Relia-robot

A wall, broken open to reveal the rat-tunnels inside; filled with tiny ladders, doors and lanterns.

The great city of Wall prospered. The fungal gardens of the midlevels provided hearty (if basic) food for all. The corner market kept the people supplied with extras and curiosities - buttons, thread, spilled sugar and pilfered flour. On the upper levels, academics and monks experimented with the strange black cables, flowing with power and strange visions. The lower levels teemed with the bounty of the out-of-doors, seeds and feathers traded with the outdoor clans.

So it was that Cherry found herself in the markets, bartering for sugar, when the city shuddered. Everyone stopped, tense, waiting, and when there was nothing more, the rats re-started their negotiations. The monks had been foreseeing doom for months now, as the Great Cables dried up, their prophetic visions going with them. What else could it be, they argued, but the end times?

Cherry hadn't ever seen the visions herself, despite working within the abbey levels. Truly, for every dozen monks prophesying doom, there must be a kitchen behind them keeping their deific voices nourished. So, here she was. She traded tokens with the sugar merchant for abbey services writing or reading, and was about to go looking for any fruit that might still have been left when there was another rumble. This one, however, didn't stop. A great, awful buzzing sound tore through the marketplace, causing rats to flee in every direction. Cherry fell to all fours, covering her basket with her body, placing her paws to her ears against the awful, terrible noise.

A great metal blade, almost as long as she was, tore through the ceiling of the marketplace and collapsed a stall a few tail-lengths away. She felt it moving underneath her, the noise and rumbling following it. She knew she must flee, but couldn't- she felt as if she'd been frozen to the spot, unable to move. It came up beside her, narrowly missing her as it crashed back up into the ceiling.

For a moment, there was quiet.

Then, the whole side of the market district fell away. Lanterns fell, stock tumbled out into the open void, and the whole floor shifted underneath Cherry as she scrambled to hold on to something. Basket in one paw, death grip on a splinter in the floor with another, she had no choice but to stare up at the massive shape in front of her. Two huge, bulbous eyes. A proportionately tiny, fleshy nose. Hairless and pale like a rat ill for weeks, save for where hair grew grotesquely many tail-lengths long. The face opened up to reveal a maw of bright white teeth, each larger than her paw, and a wet, red tentacle which moved and writhed between them. Cherry screamed, more terrified than she had ever been in her entire life, and the creature bellowed back at her:

"What the absolute fuck is happening in my goddamned walls?!"

"um, actually, Frankenstein is the doctor's name"

<

"the sin of Frankenstein was not that he created life, but that he abandoned his responsibility to that life. this has entered the public consciousness as 'the monster was inherently dangerous because it was unnatural,' which is, um, actually, the doctor's sorry excuse"

"Frankenstein abandoned his responsibility, victim blamed about it, and immediately had his excuses accepted as fact"

that's how you know he was a doctor

Previous

Willow is normal. This time for sure.

It took a few weeks, but she's almost certain she's gotten used to vampire blood. Alice gave her another hit last week and she barely went crazy-hyper-mode at all, much less reached the three days of extreme energy - 36 hours of dead sleep cycle she had going at the peak of her initial transformation.

She is normal. She doesn't feel restless, or jittery, and she can look back and realize that she was definitely not normal for a while- which she's pretty sure the ability to do that is a good indicator of normalness. Perfectly used to her new powers.

For instance, right now she is using her enhanced reflexes to absolutely destroy Bonetail with frame-perfect powerbounces. Remake nerf? Not for her! She should try speedrunning, except she isn't quite sure if that counts as cheating or not. Are there rules about supernatural powers? Is that a TAS?

There's a knock at the door, which is... strange, but not unheard of. She pauses and goes to check it.

She opens it to see a gaunt, monstrous older woman in fancy gothic attire.

"Hello?" She says, and the woman glides past her into their apartment. "Wh- Hey!"

"I can't enter unless invited." Says the woman, not even sparing her a look. "Explain yourself."

Immediately Willow is on the back foot. This woman belongs here, and she- well, she belongs here too, but she doesn't have any magically self-evident way to demonstrate that. And this woman is... scary. She looks like she lives in a manor or a castle or something.

Sure, Alice and Senna are vampires, but she's like, Nosferatu.

"I take you to Rubinova Vezha," Hro Long-Finger tells the stupid foreigners. The prospect of beds and hot food — no matter how dismayed they are by the north's squalid reality when they arrive — seems the quickest way to get rid of them.

"We cannot, Wise Long-Finger," the Ryssa lady says. "We are tracked by an unnatural hunting-creature in the shape of a man, created by a wizard of the south. We cannot be responsible for bringing it somewhere it may kill people. We would not have brought it near you, had we known you were here."

"Sestra plache za kozoyu!" Hro spits, and grips their spear tight, calculating whether they can simply skewer these lethal liabilities and have done; but they see the elf watching them a killer's look, and think: whichever they spear first, the other will slay them in the act. "You bring wizard shit here?"

"I expect whichever of the Iron Czars notices it," warrior-thewed Ryssa says calmly, "they will kill it, where we cannot."

"Along with you and every person who's spoken to you or seen you, north of the snowline!" Hro rages. "You are poison! You are death!"

"As I said," the lady says, eyes fathomless. "We cannot go to Rubinova Vezha. Travel with us, Wise, and we will do everything in our power to see you through, alive and unharmed."

"What can you do," Hro says with the contempt of someone who's just been carelessly condemned to die.

"More than you think," the lady says steadily, and something in her unwavering eyes, or her voice, or the deep currents of the world, sets the hair on Hro's nape cold and prickling.

"Your choices are very few," the elf says, by her side, like a blade. "Stay here, and perhaps the thing behind us will kill you; or the Iron Czars will kill you for its proximity, as you fear. Or run, alone, and the Iron Czars will find you and kill you, as you fear. Or travel with us, and..." she turns her knifelike look on her companion. "I have seen the paladin accomplish stranger things than keeping you alive."

"Your god means nothing, north of the snowline," Hro says. "Your southern wizards mean nothing, north of the snowline. Nothing means anything, save for the ice and the ice and the Czars."

"I don't promise you my god will aid you, Wise," the lady says. "I make you the promise I can keep: that I will."

"And where she goes, I go," the elf says, looking put out about it, "so my aid, too, I suppose," and very obviously deliberately doesn't mirror the soft look the lady gives her.

"The north kills softness," Hro says, and if she thought the elf a blade before, now she sees her true edge: deadly focus, all on Hro.

"The north is not enough to kill the paladin," she says, like the hiss of steel on oilstone, "nor any part of her. Perhaps your softness was simply a weak softness."

Hro gapes, behind their mask.

This is — this is such a bizarre thing to throw as an insult, that they cannot even find purchase to argue; as though the elf had spat at Hro's feet and said well, perhaps you fall over on the northern ground should you trip, but my paladin is too much for your northern gravity, weakling! The north is a world entire to itself, filled to bursting with the ice and the ice, with everything south of it smeared on its psychogeographic periphery like the skin of solidified fat on top of cooled stew. The north is obliterating vastness. The north is everything and takes everything and kills everything with cold and cruelty. This is a fact in the way that the stars are facts, or one's own fingers. Nobody simply survives the north.

The lady folds fingers gently around her little lunatic's wrist. "Wise Long-Finger," she says. "I cannot promise to escape the attentions of the Czars; I cannot promise we will be unscathed. But these are perils you live with every heartbeat of your life, whether we are here or not. We will do our utmost for you. This is I can promise; this I have, if you choose it."

They are worse than stupid foreigners; they are mad. Truly god-touched, perhaps, their ability to grasp reality twisted out of shape by contact with the ineffable, unable to comprehend the north, even standing in it.

"The north will kill you both," Hro croaks, their own mind reeling and recoiling from these two.

"That, at least," the lady says, "I know it will not," and Hro's neck prickles horribly again.