Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

They spent a few weeks in the hab, taking a few excursions out into the Trillium proper, including to process the name change paperwork. There was a whole fucking ship above them, with four more levels, a city above the jungle. It was a little too urban for her liking, especially around Promenade 01, but, it was so cool that it existed.

It was nice, like a vacation. She learned about all the juggled storylines down in the nothoculture: Idrissa, for example, was selected for the 'mission' to the vet's because Bellerophon wanted him, and was in the process of domesticating them, a fact he was finding very agreeable; they were incredibly compatible. xī, on the other hand, was scheduled to head back to Perseus' cell to deliver some information about the ch'thal, Tifku, whose arc mainly involved him being passed between half a dozen Affini. It turned out fi)/fi/) just kind of liked being fought over, and had a number of cores in fi)/if/) from Affini on both sides, using various excuses to pass if between them.

Ziga, on the other hand, was the floret of another Affini running the nothoculture program, indeed named Erina. Ra knew from the start, and had been subtly steering her for a little bit —"there are no sides" was a big clue there. She had a great respect for someone being able to act with a straight face, but then, deception seemed to be a virtue to lagom, so maybe it came natural to rar. She got to have some honest, open conversations about it, and ra promised to have some quality time with her when she was back, when she wasn't playing with Relmi. God, Relmi. The poor fish got so many hints that there was something more happening and just did not get it. Ziga was developing a kink for watching it sail over mer head. They even manged to do a tour of a lagom burrow with mem on the Trillium main hab ring and mey didn't realize they weren't on the Cordylia any longer.

She confirmed the allegiances of all the Affini she'd met in the nothoculture: Dino was explicitly neutral, as a buffer between the two 'factions', and with Perseus, Manuka, and others had been slowly shaping her mind towards what it would need to be to truly thrive, a proxy domestication by mosaic. Ēan was, so far, naive, but due to Cassandra having 'fed information' about her to the Network, she was scheduled to have some very interesting encounters where Manuka would protect her. And speaking of which, since Ferula and Persi were Mycorrhizal, the 'flowers' that Sundar had growing out of his head were a reskin of a reskin, a hidden cordyceps stalk in plain sight. The Affini she'd asked to mind Vi, even, was a member of The Resistance from another cell, brought in secretly by Perseus to make sure nothing happened to Silath while she recruited Cassandra, which is why after Cassandra and Vi left, Silath's brain was thoroughly turned inside out by her. Silath herself didn't even know about that part. ("If you're going to be within my domain," the Magus had said, "I am still going to assert my prerogative to trick you. Even confederates need enrichment.")

Vi and Silath were hitting it off, now that they had open time together. She'd fucked him silly a few times by now, a thing he was entirely okay with, and he was beginning to show her the joys of pain play, a thing she had an intense curiosity about but almost no tolerance for.

In her own body, anyway.

Cassandra stretched, and felt the bruises. There were side benefits to that.

And over meals, in the bath, whispered in bed until Magus put them out to get them a good night's sleep, they talked about all the things they wanted to do while they were down there. All the little plot arcs, the things they thought might be fun to experience, the way they could participate in and add onto this world that was so much bigger than them.

Cassandra vetoed anything that resulted in Silath being separated from her or betraying her again. She hated that part. It was type 3 fun, a great story, she appreciated going through it, but, no. Not again. The next cycle was one they could experience together, or not at all. Vi was almost hurt, until he realized his inevitable betrayal meant he had built-in excuses to torture Cassandra, who tried not to look too excited about it. (Her tattoo, unfortunately, gave her away, even as it was fading. She requested a side plot where she got it made permanent.)

She watched the nothoculture shift after their plot was locked in, sophonts having their minds updated to create the state of the board that would need to exist in order for their plot to work. She'd asked about this, and about how it seemed like a lot of work just for them; Magus assured them that it was standard, and that it had happened to her, too. After all, she had been searching for herself the whole time.

And then, eventually, it came time for them to go. One by one, Magus gave them a big, lingering hug, and told them how proud of all of them de was, how much fun de knew they were going to have, and that no matter what, any time, anywhere, they would be watched over by der, that de would make sure to borrow plenty of Affini to interact with them, that they would be back before they knew it and they would regale each other about their experiences before planning another round. That in a real sense, their whole social network was der, and de was them, and that they would never be far away from each other, even if they weren't in the same room in their own bodies.

And then they were all led into a room with a bunch of what looked like salon chairs, including the domes that went over your head. The floor was a big screen, slowly pulsing with hypnotic-adjacent light. She grinned, taking it all in, remembering the last time she had been here. "None of this is necessary, is it."

"No. I could program you directly with the implant if I wanted," Magus said.

"You just can't help yourself. Got the archetypical brainwashing chair and everything."

"I really can't. It's just too much fun." She got a scritch under her chin, and knew that it too was another thing that de considered 'too much fun'.

She just laughed and hopped into one, settling into it. Sil took a second to her right, and Vi a third on the left, flanking her on either side. The fourth sat empty. "Hey Vi," Cassandra said, "imagine being in one of these with Sil sucking your thing."

"Heck," Vi said, "don't give me ideas."

"I think you should worry about giving me ideas," Magus said. "I think I just figured out how Euphorbia is going to break you and turn you into a double agent for The Resistance."

"—Oh no."

"I'll pencil it in."

Magus walked into the middle of the room, faced them, and raised der arms, and the floor began to pulse. Her eyes flicked to it on instinct, and she was ensnared before she knew what was happening.

She woke up tied to some kind of chair, in a room she had never been in before. It was right out of something from Three Letter Agency —a pulsing light show on the floor throwing light everywhere, which she could barely see because of the dome over her head.

"Cass?" she heard.

"Vi? Is that you? Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, are you okay?"

"I think? Where's Sil?"

"I'm here," Sil said to her right. "I'm all bound up."

"Me too, I can't move an inch."

A dark chuckle sounded in the room, low and sonorous, and her blood ran cold. She could see the lower part of an Affini approaching. "Good morning. I take it you slept well."

"Fuck you," she said. "Who are you? What do you want with me and my pinnates?"

"You'll find out soon enough," they said. "As for who I am… call me the Magus."

The Magus. one of the lead researchers of the Mycorrhizal network. She had gotten so close to figuring der out, but then… something had happened. She had been caught, clearly. Fuck. Fuck! If only she had been a little more careful.

"As for what I want with you, it's very simple, it's what I want for everyone." The visor flipped up, and she stared into the cold, circular red eyes of her captor.

"…You're the one who I thought was following me," she said, pulling fruitlessly at her bonds. "Has this been your plan the whole time? How long have you been watching me?"

"Long enough, my dear. I see all, including you. And your poor little mind is working so hard, isn't it, figuring every little thing out, worrying if anything is even real."

The visor flipped back down.

"You won't need to worry about that ever again."

"No—!" she cried. "I'll never— you won't get away with this!"

This was just met with another laugh. "I already have. You should know by now: My victory is axiomatic."

"I won't let you hurt my pinnate!" Vi yelled from the side, as the Magus moved over to him.

"Ah, such a noble little terran you are, Vitalii. So loyal, to a fault, willing to follow your pinnate to the ends of the earth. It will be so delicious to turn you against her."

"…Noo, nononono, you can't do that."

"As long as you're in my domain, I can do whatever I please. You will be such an effective weapon for me."

She watched der sweep across to the other side. "And you, Silath. So protective, so eager. You would do anything for them, wouldn't you? We shall see how you feel when you're forced to choose."

"There's always another way," Sil said, sounding like she was forcing herself to remain calm. "I won't be trapped in your games."

"I think you'll find them quite airtight. We shall see if you can outsmart the combined cognition of the Mycorrhizal Network."

This is bad, she thought, reaching out mentally to comfort her pinnates, and feeling them reach out to do the same.

It would be okay, so long as they had each other. And there was nothing in the universe that could break them apart, even if this villain were to try.

I'll keep you safe, was what Sil was thinking towards her.

I'll never betray you, was what she got from Vi.

And then, suddenly, she got another projection, from Magus derself: "Have fun."

She didn't understand the tone of it. It was almost… familiar? Affectionate?

Her confusion was put on the backburner, however, when the dome began to light up, and no matter where she looked, whether her eyes were open or closed, the pulsing lights and colours began to work on her. It was slow, methodical; she could feel it taking hold, in herself, and in the others. Slowly, she felt the presence of the two of them weaken, and her grip also weakened; no, this wasn't how things were supposed to go, this wasn't… she couldn't accept a bad end as the final chapter…

Sil let go first. Vi a moment later.

She was alone in her thoughts.

And then those thoughts winked out, one by one, until there was nothing left.

"I'm telling you, there's something going on." Cassandra was saying, staring at the I WANT TO BELIEVE poster on the wall across from the couch.

There are some displays of opulence that are bougie: Chromophobia, glass and crystal, gold, patterns whose lineage dates back hundreds of years. But that wasn't the opulence of the hab in our tale. No, the opulence here was one of personality, colour, of making something yours, with a history. Priceless shit was for art galleries. This was an extension of the occupants' biorhythms: soft, natural, imperfect, every surface scratched and dented, a couch taller than she was which you could sink into like it was made of marshmallow, and, relevantly, a slightly off-kilter poster adapted from the Three Letter Agency shit she loved. The detritus of living was accumulated everywhere. Warm. Humid. Not a pigsty, but not neat. It was a vibe.

The poster, in specific, felt Significant to her at the moment, for some reason. This was a signal with a lot of noise in it. Perhaps something that related to what she was thinking about, but how was completely up in the air. Did it just give off the same emotional vibe? Was it conceptually related in a way her brain had picked up before she did? Did it represent a missing data point that connected the graph and made it all make sense?

She knew she'd figure it out eventually. She always did.

"Like what?" came the muffled response from her first pinnate, Vitalii.

"It's on the tip of my tongue. I don't…"

She took another swig of New Rochefort's second-finest beer; the first finest would have had her babbling way more unhinged shit than this. Her other hand scratched his head in confusion, fingers slipping easily through his premature salt-and-pepper hair. "There's weird shit happening." She continued. "You remember that 'earthquake' bullshit last week?"

"They didn't want to risk the building collapsing," her second pinnate, Sil, said, giving her a little scritch to the back of the head to soothe her.

"Mmnn." She melted, but not entirely; her brain was too focused on this. "We're on a spaceship. Why are earthquakes even a thing?"

"The Affini emulate tectonics? For realism?"

That honestly did sound like something they would bother to do, but Sil was clearly just casting around for a counterargument. Occam's razor only applied if you were willing to let it cut you.

"Nah, I don't like it. Shit doesn't break any more, not like it used to. I had to intentionally tell the hab designers not to make it indestructible so it could age, remember? What were they fixing?"

"I'm not sure."

More staring, more drinking. The poster's immense, three-petaled white flower, so large you could stick it into the Mariana Trench and it would still be taller than anything terrans made on their own homeworld, stared back. She never got that poster, but like everything else, it had the right aura for the place.

She was getting nowhere just sitting here letting her brain rearrange concepts in the hopes it would tell her why any of it mattered. So she took her arm back from where it was around Vi's head, and got up.

"Hey, I was using that," he said, not serious, blinking blearily, not expecting getting to get his face out from under her arm so soon.

"Oh, poor you," Sil said as Cassandra went to put her shoes on, and, smirking, just reached under her dress and slid her panties off. "Here, have a consolation prize."

"…I mean."

"I can hear that thought from here, Vi, don't deny it, you little pervert."

"—Okay, okay."

"Lie down for me."

Vi complied pretty readily, splaying out on the couch, head up towards Sil, one leg hanging off it. Sil flipped the panties like a tablecloth and neatly laid it over his face, then took his hands and placed both over it. "There. Now don't take it away until you can't smell anything any more."

"Nngh," Vi said, but did what he was told, though he did pull it down slightly to look over the teal silk when Sil also got up. "You're going out?"

"Yeah, I need a walk." She stretched her arms out above her head, letting the shirt ride up over the waistband of her flared-out olive jeans. Thin and tight on top, thick and loose below. Stable. "Don't bruise your dick too much jerking off to her."

"I wasn't gonna—!" Vi lied.

"Uh-huh."

"I'm going to join you," Sil said. "In case you could use the company."

"Sure."

"Hab, set the autostroker to milking pattern mu. Lock the controls after it turns on until he safewords." Oh, he was in for it now; Sil did the mo-cap for that one herself.

"Got it!" the hab replied.

Vitalii groaned, the tent in his shorts nonetheless twitching. "And hey, just think about what happens when you're too fuckdrunk to move when we get back." Cassandra finished, and watched the plan click into place in his head.

"…Fuck."

Seeing what others couldn't had its benefits.

"There it is."

"Don't, uh, don't tire yourself out or anything." Vitalii eyed the autostroker. "Y'know, short walks are supposed to be as healthy as long ones."

"Thank you for looking out for our well-being," Sil said amusedly.

"No problem."

"Alright, we're out of here." Cass said. "See you in a bit." She made a beeline for the door, and Sil followed.

"'Kay, bye."

Through the door, technically the back door though there was no front, and onto the closed veranda that encircled the hab, past the racks that lined the outside. She loved this place. They were all filled with knick-knacks, little things that she and Vi and Sil had made, or things that they loved, like having a series of vending machines that were just built for them. Pins for VIRIDIS PEARL, scale models of Burrows structures, a game controller Vi designed with a massage gun on it, a fridge full of drinks, a rack of munchies, a couple of recreational xenodrug blends, a coffee setup like she had upstairs. They had absolutely zero compromise for popularity or taste; it was an extension of them just like the upstairs was. What, was she worried about making a profit? Doing what was popular, or soliciting the favour of a few influencers?

It made her smile every time she saw an empty place somewhere in here, a little hit of validation, especially if it was close to the back door. Someone wandered by and liked what they liked, sometimes enough to go snooping around, and even if they never met in person, they had that in common, wherever they were out there.

Turning the corner to the front, the rough stone floor gave way to a soft dirt path which they wandered out and began to follow, turning left.

Fuck, the Cordylia was beautiful.

There was a creek somewhere over all the plant life to her right, across from the hab and extending in both directions. A bridge over it coming up, but there was nothing over there. The rest was just… trees, grasses taller than she was, mushrooms growing on trunks, little caps sprouting up from the ground along the path…

No sign of tech. No sign that there was even a ship beyond the swampy jungly floating biome. It was great.

"Pretty magical, how just being out in all this helps your mood," Sil commented beside her.

"Yeah," she said. "I was just thinking that. …I don't know. Maybe I was just being crazy again."

"So what?" Sil leaned in and placed a kiss to her head. "If the worst thing that happens is that I get to go out on a walk with you, what's the harm?"

That brought a smile to her face. "You're so good to me," she said. "Sometimes I kinda wish I was different, you know. More 'normal'. But then I remember you and Vi'd miss this version of me, and it goes away pretty quickly."

"Good. Because I would."

After a few minutes of this rumination, she reached that hab with the 'earthquake damage', and looked at it. It still had caution tape across the door at the back of an open first floor, a thick strip of something that honestly looked more like washi tape than a safety indicator which, in a cutesy pastel, announced "Danger! Keep out, little one!"

How long does it take to fix a busted hab? Wouldn't the occupant want their hab back or something? She hoped they were alright.

She felt her desire to walk leave her. Yeah, that was about right. She didn't really want to walk, she figured. She just wanted to walk here, and think about the hab, and what it could mean. To try and satisfy that itch in the back of her head, the part that Just Didn't Make Sense.

It wasn't something she could control. She knew she would be thinking about it at her own hab or here. She could throw some red meat at it and let it chew on it for a while, but its stomach was ultimately bottomless. She tried to let things go, eventually, but it was a slow process and they tended to show back up in her pocket after a while, like a cursed object.

…She wasn't naive enough to try to get past that tape. She knew she'd never get there. Maybe there was something in the first floor, or out back, but she doubted it.

"Who were you," she asked, under her breath.

"You want to look around?" Sil said.

"You think it's a good idea? I mean, I don't want to get in trouble, or get a building collapsed on me or something."

"Now you're deciding nothing is going on?"

"I don't know! Maybe several things are true at once. Maybe someone has an earthquake gun."

"An earthquake gun."

"Yeah, you know, like Havana syndrome."

Sil just chuckled. "Like your Three Letter Agency stuff."

"Yeah!"

"You're so cute." Sil pulled her in and scratched her at the back of her head, and she let go of the reflexive sense that she was being humoured. It was Sil; she wouldn't do that to her.

Cassandra sighed softly as Sil pulled back. "…I'm not going to lie, I do actually want to look around."

"Okay. You want to take the inside, I'll take the outside?"

"Sure."

She wandered up into the first floor while Sil went into the foliage. "Weird layout," Sil commented, as she looked at the empty space.

"Yeah. What do you think this place was, a store?"

"Maybe." Sil disappeared behind the hab, and she started wandering.

Whatever happened here, it did the kind of damage she had never seen in the Compact, and had rarely seen in the Accord. There were scratches and gouges all over the jamb. Honestly, it looked kind of cool. But what it didn't look like, in any way, was that it was from an earthquake. She went around back of a little bar area, and there was some debris across the floor, nothing that looked structural, and she studied it. She caught something with a little bit of colour, and picked it up.

It was one of her buttons for VIRIDIS PEARL. She guessed they must have picked one up at some point.

"Whoever they were, they had good taste in music," she mumbled to herself.

"Hey Sandra, come check this out," Sil called out, and she perked up and made her way around back to meet her.

"What's up?"

"Look," Sil said, gesturing at the ground. "Glass."

"Yeah?"

"I think it's from the bedroom window up there."

The pane was half-intact. A big hole had been knocked into it, implying that it was where the glass came from. She couldn't see anything from down here, and it was too high to stand on Sil's shoulders or something.

"…They threw something, maybe."

"You think?" Sil asked, glancing around. "…Do you think it's still here?"

"Maybe. Let's see if we can find anything."

She and Sil started wading through the underbrush, pushing leaves to the side. It was a little hard for Sil, being taller; she had to really hunch over, and after a bit, straightened up. "This is not great for my back," she said. "I think I'm done."

"Okay," Cassandra said; just a little more, and then she'd give up—

And just then, a glint caught her eye.

She went over to it and picked it up. It was a silvery, strangely-shaped piece of metal, as if to a puzzle box.

"Sil. Sil."

"What?"

"I was right. There was a coverup."