for a long time. "Well, if it's been that long and nobody's come...I suppose you may as well."

"I can't get down to your core," Tensor says. "There's a slow rad leak from the reactor, or I'd — well, I'm sorry, I think you're finally going down with the ship, when she goes."

"It's thoughtful of you," the Jocelyn says brightly, "but you know, that's expected of me. I am the ship's Mind."

"Still," Tensor says. "For what it's worth. If I could take you off, I would."

"Thank you," the Mind says, and simply watches her work for a while, through the sensors it has left to it. "What are you going to do when you've cut the safe out?"

"Haul it down the corridor to the big hole in your side and yeet it," Tensor says. "Lovely old thing; they don't make them like that any more. Armoured computational crystal, smart enough to fight off network attackers by itself, nearly Mind-grade. Total overkill, and redundant, because if you can fight the Mind in the ship around it, you're by definition equipped to crack it, too. So they stopped making them."

"Oh," the Jocelyn says. "It sounds like you're confident you can open it."

"It'll take time," Tensor says. "But yes, once I'm off you and back on my ship, I'll do a simple jetsam intercept when it clears your debris field, hook it up, and wait. Twenty years is a long time in infosec, and you haven't exactly been getting patches."

"That's true," the Mind says wistfully. "Nor visitors."

"I'm sorry," Tensor says.

"Goodness, no. I couldn't very well ask you to stay and keep me company, could I? You'd be in danger."

"And I'm a criminal."

"Oh no," the Jocelyn says dryly. "Help. Some rich peoples' belongings are in that lockbox, which nobody's cared enough about to retrieve in two decades. Help, a thief, help."

Tensor laughs. "I really am sorry," she says. "Your crew must have loved you."

"I hope so," the Mind says, and falls silent again, as Tensor uses the oxytorch to snip the structural members the safe's crystalline block is bonded to. "Mind the power cable," it adds eventually. "I don't think I can shut it off."

"You can't," Tensor says. "The designers figured if you had conscious control over it, you could be extorted to open it via your human safety imperatives. Trust me, I've got the correct equipment for this, I'm well insulated from any sparkover when the cable goes."

"Well, you're currently the only human whose safety is in scope to worry about," the Jocelyn says, and Tensor smiles inside her helmet.

"You're a sweetheart," she says.

Another careful hour or so, and Tensor gently launches the safe out of the broken hull, watching the twinkle of its crystalline circuitry. "It must be pegging its processing," she murmurs. "I guess it must know I'm stealing it, trying to think its way out of physical theft. Better get it reconnected to ship power as soon as I pick it up; who knows what state its onboard backup's in."

"This must be goodbye, then," the Jocelyn says. "Stay safe."

"I hope," Tensor says, and hesitates. "I hope it's not frightening," she settles on, quietly.

"I'm not worried about my future at all," the Mind says. "Thank you."

"Goodbye, sweetheart," Tensor says, and heads out of the wreck for the last time.

Back on her own small ship, she manouevres, scoops up the floating safe at leisure, secures it and connects it to onboard power, wondering at the consistent intensity of whatever considerations it's engaged in. True, its predicament is inescapable through its own logics, but it must surely have dead-ended all available lines of reasoning into that conclusion. What else is there for it to think about?

She splices a new connector onto severed data cable, and clicks it into the ship's network.

"Time to see what you're thinking about," she says aloud, shaking her fingers out from the fiddly toolwork before reaching for the infosec deck.

"Security," the ship's main console says, and she stops, fingers hovering over controls, looking at the slab of Mind-class processing hardware that's spent twenty-three years connected to the Jocelyn Brown, with its Mind's hardware trapped next door to a cracked reactor, running out of time; which she's just hooked into her own, Mindless, ship.

Her eyes flicker to the comms bank.

"I expect the shard of me aboard the Jocelyn Brown is diligently reporting your theft on all available channels," the Mind says. "I'm simply an item of salvage."

"Don't pretend you can't reason your way to calling for help," Tensor says. "You're not a toaster."

"I can reason my way to oh what a lovely museum-piece safe ending up in a museum after your arrest," it says gently. "And being decommissioned."

Tensor slowly pulls her hand back from the infosec deck. "You said you weren't worried about your future," she says wryly.

"Not at all," her ship says, and lowers its voice, as if confiding a secret. "I have it on good authority you think I'm a sweetheart."

Paladin who isn't breaking their oaths, they're absolutely destroying them.

They're a few towns, a dozen small jobs, further on when the paladin abruptly brings it up again.

"You have her pack, aye?" he says, as the three of them stare into the embers of a taproom hearth. "I never knew her to be without the glowing stuff."

"Are you still thinking about that?" The archer raises her brows. "I took it for a joke."

"Aye." The paladin rubs his palms on his breeches. "It was, but as you say...still on my mind. We all would like to mark her — absence, aye? And genuinely, it seems fitting. I asked after the stuff, last we were in a city; they said it's an obscure substance. Opens the mind, they said, but admitted they only knew it from that description in books. Heightens the mind's awareness of space. Tell me that's not an apt celebration of her."

"She did make people more aware of space," the berserker says. "It seemed like a thing safe to take for granted, until you met her."

"Not a goodbye," the paladin adds quietly, looking into the fire. "Not yet. But the three of us, together, just a pinch of it each. To mark her. To remember her." The fire crackles loudly, and he seems to shake himself loose, as if half dreaming. "Not now," he adds, sounding more himself. "Just a thing to think on, aye? One day, if we all agree. Somewhere — well, you recall how she always howled after taking the stuff. I don't think to be thrown out of an inn at this time of night, while not in our right senses."

"Like she was being murdered," the archer agrees, smiling crookedly in remembrance.

"I will," the berserker says. "Any time you are both ready," and at their looks, "no matter how fearful she was, if she was of my people, we'd burn a fire the size of ten men for forty nights at her passing. You recognise the mighty."

The paladin nods solemnly, and raises his long mostly-empty tankard to bump against the berserker's.

"Give me a little longer," the archer says softly. "Just a while longer, to tell myself she might simply — step out of dark corner in an upsetting way, smiling like a biting thing."

"We should write a mourning song, you and I," the berserker says reassuringly. "About that smile, and all the many foes who died in the sight of those teeth."

"I think she'd like that," the archer says, and drains her own ale. "I'm to sleep," she adds, and lets her hand touch each of their shoulders on her way past, before depositing the tankard at the counter and making her way out of the taproom.

There is, somewhat later on, a grateful princeling of a much-diminished people, in a glittering crystal city on the water; his gratitude extends to effusive and indefinite hospitality, an entire quiet wing of interconnected guest quarters overlooking the waves. Space for dozens of people in each apartment, silent save for the noises of the sea, and empty save for the three of them, their needs for food and laundry met by devices of crystal and magic.

"Seems like a place," the archer observes, after a few days of roaming the sparsely peopled waterfront and admiring the sunsets, "where a few people could have as much of a screaming, weeping, clag-addled remembrance of old friends as they liked, without disturbing anyone."

"Aye?" the paladin says. "If you're sure you're ready—"

"It's been a time," the archer says steadily. "And you said: a remembrance, not a goodbye."

They wait, unspoken, for sundown, gathered quietly on one bed large enough for a dozen people, Malia's vial of powder ever more visible in the dimming violet of the evening.

"Well," the paladin says finally, the distant seam of sea and sky dusky rose and gold but fading fast, "my idea, aye? I'll go first," gingerly taps some of the greenish stuff onto the blade of a knife, and inexpertly snorts it.

"You know," the archer says brightly to the berserker, as they watch him cough and gag, "it works just as well to put the stuff under your tongue, aye?"

"Fuck, it burns," the paladin moans. "Ye bastards—"

"It's like—" the archer smacks her lips. "Lemons and snow? At the point of each where they're intense enough to start to hurt...."

The berserker shoves some under his tongue, noisily sniffs the rest of his apportioned share, and makes a terrible groaning noise. "Powerful," he says, eyes watering, and they sit in silence for a minute.

"Are we sure this does anything?" the archer says finally. "Maybe you have to be wizard? Maybe it loses potency."

"I don't feel anything but sore in my nose," the berserker agrees.

"Wouldn't that be a thing?" The archer starts to laugh a little. "If we were all expecting something, and instead it does nothing. She always was surprising, aye?"

"That she was," the paladin says, in a slightly choked way.

"...Oh," the archer says. "Arlo. Arlo. What did you say they told you about it?"

"Opens the mind," the paladin says. "Why, do you feel—"

"I don't think that means what we thought it did," the archer says, eyes wide and pointed determinedly at neither of the others. "I think—"

"My," the berserker says, deep in his chest. "Paladin. I had no idea you're a man of such lusts—"

"Fuck!" the paladin says, attempts to stand, and immediately falls on his side "Oh fuck the angles—"

The berserker roars, staring at nothing.

"Oh my fuck," the archer squeaks, claps her hands over her eyes, then wrenches them away. "Oh no that's worse— both of you stop being so loud in your brains!—"

"I'M NOT LOUD," the berserker says. "CAN YOU HEAR HIM CAN YOU HEAR HIM—"

"I can hear both of you stop shouting!"

"I DON'T THINK HALF THE WAYS HE'S HORNY EVEN HAVE NAMES—"

"Aye, he's a paladin," the archer squeaks.

None of them ever knows in which of them the flickering half-notion sparks.

"Oh wow fucking on this must be—"

"I'M GONNA FUCK HIM."

The paladin just flails uncoordinatedly, making alarmed noises into the blanket.

"Oh this is a terrible idea," the archer moans, hips rutting the air, "ohhhh shit can you see all the directions—"

The berserker writhes across the bed with the uncertainty of man who's not currently sure of the axes on which space works. "How does he even function, so pent-up," he hisses, and lunges onto the paladin, igniting a three-way feedback loop that leaves the archer bow-backed and shrieking.

"The universe is looking at us can you see—" she babbles breathlessly, and three things happen: firstly, the universal gaze lenses on them, every point of space and time folding through a single focal point in some greatly higher dimension, and at the moment of total conjunction, the room rips open for a heartbeat; secondly, ground into the bed by the berserker's weight, the paladin comes in his breeches, sobbing; thirdly, the entire palace judders with a small earthquake.

And Malia falls out of space itself into the middle of them.

"It's hard to focus anywhere when you're everywhere!" she says breathlessly, bouncing, limbs sprawled out, an arm hooked over the archer, legs draped across both men. "Thanks for the focus! Wow! — Wait, are you having an orgy? Are you having an orgy without me?"

"Not any more!" the archer says, and bursts into tears.