Valiant: Tales From The Drift

[Tails #1: One Man’s Monster Is Another Man’s…]

Log Date: 7/25/12763

Data Sources: Lysanne Arrignis

Event Log: Lysanne Arrignis

Dandelion Drift: Kitchen

6:23am SGT

“I’m going to go flirt with the crazy soul-eating fox.”

I sigh into my coffee, set down my mug, and look sideways at my green-eyed, wide-eyed best friend of twenty-three years.

“Okay fine.” I say, pushing my chair back from the table. “You get the skipper started up. I’ll go get the rocket launcher.”

He gives an abashed smile as he backpedals towards the door, snatching his jacket off the coatrack. “Thanks, Lysanne. Smoothies on me on the way back, promise!”

“You still haven’t gotten me my smoothie for the last trip!” I call as the hatch door spirals open, and he runs through it.

“I’ll get you two this time, then!” he shouts over his shoulder as he runs down the hall, pulling his jacket on while the door spirals shut in his wake.

I give another sigh, even though no one’s going to hear it. Pinching the bridge of my nose, I down the rest of my coffee and drop the mug in the sink.

“Alright.” I mutter to myself as I head to the coatrack to grab my field jacket. “Let’s go do something suicidal.”

Lysanne’s Notes

My friend Jazel has always been fascinated with supernatural creatures. And in fairness, so have I. It’s why we’re both Preservers — arcane professionals that study magical creatures and, in some cases, collect the endangered ones so they can be preserved.

We work off of the Dandelion Drift, an eco-sanctuary arkship that looks a lot less pretentious than its name sounds. It’s basically a giant biodome separated into partitioned environments, cradled between the front and back halves of the ship. We sail the galaxy, roaming from system to system as we study all sorts of arcane creatures.

And occasionally impound or kill the troublesome ones.

We like to think of ourselves as scientists, but CURSE, the organization that owns the ship, tends to view us more like pest control. We like to study problems; they usually want us to stamp them out and poke through the remains. It’s led to some differences of opinion over how we choose to handle our assignments.

Which brings us to our current assignment: CURSE caught wind of some soul-munching monster on a settlement planet near the edge of dark space, and sent us to deal with it. We figured we’d bag and tag it, find out if we could resettle it on a preserve world, and move on to the next assignment. It’d take a week, maybe two, I thought.

It’s been three months.

Event Log: Lysanne Arrignis

Dandelion Drift Skipper-2

7:49am SGT

“So, what’s the master plan this time around?” I ask as our skipper ship descends through the planet’s atmosphere, the windshield tinting red at the edges. “Every day that we spend on this is another day she gets hungrier. At some point she’s going to try to raid the settlement again.”

“Tracking.” Jazel replies, holding up a dreamcatcher and tapping it against his jaw as he stares out the windshield. “If we can track her, we can trap her. If we can trap her, we can talk to her.”

“Yeah, because that’s worked so well in the past.” I say. “This might have to be a euthanasia assignment, Jazel.”

“No.” he counters almost immediately. “We put down creatures that can’t be controlled or resettled. We don’t euthanize people.”

“How many times has she tried to eat your soul in the last month alone?”

“Uh…” His face scrunches up as pauses to count up each incident on his fingers.

“You literally had to stop to count the number of times, Jazel.”

“Look, she probably doesn’t know any better.” Jazel says as the red tint starts to fade from the windshield. Below us, the rolling green expanse of Vissengard’s surface stretches out below us for miles, pocked with lakes here and there. “A wild dog bites. It’s what it does.”

“And you keep trying to pet it when we should be putting it down.” I point out. “The settlement here on Vissengard is expecting us to solve this problem. The local leaders are getting a little antsy; it’s been three months and all we’ve really managed to do is put up a barrier around the settlement and piss off the monster prowling around outside. If we don’t get results soon, we’re going to wear out our welcome.”

“So it goes with colonists and corporations.” Jazel mutters. “If they can’t use it, understand it, exploit it, or bend it to their will—”

“Then they’ll use every weapon in their arsenal to wipe it out, yes.” I finish for him. “But this time we can’t hide behind the ‘humanoids are bad’ straw man, Jazel.” I look sideways at him. “This creature is killing people.”

“Well, it was.” Jazel points out as I steer us around a mountain range. “To be precise, it was killing one person every three to five years. Which really isn’t that bad, if you think about it from a natural predator’s perspective. And it’s been doing this for generations, at least according to the locals.”

“Just because it’s been doing this for centuries doesn’t mean it’s okay.”

“All the more reason to talk to her and see if we can convince her to stop!”

“We’ve covered this already! Every time you try to talk to her, she starts chasing your ass through the forest and usually gets within six inches of sucking your soul out of that stupid face of yours!” I exclaim as I pull us into a long, curving arc around the last mountain in the range. “We cannot reason with this thing. We have tried. It needs to be put down.”

“No. Give it a bit of time. I can make it work.” Jazel insists. “A rare creature like this, we should at least try to preserve it before going to the euthanasia option. Even if it is predatory.”

“Are you actually saying that because you believe that, or because you find her attractive?” I demand. Blunt, straight, to the point.

Jazel doesn’t answer right away, looking up as if he’d find the answer in the sky or something. “Can I say yes to both?” he says after a moment.

“I hope they etch ‘Killed by his monster kink’ on your gravestone.”

“Wow thanks Lysanne, you’re a great friend.”

Lysanne’s Notes

Understanding Jazel is best done through the lens of my earliest memory of him.

We were both about twelve years old, and since we lived in the same neighborhood, we did a lot of stuff together. Not because we liked spending time with each other, but because our parents tended to kick us out of our houses at the same time each afternoon in the summer and tell us to get some sunlight instead of staring at screens all day.

Even back then, he was a classic explorer, with brown hair that stuck up everywhere like a lab beaker had blown up in his face. We would hang out with each other because we had nothing better to do, but his curiosity about nature would always have us wandering in the woods, looking for weird creatures or watching insects go about their business. I’m pretty sure our mothers started regretting sending us outside after we started coming back with bugs and lizards that we decided would be our new pets.

Though we never really went anywhere adventurous — there wasn’t much that you could call dangerous in the woods around our neighborhood, except for a couple varieties of poisonous snakes — Jazel was decidedly more daring with his explorations. This was demonstrated one day when we were wandering around the AC units behind my house.

“Hold up, you see that?” he’d said, grabbing my sleeve and holding me in place before I could wander through the metal boxes that kept our house cool.

“See what?” I’d asked, following his finger. It looked like he was pointing at a web woven between one of the AC units and the wall, but the web looked empty.

“Over there. The web. The spider’s in the corner. Can you see it?”

I looked to the corners of the web, and sure enough, there was a long black spider perched on one of the corners of the web. Both of us edged a little nearer so we could get a better look at it.

“It looks dangerous.” I’d said. It looked like it had a scarlet fiddle shape on its abdomen, and the tips of its legs were tinted red.

“Yeah, it’s a black fiddleback.” he’d said, those inquisitive green eyes fixed on it. “They hunt using a neurotoxin that can kill people. A lot of people get bit by them every year because they’re not paying attention to where they’re going.”

I started looking around for something to smash it with. “We better get rid of it before it hurts someone.”

“No, I got it. Don’t worry.” Jazel had said. I’d turned around to see that he’d prodded the spider onto his forefinger with one hand.

“What are you doing?!” I’d screeched. “What if it bites you?!”

“It won’t bite me if I don’t scare it.” he’d said, letting it crawl from one hand to another as he started walking back towards his house, smiling over his shoulder at me. “I’ll take it back home and keep it in the terrarium where it won’t bother anyone.”

And that was the day I realized that in spite of his quiet, mild, inquisitive demeanor, Jazel was absolutely batshit insane.

Event Log: Lysanne Arrignis

Helios Settlement: Airfield

8:15am SGT

“He’s back for another dance with the devil?”

“Something like that, yeah.” I say as I finish pulling my gloves on. The skipper’s parked on the settlement’s airfield, and Jazel’s already making his way towards the fencing that walls off the settlement from the vast forest outside. Standing beside me is the settlement’s deputy sheriff, rocking the five o’clock shadow and a widebrimmed hat. Plasma pistol holstered at his hip, boots shined until I can see my reflection in them.

This guy oozes so much latent masculinity that I think I might get a craving for red meat and gravy potatoes if I stand downwind from him.

“Well, hopefully he gets her this time.” Deputy Milor says, working around the toothpick in the corner of his mouth. “Turrets been picking up heat signatures and movement near the fence more and more recently. Human-sized stuff, not rodents and the like. She’s gettin’ hungry.”

I raise an eyebrow. “And you would know that how…?”

“I feel it.” he says, narrowing his eyes as he stares at the forest past the fences. “In my bones.”

I puff out a breath. “You should probably get that looked at. I don’t think bones are supposed to resonate at that frequency.”

“Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit.” Milor admits, folding his arms as he looks down at me. “Seriously though, Preserver, it’s what, going on three months now? People are gettin’ antsy. The problem ain't been taken care of.”

“You ever try to catch a monster powerful enough to clear an acre of trees with a single spell, deputy?” I ask, pulling out my data slate and flicking through the files.

“I can’t say that I have. But the mayor’s getting impatient with this… whatever it is you guys are doing. I know you two are real big on the nonviolence thing, but some problems you can’t solve with kindness.”

“I don’t give a damn what the mayor thinks and I won’t give a damn unless he starts coughing up some dough.” I say, glancing up from my data slate and giving Milor a flat look. “We’re working on this problem for free. We put up the warding barrier around your settlement for free. I know this creature’s a tough customer, but if you want extermination, you’re going to need to pony up for it, and it ain’t gonna be cheap. You’d need to shell out enough to convince us it’d be worth more dead than alive.”

Milor puts his hands up. “Hey, I’m not the treasurer, I’m just pointin’ it out. The longer that thing stays alive, the more antsy people get. If you two can’t get it under control, the mayor’s going to give the Vaunted a call and ask them to do it.”

“Is that so.” I say, raising an eyebrow. “You got a timetable on that, so I can expect when they’ll crash the party?”

“That depends on whether your boy makes any progress in the next few weeks.” Milor says, nodding to the fence. “Speaking of which, shouldn’t you be keeping an eye on his scrawny little butt?”

I look over my shoulder to see that Jazel’s already gone, disappeared through one of the gates in the fence. “He knows how to handle himself in the wilds better than any of your hunting parties do. But you’re right, I should go catch up to him before he tries to ask the monster for her number.” Reaching down, I grab my pack, seating it on my back before grabbing my rocket launcher and slinging it over my shoulder. “Tell the mayor and the sheriff that we’re working on it. If they want it exterminated, we’re going to need to see some ones and zeros, preferably in the five- or six-digit range.”

Milor grimaces as I start walking. “I’ll let ‘em know, but I don’t think that’s in the budget, sweetheart.”

“Better go call up your local Vaunted chapter, then.” I say as I start across the airfield, headed for the fences and the forest beyond.

Lysanne’s Notes

Vissengard had something of a history with the creature long before we’d arrived here.

According to the natives — who, as far as we could tell, were the descendants of a crew whose ship had crashed here about four centuries ago and never got rescued — the creature had been awakened by their arrival on the planet, and had been with them ever since. Early generations of the crash survivors tried to fend it off with the weapons that had survived the impact, but only had limited success, and it was easily able to pick off victims that strayed too deep into the forest or that left their doors unlocked at night. Not that it would’ve mattered, since the creature had demonstrated early on that it was able to withstand a blast from one of the ship’s turrets.

As later generations were born, and were raised in the wilds without contact with modern civilization, the descendants of the survivors started to lean back towards the superstitious predilections that most humanoids gravitate towards. This took the form of seeking meaning in natural patterns, generating spiritual explanations for natural phenomena, and creating rituals to give some sort of social structure to the mini-society that had popped up on the surface of Vissengard. Along the way, they came to realize that they were badly outclassed by their residential neighbor, and after a few midnight summits and much speculation about what they could do about the problem, they resorted to a less aggressive and more ritualistic approach: throw the monster a sacrifice every three to five years and politely ask it to go away.

And it worked, for the most part.

In the centuries since then, the locals would perk up whenever a certain nocturnal flower bloomed on its three-to-five year cycle. They’d get together, settle on someone to sacrifice to the monster (preferably someone young and beautiful, of course; male or female didn’t matter), and they’d throw that person a big old farewell party. Then, once all the fun was said and done, they’d send them off into the forest at night, and the monster, who usually woke on the flowers’ bloom cycle, would presumably eat their soul and go back to napping at the end of the bloom season.

This isn’t to say that all the locals agreed with the tradition, and there were attempts in the past to try and lure the monster with a sacrifice, then gang up on it and kill it once and for all. In those years, the monster usually ended up feasting on a lot more than one soul. Those that managed to make it back alive usually told the story of the carnage to the following generations as a warning against such foolhardiness, and it usually served as a deterrent for a few generations.

It was a tidy little cycle and probably would’ve gone on for a long time.

But the Helios settlers arriving here twenty years ago put a little kink in that.

From what I can tell in the three months that we’ve been here, the Helios settlement has a bit of a rocky relationship with the native Vissengardians. It’s a little bit complex, but what it boils down to is that the Vissengardians don’t feel like the settlers respect the land and their world; the settlers feel like the Vissengardians are delusional and disagree strongly with ritual sacrifice as a means of fixing your problems. Over the past half-dozen bloom cycles, the settlers had swallowed their distaste and let the Vissengardians do their thing.

On this bloom cycle, though, they decided to put their foot down.

From what I gather, things got real ugly. The police went in and broke up the traditional farewell party for the chosen sacrifice, and the Vissengardians got real bent out of shape by that. They responded by picking another sacrifice, the police went in again and broke up that party too, and the Vissengardians went ballistic at that point. They attacked the settlement, the settlers responded in kind, people ended up dead on both sides, and the mayor ordered barricades deployed around the Vissengardian villages.

And while all this was happening, the monster was, and still is, roaming the forest between villages, getting steadily more pissed off as it realizes the bloom is getting close to ending, and that the sacrifice it’s expected for the last four centuries hasn’t showed up yet. It’s chosen to express this frustration in the form of arcane artillery that it lobs at the Helios settlement every two weeks or so; so far it’s managed to hit the library, a supply depot, the west wing of the mayor’s mansion, a playground, and the mayor’s mansion again.

And that’s where Jazel and I come in.

If we can find a way to bag this creature, get it offworld, and resettle it on a preserve planet, then the Vissengardians can stop the ritual sacrifices, the settlers can take down the barricades and repair their settlement, and everybody can go back to arguing about something other than the moral expediency of sacrificing one person to save others.

Event Log: Lysanne Arrignis

Vissengard Wilds: Maintenance Trail

10:27am SGT

“It’s gonna be a hot day.” Jazel says, peering up at the sunlight leaking between the leaves. “If we don’t see her by noon, I think we should head back. She’s not going to be roaming once the heat starts cranking up.”

“If that’s the case, maybe you should’ve checked the forecast before deciding on a surface visit.” I retort, looking around. This planet’s gravity is slightly under standard, so a lot of things here tend to grow slightly larger. The ferns arch up to shoulder height, and most of the trees tower into the sky, so wide around that you could conceivably carve rooms into them and live in them. Which is what some of the Vissengardians have done.

“What we really need to do is come back at evening or night.” Jazel says, stopping in the path and looking around at me.

“No.” I say firmly. “We are not doing nightwalks on this assignment.”

“Night and evening are when she’ll be most active.” Jazel points out. “Especially at night, when the flowers open up. It’ll make it easier to find her, especially when we know she’ll be prowling in the woods outside the settlement. If we go looking for her during the day, we’re just taking wild guesses about where she’ll be. If she’s even out wandering around at all.”

“We are not doing nightwalks.” I repeat. “She is a nocturnal predator. Just because you feel comfortable traipsing around on a foreign planet at night with a powerful magical predator on the loose doesn’t mean I do.”

“We didn’t take this line of work because it was going to be ‘comfortable’, Lysanne.” Jazel says. “Risk is part of the job. You know this. We’ve dealt with dangerous predators before. Hell, you spent three weeks in the hospital recovering after being gored by a juvenile Talaskian bull dragon, but it didn’t stop you from getting back on the job.”

“There’s a big difference between risk and suicide.” I say, walking past him and brushing a fern out of the way. “And there’s a big difference between catching a horn to the gut and having your soul extracted from your body. I can always stuff my intestines back into my body cavity if they spill out. Your soul, on the other hand, is a lot harder to cram back into your body once it’s left it.”

“Alright, I’ll grant you that.” he says, following after me. “But we’ve gotta take some risks. If we don’t, this is going to take forever. I don’t mind taking my time, but I know everybody else is getting impatient.”

“I’m glad you noticed.” I say, stepping over a root as the path takes a bend around a big tree. “The deputy said that the mayor was thinking of calling up the Vaunted and asking them to take care of it if he didn’t see progress in the next few weeks.”

“The Vaunted have more important things to do than take a field trip out to a frontier system for pest control.” Jazel says, swatting a fern out of the way. “The Collective are the big thing on their radar right now. I heard that they’ve been on the move.”

“If the gear squeaks loud enough, they’ll get some grease on it.” I answer, slowing down to examine a closed bud hanging from the branch of a young tree. “Besides, the mayor may have some strings he can pull. Politicians usually do.”

“Then we should go on a nightwalk sometime.” he says, passing me as I touch the closed flowerbud.

“No.”

“You said it yourself: if the mayor complains loud enough, he might be able to get a Vaunted team out here, and we both know in a situation like this, they’ll be coming with a kill order, not an arrest warrant. If we’re running out of time, we need to take some risks.”

I pluck the bud, closing one eye and whinging it at Jazel’s back as he continues down the path. It hits his shoulder and bursts, splattering his sleeve with a sapphire-blue liquid that has a neon tint to it. “I said no. No nightwalks.”

Jazel looks down at his sleeve, then around at me. “Did you just throw one of the spirit blooms at me?”

“The what?”

“Spirit blooms! The flowers that wake up the creature whenever they bloom!” he says indignantly, touching a finger to a viscous blue liquid on his sleeve.

“Maybe.” I say, squint at the tree I grabbed the bud from. “Upgrade that to a probably-definitely.” Reaching up, I snap another one off a branch.

“Why would you do that? The Vissengardians said that the liquid in these things will draw her like a magnet, it’s why they use them to paint symbols on their ritual sacrifices!” He shakes his fingers, flicking the blue liquid onto a nearby fern. “That and they’re said to be memories of lost souls, so throwing them around like paintball grenades is kinda disrespectful…”

“C’mon, you don’t really believe that, do you?” I ask, tossing the one I’ve got from hand to hand. “A lot of what the Vissengardians believe in is superstition and nothing else. There’s no arcane or divine foundation to back it up, just coincidence and religious supposition.”

“Regardless of whether or not it’s true, it’s still disrespectful.” he mutters, touching the liquid on his sleeve. “Wonder if I can taste the memories.” With that, he cautiously dabs the fingers to the tip of his tongue, looking pensive as he works his mouth around a little.

“It’s disrespectful, he says, moments before taste-testing some lost soul’s forgotten memories.” I say, rolling my eyes. “What it probably is, is poisonous.”

“Tastes like nostalgia.” he muses.

“Oh really.” I say, hitching my hands on my hips. “And what’s that taste like?”

“Regret, contentment, blue raspberry, and a hint of peppermint right on the tail end.”

“Blue raspberry and peppermint? Urgh.”

“Yeah, it’s not a great combinatioOOOH SHIT—”

Something startles Jazel enough for him to twist in place and stagger off the path, running through the ferns. I start forward, alarmed and looking around, before I see the disturbance rippling through the ferns on the other side of the path. Two seconds later, a lithe girl with fox tails and ears comes hurtling across the path, disappearing into the ferns after Jazel.

“Oh boy, here we go.” I mutter, pocketing the flower bud as I start to chase after them, reaching for the rocket launcher slung over my shoulder.

Lysanne’s Notes

When we’d first gotten the assignment, it hadn’t specified what we’d been tasked with neutralizing. We’d gotten a system address, the phone number of the local government, and one of the briefest assignment descriptions I’d ever seen: settlement government requesting assistance neutralizing soul-consuming native specimen. For us, that was incredibly vague and unhelpful, since there are all sorts of arcane creatures across a wide variety of cultures that like to nibble on souls, emotions, memories, and other intangible but spiritually nourishing things.

But it was part of the job, so we loaded in the system address, mapped out a tunnelspace route, and got on our way. During the jump, to pass the time, we came up with a list of creatures we knew liked feeding on souls: certain varieties of lichs, creatures from the Dreaming, the parasitic Carceri fungus, certain varieties of wraiths… the list just went on and on. It could’ve been anything.

You’d figure the locals would’ve cued us in on what the creature really was, but they weren’t particularly helpful in that regard either.

To be fair, most of them had never seen the creature that terrorized them. It only wandered around at night, it didn’t like interacting with people unless it was sucking their souls out, and it was smart enough to destroy camera traps whenever it came across one. Most of the settlers had only stories to go off of, and most of those stories came from the Vissengardians — who described the creature as a forest wraith or spirit, something that you only heard rustling in the ferns or moving out of the corner of your eye.

Basically, the Vissengardians had never seen it either. And those that had, never survived the encounter — because they were the ones being ritually sacrificed to the creature.

So when we first arrived, we had no idea what we were looking for. And as a result of that, when we encountered a fox-tailed young woman on our evening patrol out in the forest, the pieces didn’t click into place right away. Hell, Jazel had walked right up to her and tried to introduce himself and make small talk, complimented her on the off-the-shoulder shirt she was wearing, asked her why she wasn’t wearing any shoes, wondered why she had so many silver tails, inquired about her species, was curious about the vibrant blue flower she had pinned to her ravenlock hair…

…if we’re being honest, all of those things set off red flags in my head because those are the typical archetypes of arcane creatures that hunt by seduction and allure. And they should’ve set off the same red flags in Jazel’s head. They probably did; he’s observant and he probably knew something wasn’t quite right.

But as I’ve mentioned before, Jazel is absolutely batshit insane when it comes to potentially dangerous creatures, so it doesn’t really come as a surprise that he’d walk up to a pretty soulstealer and try to strike up a conversation.

For what it’s worth, Jazel’s curious approach bought us some time on that first encounter; she seemed confused that we hadn’t run when we saw her, and downright befuddled when he started peppering her with questions. She stumbled through trying to answer them, clearly lying on some of them, and it took her a full two minutes before her patience ran out and the hunger took over; at that point she grabbed Jazel by the throat, slammed him against the nearest tree, and promptly ended the conversation with attempted murder.

Most people would stop trying to make friends with someone after something like that.

But as I’ve said before, Jazel’s batshit insane.

Event Log: Lysanne Arrignis

Vissengard Wilds: Off-Trail

10:41am SGT

Two and a half months down the line, Jazel’s still trying to make friends with this thing that would rather be eating his soul.

“I thought you said it was too hot out here for her!” I shout as I tear through the ferns after Jazel and the monster, swatting some of the bigger ones out of the way.

“It’s because you busted one of the spirit blooms on my back, you knucklehead!” he shouts back. “The Vissengardians were right, it draws her like a magnet!”

“Stupid flowers.” I mutter under my breath. “Hey Silvertail! Newsflash, you’re only supposed to be out at night!”

The monster looks over her shoulder, pale pink lips drawn back to reveal teeth bared in a snarl. The august eyes flash, and without warning, she splits into three identical copies of herself, each one having fewer tails than the original. The middle one keeps tearing after Jazel; the one on the right scrambles up a tree, and the one on the left skids to a halt and kicks off the ground, lunging at me.

“Oh c’mon!” I shout, pivoting out of the way of the razor-sharp nails. “Since when have you been able to do that?!”

Catching my footing, I keep after Jazel and the middle copy, even as I hear the left copy slapping through the ferns behind me. Up ahead, I can see the middle copy put on a burst of speed; something that looks like a translucent ghost of herself splits off from her, rushing through the ferns to tackle Jazel. It doesn’t seem to shift him and he doesn’t seem to notice the ghost clinging to his back, but then the drifting swirls of ethereal smoke snap tight, yanking the middle copy to rejoin its ghost. She slams into Jazel’s back, and both of them go down hard, rolling through the leaf litter and undergrowth.

“Oh no you don’t—” I mutter, boots digging into the ground as I push myself to run faster. I can see them wrestling on the ground through the ferns, at least until I take a knee to the back. I get slammed down into the leaf litter, losing my grip on the rocket launcher as my face slides through the leaves for a couple feet, with what I presume is the right copy pinning me down.

“Geddoffa me you nine-tailed bitch—” I gasp, clawing in the leaf litter as I try to get some leverage to push myself back up. Faceplanting into the ground at speed has knocked the breath out of me, and I can barely breathe with her knee digging into my upper back.

“I will. In a moment.” Her voice is silky smooth, irritatingly pleasant. I grit my teeth as her fingers dig into my hair and yank my head back, so I can see Jazel and the middle copy still struggling with each other some distance from me. Then bare feet and ankles walk into my line of sight, and the left copy crouches down in front of me, her mouth tugged to the side in an infuriating smirk. She’s got on a pale, midriff-baring shirt with long, open sleeves today, along with a green skirt that’s been pleated to look like big, overlapping leaves.

“You look awfully smug.” I growl at her.

Her only response is to twist both her hands at the wrist, forefingers moving in circling motion as vines break through the leaf litter and loop around my forearms, then draw them tight against the ground. The pressure between my shoulderblades eases off as the right copy stands up and walks past me, merging into the left copy. “You’re just a side dish. Your friend is the main course.”

“If you think you’re going t— mmmfph!” I twist and squirm at the handful of dirt and decaying leaves that’s been shoved in my mouth, coughing and spitting them out.

“Relax.” she purrs, tapping the tip of her finger to my nose. “You will be next.” With that, she stands up and starts stalking away, merging into the middle copy that’s pinned Jazel against the ground, vines winding around his arm and legs. 

“All this time you have taunted and teased me. Did you think that you would escape?” she says, sitting on his stomach as she walks her sharp nails up his chest. “It was kind of you to volunteer as my sacrifice, since the villagers didn’t give me one this year.”

“Well, in fairness, that’s kind of the settlers’ fault, since they’ve barricaded them in their villages.” Jazel says, being far more relaxed than he has any right to be. “It’s kind of a complicated political and cultural confli—”

Jazel’s voice is muffled as the monster presses a hand over the lower half of his face, leaning low to whisper to him. “I. Don’t. Care.”

I finish spitting the dirt out of my mouth, gritting my teeth as I twist my wrist around to snap one of the smallest bones on the bracelet I’m wearing. Heat starts to seep out of it, and I curl my fingers, guiding it around to the vines wrapped around my arms. They start to dry out, the little hairs on the green shoots shriveling away. As that’s happening, the monster pushes back upright, taking her hand off Jazel’s mouth and hooking a nail under his chin so she can tilt it back. “Have you any last words for me? I usually just kill my sacrifice, but you have given me a good hunt over the past two moons. It has been many years since I’ve had this much fun.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed them! I’ve enjoyed them too, they’re fun.” Jazel says with a genuine smile. In front of me, the vines holding down my arms continue to dry out, and start to crackle and cinder with heat; I bite back a hiss of pain as the cinders start to burn away the hair on my arms. “I’m looking forward to our next one.”

The monster clamps her hand back over Jazel’s mouth again as the her coy smugness morphs into irritation again. “There will be no more chases. You’ve run a good race, but this is the end; you should be honored that your soul will find its final home in me.” Noticing the thick blue liquid on his sleeve, she dips one of her nails in it, then drags along his left cheek, drawing a line of blood. “So. No more running, no more taunting, no more teasing, no more close escapes.” She draws that nail along the left side of his face twice more, grinning as he winces with each slash, then uses her grip on his face to turn his head and draw three slashes across the right side of his face. “Once again: have you any last words for me?”

All the playful levity went out of Jazel when she cut up his face. He looks like he’s struggling to maintain his composure against the pain, and for a moment I’m not sure he’s going to hold it together; but he grits his teeth and takes a deep breath as the blood drips down the sides of his face. “Can I ask you a question?” he says, sounding slightly out of breath.

“I will allow it.”

“What’s your name?” Just three words, breathless but bold.

Her mouth curls at the corners, an amused look coming over her face. “You want to know who killed you. Very well.” With that, she leans down over him, murmuring something in his ear that I can’t hear from this distance.

Which is all good and well, because while Jazel’s got her distracted, I’m able to yank my arms free of the cindered vines, scrambling forward to grab the rocket launcher and get into firing position. “Ledd’im go!”

The sound of me scrambling through the leaf litter has her sitting back upright, fox ears tilted and turned towards me. Her pupils narrow to slits when she sees the rocket launcher pointed at her. “I should’ve snapped your neck when I had the chance.” she rumbles, the growl coming from deep in her chest. “Put that down. You would not risk your friend.”

“That is factually incorrect.” I say, priming the launcher with a flick of my thumb.

“Wait what, it is?” Jazel demands.

“Yup.” I say, pulling the trigger.

Even if the recoil from the rocket launching doesn’t throw me on my back, the blast from the detonation does. I can feel the shockwave travel through me, and the brief moment of searing heat; when my senses all come back into line, I roll back to my feet to find that the forest around the monster’s spot has been turned into a scorch radius. Bits of burning leaves and ferns are still drifting down from where they’d been thrown into the air, and smoke is clinging to an ethereal blue orb that the monster has raised around herself and Jazel.

“Did you really think that would kill me?” she asks as she lowers her hands, the orb dissipating as she does so. “You will have to try harder than that.”

“Challenge accepted.” Jazel grunts, closing his right hand into a fist. A plasma blade ignites from the bracer on his arm, burning through the vines holding that arm down, and he swings it up at her. She jerks back, the blade shearing through one of her low-hanging locks of hair as it misses her throat by half an inch.

“I will savor extracting your soul from that lying mouth of yours—” she snarls, crouching to launch herself back at Jazel. She thinks twice when she sees I’m charging full tilt at her, my buzz baton out and geared up for a home-run swing at her noggin.

“We need to recall, Jazel!” I shout as the monster backs out of range of my baton. I take a position standing over Jazel as he uses the plasma blade to finish cutting away the vines holding him down. “Like right the hell now!”

“Yeah yeah I’m on it.” he says, scrambling to get his pack off and unzip it. The monster feints forwards, and I take a swing at her to ward her off; she backs up, then starts circling around the blast zone. As she goes, copies of herself start splitting off to encircle us.

“NOW, Jazel!” I shout as I try to keep track of the copies, but there’s too many of them. No matter which way I turn, I’m always going to have my back to one of them.

“I heard you the first time!” He yanks what looks like a disc with two handles on it out of his pack; I reach down and grab one, and we tug in opposite directions. The disc snaps open, crackling and thrumming with energy; the air around us blurs and wrenches nauseatingly, and when the air clears again, we’re in the loading bay of our skipper.

The emergency warp disc snaps and pops, producing a dying whine. After that it lets out a thick billow of smoke and heat that has both of us dropping it in a hurry, and stumbling down the loading ramp of the skipper, coughing and wheezing. As we kneel outside on the airfield, catching our breath, Jazel looks sideways at me, then smiles in spite of the blood dripping from the slashes on either side of his face.

“I got her name.”

I stare at him for a moment, then whack his knee with the end of the buzz baton.

“AUGH OW! What was that for?!”

Event Log: Lysanne Arrignis

Helios Settlement: Airfield

2:39pm SGT

“Trying to make a fashion statement there, kiddo?”

Jazel and I look up from where we’re cleaning up the scorch mark that the warp disc left on the floor of the loading bay when we dropped it. Deputy Milor’s sauntering across the airfield to where our skipper is parked, taking his toothpick out of his mouth to point at Jazel.

“What?” Jazel says blankly, then reaches up to touch the white strips of medical tape that were placed over the slashes on his face when we visited the settlement’s hospital. “Oh, this. Got into a little bit of a scuffle out in the forest.”

“Really.” Milor says, his boots echoing over the landing ramp as he walks into the loading bay, then crouches down to size up Jazel. “Looks awfully precise to me. Three on each side, evenly spaced. Not the sort of thing you usually pick up in a random scuffle.”

Jazel looks away, biting his lip at the implication heavy in Milor’s words.

“Did you need something, Deputy?” I ask, setting aside the brush after I scrub the last of the scorch mark from the floor.

“Nah, the mayor just wanted me to make sure that you two were okay.” Milor says, standing up and putting his toothpick back between his teeth. “Word gets around. He heard your friend came back looking like he’d stuck his face in a blender.”

“Injury and possible death are part of our line of work.” I say, standing up as Jazel gathers the cleaning supplies and starts putting them away. “I’m sure that you understand the risk, considering your career choice.”

“Sort of.” Milor shrugs. “Can’t say that I expect to get marked like that in my line of work, but otherwise I can understand the occupational hazards. But, since we’re on the topic, the mayor’s wanting to know if you guys managed to get something out of today’s little field trip. It’d be a pity if Mr. Jaskolka didn’t get anything in exchange for that makeover.”

“Of course.” I say, rolling my eyes. “Tell him—”

“We did get something out of it.” Jazel says quietly, closing the locker door on the cleaning supplies. Reaching into his pocket, he digs out the dreamcatcher - woven through its threads is the lock of hair that he’d sheared off when he’d swung his plasma blade at the monster's neck. “There’s still some work to do, but we can use this to track her. Once we get a map of her frequent routes nailed down, we can build a trap for her.”

“The mayor will be happy to hear that.” Milor says, reaching up to lift his hat off his head and run a hand through his hair. “I’ll let him know. It’s good to hear that you two got some progress out of your adventure today.” Turning around, he starts back down the loading ramp, pausing at the end of it as he turns halfway and takes his toothpick out of his mouth. “And Mr. Jaskolka?”

Jazel perks up. “Yes, Deputy?”

“I know you like making visits to the villages, but I’d stay away from Vissengardians if I were you. If they see that she marked you, I can’t promise what they’ll do or how they’ll take it. Hell, they might worship you… or they might think that you’re destined to be her next sacrifice.” He winks at us. “Just some food for thought.”

He doesn’t wait for a response, walking off with that. Once he’s out of earshot, Jazel looks at me.

I hold up the burnt-out warp disc. “Three months of pay. Up in smoke.”

He grins. “I got her name, though.”

“Are you telling me that getting a homicidal soulstealer’s name is worth three months of money?” I demand as he starts back towards the hallway leading to the cockpit.

Pausing in the doorway, he mulls that over, then smiles.

“Yeah. I think it will be.”