EMPATHY [Easy: Success] - She says it so insistently, as if arguing with you. You may have upset her.
COMPOSURE [Formidable: Failure] - You feel a pit in your stomach. You did something wrong, but you don’t know what.
LOGIC [Trivial: Success] - Her way of dressing, the feminine name, yet deep voice - it should have been clear to you sooner. She’s transgender.
ESPIRIT DE CORPS [Formidable: Success] - Almost imperceptible, the lieutenant anxiously twitches his eyebrow.
DAMAGED MORALE - 1
Transgender? What’s that?
This doesn’t have any bearing on the investigation.
ENCYCLOPEDIA [Trivial: Success] - A transgender person is someone who does not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. Oftentimes they will dress conforming to their desired gender roles, change their names, and seek medical intervention to, “transition.”
Gender is rather bourgeois, anyway.
Why would any proud Revacholian discard their masculinity?
Changing your gender? That sounds like quite the hustle. Maybe we can learn a thing or two from this woman.
That’s cool. I have no opinion on this one way or another.
RHETORIC [Medium: Success] - Just as Mazov dared to challenge the established order of capitalism, so too do others challenge the order of things such as sex and gender.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Trivial: Success] - IT’S BEEN SO LONG SINCE WE’VE FELT THE TOUCH OF A WOMAN. WHO CARES IF SHE USED TO BE A MAN? HAVE SEX WITH HER NOW! ITS WHAT A REAL MAN WOULD DO!
EMPATHY - [Trivial: Success] - Don’t do that. It’s clear now, you upset her for accidentally calling her a man. Just apologize.
COMPOSURE [Medium: Failure] - Profusely.
ESPIRIT DE CORPS [Medium: Success] - It’s important to be a good ally.
DRAMA [Medium: Success] - Make a real show of it, sire!
“Oh, I didn’t realize. I’m sorry.”
“I’m so sorry I’m so sorry I’ll leave you alone forever now.”
“I haven’t been a good representative of the RCM. We’re here to help the people of Martinaise, no matter their identity. I’m sorry to have let you down.”
[Drama - Legendary 14] Try and come up with an elaborate, heartfelt apology in the style of the turn of the century thespians.
HIGH 83% +1 Found testosterone ampoule on nightstand. +1 Homo-Sexual Underground. +1 Read about the turn of the century thespians. -1 Recovered your gun. -1 Masculinity challenged.
This is a Red Check. It cannot be retried.
⚀⚀
CHECK FAILURE
YOU - You try and come up with the words to convey your apology to the young woman, but you come up blank. It’s hard to fit, “transgender” into iambic pentameter, as it turns out.
DRAMA - I’m sorry, sire. I have failed you.
KIM KITSURAGI - “Detective? You’ve been standing there for a whole minute. Are you okay?”
ESPIRIT DE CORPS - Shit, the lieutenant is onto us. We have to say something soon, or we could lose him.
COMPOSURE [Trivial: Success] - Don’t worry, we can still salvage this. Anyone have any ideas?
VOLITION [Heroic: Failure] - Let me handle this.
You - “I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sorry. I’m such a fucking failure. Do you want me to kill myself?”
It is almost five centuries ago, and the girl who will one day be a swordswoman is lying in the red-tinged mud. She can’t get up—broken bone? severed tendon? She can’t tell. She’s yet to cultivate her palate for pain. Her enemy towers over her, a cataphract mailed in screaming steel and poisoned light. His warhammer falls, and it is death, forever death, death unconquered and unconquerable.
“No,” says a part of her. She is not even seventeen years old. Her body is mangled and broken, wound piled upon wound piled upon wound. A dull kitchen knife is her only weapon, though she lost that in the mud the second her grip faltered. Her enemy is no thing of this earth. And yet—
“No. It is not death, forever death, death unconquered and unconquerable. It is only a hammer, falling. It is only ‘an attack.’”
And the girl understood.
~~~
It is the better part of three centuries ago, as best the swordswoman can reckon, and she is beset on all sides by foes. They are not monsters—just mountain bandits, or highland rebels, as one cares to see it. But they outnumber her by dozens, and even an exceptional swordswoman might struggle against but two opponents of lesser skill.
From in front of her, beside her, behind her they advance, striking from every angle with spears and blades and axes. Others fill the air with arrows, sling stones, firepots. It would be effortless, to parry any single blow. It would be impossible, physically impossible, to defend against them all.
“No,” says a part of her.
“You are not outnumbered. You do not face 'multiple’ foes. It would be impossible to defend against every attack — but there is no 'every’ attack. Only one.”
“Oh,” the swordswoman said. And it was, in fact, effortless.
~~~
It is eighty years ago, or thereabouts. A coiling spire of stony flesh and verdigrised copper throbs like a tumor on the horizon, coaxed from the earth by spell and sacrifice. It is the tower of a sorcerer-prince, and a birthing place of abominations.
Seven locks of rune-etched metal are opened with her single key. Wretched shapeling beasts, grown by sorcery in vitreous nodules, flee wailing from her, absconding before she even draws her blade. Demons sworn to thousand-year pacts of service find the binding provisions of their agreements unexpectedly severed.
These things dissatisfy the sorcerer-prince. He waxes wroth. He makes signs of power and chants incantations. With a flask of godling’s blood, he draws the binding sigil inscribed upon the moon’s dark face. With cold fire burning in his eyes, he speaks the secret name of Death. It is a king among curses, all-corrupting, all-consuming, and it falls from his lips upon the swordswoman.
“No,” she says, and she turns it aside with her blade.
The sorcerer-prince’s brow furrows. How did she even do that?
“Parried it.”
But—
“With my sword.”
No—
“See, like this.”
Stop—
“Well,” the swordswoman finally says, “I figured that if I just…looked at it right, and thought about it, and construed your curse as a kind of attack…then I could block it.”
That’s not how it works at all!
“If you insist,” says the swordswoman, shrugging, and decapitates him.
~~~
It is now. It is the end. Death couldn’t take the swordswoman, not when she’d spent all her life cutting it up. At times, Death might sidle up to one of her friends, or peer down into a grandchild’s crib, and she’d just give it a look. That’s all it took, by then.
Heartache couldn’t take her, either. Bad things happened to her, and they hurt, and she lived in that hurt, but if it was ever more than she could take…she’d just, move her sword in a way that’s difficult to describe. And she’d keep going.
Kingdoms fell, and she kept going. Continents crumbled and sank into the sea. Her planet’s star faded and froze. She started carrying a lantern. Universes were torn apart and scattered, until all that had been matter was redistributed in thermodynamic equilibrium. With one exception.
But now it is the end. There is no time left; time is already dead. The swordswoman has outlived reality, but there is simply no further she can go. This is not a thing that can be blocked. This is the absence of anything further to block.
“No,” says the girl who will one day be a swordswoman. “This isn’t the ending.And even if it was, it’s not the ending that matters.”
The swordswoman looks back at who she was, at the countless selves she’s been between them. She looks forward, at the rapidly contracting point that remains of the future. She grasps the all of linear time in her mind, and sees that it is shaped like a spear.
