Jazz fusion
What, give aid to a person of ill repute to satiate my own curiosity?
What, carelessly help bring about my employer's possible doom?
Who, me?
Curator's Office
Hydra/Gamma arrives from outside.
"White product. We will quest. I tire of Thnad's hiding," the dark-bladed plant-thing in the doorway says. She straights from her leaning.
Squizzle walks to the front of the desk and stands up straight, hands clasped in front. "Seems like everyone's searching for something nowadays. Perhaps you should get togethr with the obscure one, who's searching for Thnad as well."
Squizzle picks up Thnad's mask, and looks from it to Gamma's own and back, comparing them.
Gamma gazes evenly at Squizzle, both with great contempt and curiously striking respect. "That accursed obscure one I seek, too." A bit longer of staring. Her mask might have been made by a similar maker, but otherwise is not the same. She continues. "We are alike. We are numbered in masses. We are disposable. We have unusual products. What motivates you?"
Squizzle nods, gently setting the mask down and looking up at Gamma again. "Curiosity. Inquisitiveness. The chase, I suppose. And you?"
Gamma's own mask hardens its angles and edges ever so slightly. "I turn to invigorating music to drown the core of anger. I have no soul, only anger. Now I feel angry enough to seek my own end." Then she strides rapidly to the desk, and bends over. "Get on my shoulder, in my hair, whatever you clingers-to-things-such-as-me do. We will go."
Squizzle nods, stepping over to the edge-- takes a leap-- scrabbles at Gamma's front-- and finally perches on her shoulder, on all fours.
Does Gamma bother with another word? No, she does not. She simply stomps out immediately.
StrangeWarp
Squizzle hangs on tightly, though its gripping claws scarcely can be felt, much less painful. "You think Thnad may be hiding somewhere around here, ma'am?"
Gamma utters a cry terrible and musical, like a calling to hunting of souls. Then she explains simply, "I asked the Library. It will tell me. Cost me, but I do not care. We check Strange first."
Squizzle rubs its chin thoughtfully. "Do you have some ideas of places Thnad tended to frequent?"
Now Gamma swivels her head, a direct look at the squirrel riding upon her shoulder. "You are disposable, as am I. The Museum attracted the obscure one. The Museum has a cling to you. We will use your properties. We will call, not seek. If we seek, we will fail. The obscure one hides too well."
"I will play you, squirrel. Prepare your replacements."
Squizzle turns to look at Gamma's face, or rather mask, raising its eyebrows. "You think I'm not used to being played with, ma'am? Very well." It glances about, squinting a little.
Grasping Squizzle with a curious tenderness, wrapping her tendril-fingers around it, Gamma raises it off her shoulder. She places Squizzle before the 'mouth' of her mask. A soft 'breath' indraws, more like a rapid absorption-and-conversion of air into direct energy. And then she blows. A note. The sheer violence is a stark contrast with the softness of precluding actions.
Squizzle shivers a little at the blast of air. "I... I don't know... I don't think it's around here... I'm not sure..."
Again, Gamma blows. The very action seems to erode Squizzle's physical existence itself, grating scraping blasting bits of it into another, fierce note. This one travels further, enveloping more than merely the Square.
Gamma stops to speak only after that last note has echoed. "We will envelope the entire Warp." A sharp glitter in her mask's eyes.
Squizzle blinks, dazed, hazy, even as flecks of white and red and purple float off of it, swirling in the air. "Envelope it? How?"
Another, final, blast of the improv horn named Squizzle. The hornblow echoes further, evocative hints of the Museum radiating out from a clearly perceivable epicenter right here in the Square. Calling Obscurity to Gamma, resonating out.
Squizzle shivers in the breeze, even as it is carried away, looking more like a sand dune being dissipated than a flesh-and-blood creature. "How is this supposed to--?" is as far as it gets before its head is entirely gone. Then its neck. Then its shoulders. Torso and arms. Legs. Feet. Dust in the wind.
[ And why not? It was Ash Wednesday. ]
The very walls of Strange sing, a musical chorus radiating outward, in some narrow spaces intensifying enough to blow them clean.
The shockwave travels, dissipating just enough to avoid sheer mass destruction, staying well beneath the threshold of suppression by the very systems of safety preserving the Puzzlebox. But not weakening, gathering and maintaining a constant strength.
White powder swirls about the square, in and out of the library, to and from the Emporium's vein, between walls, above and below and left and right and forward and back and past and present, a magnetic field exactly centered on the Hydra sproutling.
Strangelings howl with great anger, those of them who do not listen enthralled for the brief moment the music rushes past them or merely ignore them. Many do not act. But those who do, they begin rushing toward the offender. Concentrating upon the one who inflicted that ear-tearing thunder upon them.
The crowd begins its blind rush, sweeping through the square. Gamma simply stands there, in the midst of the whirling powder, indifferent. She sweeps her hand. "Squizzle. It matters not what they do to me. Clear yourself so I can seek the obscure one within the mob."
The airborne dust trickles down, dissipating, falling into obscurity.
The last words of Gamma before the enraged horde of monsters and gothlings and little blood-weeping girls and pathologically polite gentlefigures set upon her are, "Thnad. Alley. Void. Bott-"
--and Squizzle is standing on the ground before the mirror. "But of course, ma'am."
As you touch the mirror, it spurts a corona of tentacles to encapsulate you. For one dizzying instant you have the sensation of rocketing down a tube filled with liquid... and then you're in...
Transit Nexus
[ and from there to BottomWarp, up the stairs to the Upper Bazaar, and into the blind alley ]
Narrow Alley
There's nothing here. Really nothing. At all. Except you. You begin wonder, in such a context, with no opposition against which to define yourself, whether you can truly be said to exist at all. Then you begin to wonder how you can get out, because there don't seem to be any exits.
Just outside the alley, a plant sprouts. It is pawed at curiously, sniffed, as it commences its rapid growth.
The familiar thorn-blades blossom outward, causing hands to snap back and some to wander off. Then it takes shape, and walks right into the alley. And Gamma arrives to await.
Squizzle nods to Gamma, sitting up on its haunches, on nothing. "Greetings again, ma'am."
Gamma merely nods. And stares around herself. While she asks, "Do you know why I selected this?" A gesture around.
Squizzle idly taps Thnad's Mask with its fingerclaws. "Because it's one of the few areas of the Mess which isn't bound by absolutist physical definition?"
Squizzle glances around. "A featureless gray area, so devoid of detail that it's impossible to judge exactly how large it is. Utterly alone with only your thoughts and imaginings as company..."
"That is a relatively minor matter though potentially useful. I selected because..." A finger snaps out at a blur, visible because there is nothing to blur, nothing to conceal itself in. "Even the most obscure and arcane soul cannot hide against nothing."
Obscurity is only now noticed as being here.
Squizzle darts around to look in the direction Gamma pointed. "Ah yes..."
In many ways, this wombat lacks notable features. Can you really be sure that this is not one of many by-passers of similar species you might have ignored in the streets and walkways? A simple, clean gray jumpsuit adorns *r. * lacks all trackable traces. No scents remain in *r trails, no footprints are left, no apparent presence exists on the datasphere. * does not even have a shadow.
Squizzle bows low. "Greetings, obscure one."
The wombat stares hostilely back at Gamma's pointing finger.
"You have believed yourself clever. Leading me on the merest of wild hintings, merely so you can pin down my presence," the wombat rumbles.
Squizzle says, "And now that we are reunited, how shall we fare?"
Gamma says, "We will fare interestingly, Squizzle." She ignores the wombat's anger.
Squizzle says, "And didn't you want to be pinned down, dear shade?"
The wombat simply shifts *s stare to Squizzle. A faint tremble stirs *s body.
Squizzle says, "You can't go on hiding forever, you know."
"And what would you have me do?" The wombat wipes *s face, smudging it ever so slightly.
Squizzle holds up the Mask of Thnad. "Take this. It's yours."
Gamma breaks her momentary silence. "Yes. You know where Thnad is." With an odd sigh, she brushes tendril-fingers through her hair, pulling away with it flowers. "Get it over with. I've tired too much of playing this role. It was less tiring when I was a shard of a person, pure embodiment of anger. But even fragments regenerate personalities in the right situations."
Slowly, the wombat reaches out to the mask. A moment, slow. "Thnad is dead. Yet she still exists."
Squizzle says, "Of course. Thnad still can exist. All you have to do is remember her."
"She is a shadow. My shadow," the wombat speaks. "Destroyed by her very own mother. I loved her. I thought I could bring her without her mother, I thought I had enough. But she never was anything more than a pale shadow!"
Squizzle says, "Who was her mother?"
Gamma cackles. Sharply unkindly, but it softens toward the end. "We of Hydra were a singular being known as her mother. The floodgates of memories open more and more. The reunification has already begun, begun sooner than most think, my dear squizzle." And then she gazes at the wombat. Softly.
"You are as much Thnad now as yourself," Gamma says.
Squizzle says, "Ah yes. Mother..."
Squizzle says, "The great robot Mother. The Strangevirus strain Mother. And the Hydra-precursor Mother."
Squizzle rubs its chin. "Another threesome..."
Gamma chuckles. And the wombat turns the mask over in *s hands thoughtfully.
Squizzle waves a paw handpaw testily to the obscure one. "Well? Go on..."
Obscurity... Thnad... fixes the mask upon *s face. "I still have yet to decide whether to forgive you. But I will return to you, Hydra, for what of Thnad you hold onto."
Squizzle nods, and stands aside, quietly.
Obscurity disappears with a grumbled mutter, once Squizzle has stepped out of *s way.
Obscurity does not seem to be anywhere to be seen anymore.
Squizzle looks up at Gamma. "Well then, ma'am? Shall we leave?"
For once, Gamma's mask has a smile. "I have done what I desired. I know the others of myself worry, but they are capable. They have more impetus to preserve themselves than they have to change, most of them, but when pushed, they will find a way to effect the changeover safely."
"I have made no plans for safety. I push instead," Gamma says. She brushes her hair, again pulling out more flowers.
Squizzle shrugs indifferently. "There's nothing as constant as change..."
Squizzle catches a flower and gently presses it onto its jacket's right epaulette.
Gamma's 'head' nods. "No grief or guilt can last forever."
Squizzle says, "Guilt? What about?"
"You are a Curator. You are close to Mel in some senses. You know what happened to him?" Gamma asks with a tired droop.
Squizzle says, "I work for him. He doesn't like to talk about his past much... the previous Museum and suchlike. Is that the guilt you mean?"
Gamma looks at Squizzle. And, in a single, potent and charged word, she says everything.
Squizzle rubs its chin. You might even notice it looking a bit nervous. "'Caroline'? Caroline knows?"
Squizzle says, "I guess she would, if anyone..."
"And that is all I will say. I have more interest in the fusion now. You have helped."
With that simple statement, Gamma turns aside into a patch of magic mirror blossoming outward from herself.