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Harlequin · Journeyman Joined: 07 Feb 2010 Posts: 140

The sun fought its way through the hazy darkness of umbra, clawing for every inch of purchase it made. The light clack clack of her sandals on the dark cobblestones seemed oddly out of place, but she paid it no mind and pushed through throngs of soft-shoed mages and heavy-booted meatshields toward the bank.

She made a quiet request of the minter as she perused her bank box. “Technomancy,” she repeated as the minter scratched his head. “Do you know anyone who—“

“Pssst…PSST…” A hiss came from the shadowy corner of the bank. The cloaked figure in the corner made eye contact with Harlequin and then swiftly stepped outside and stalked off to the west.

Harlequin looked from the dark figure back to the Minter with a pained smile. “Nevermind, Sir. I think I…may have found what I was looking for. Thank you ever-so-kindly.” She curtsied as she handed her bank box back to the minter and swiftly followed the cloaked man. Several others peered through the archway in the direction he had gone. Harlequin blew her hair out of her face as she pushed through the onlookers.

He’d stopped beside a dark alley stone wall and leaned back against it, grinning sleazily and chewing a toothpick. With one hand he flipped a gold coin. He looked Harlequin up and down slowly. “You are clearly the kind of girl who needs a technomancer….among other things.” He licked his lips.

Harlequin smiled wryly, barely altering the emotionless painted expression he would have seen. “And you’re clearly the type of guy who doesn’t know the meaning of the word discreet.”

He laughed. “Sweetness, I don’t need to be discreet around here. You think anyone here cares what I’m selling?” Greasy tendrils of hair snaked down around his face and neck from beneath the hood of his cloak as he unwrapped one shoulder and held the cloak open to one side. Various shiny pendants, gears, and cogs dangled inside it with paper price tags hanging from each one.

It was Harlequin’s turn to laugh. “Gods, you are a walking metaphor aren’t you?”

The man’s brow knitted at the word, which he obviously didn’t understand. His hand made intention toward his dagger. Harlequin waved dismissively with one hand and chuckled. “Nevermind…I am looking to begin a project. I have no experience or knowledge of technomancy. I am willing to pay well for your time, if you can help me get it started.”

“I’ll do better than that, Sweetness. I’ll help you get started and build a kit so's you can finish it up yourself. Be quite a clutch o’ coin though. You good for it?”

“If you can do what you say, I will pay a million gold coins.”

The man boggled, nearly swallowing the grubby toothpick he’d been mangling with all six of his teeth. “Sweets, you got yerself a technomancer.”
_________________
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
~Paul Laurence Dunbar

Harlequin · Journeyman Joined: 07 Feb 2010 Posts: 140

Months had passed since the day Quinn met the shady technomancer in an Umbran back alley. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he had proven most useful. What she had needed was a hands-on approach to technomancy and a project she could complete. Unfortunately, what she had found was a hands-on technomancer, but at least she got the project started, and made sure she could complete it alone before she put him at the bottom of a hole in the desert.

And today, the project would finally be complete. Harlequin’s painted face solemn with concentration, she took a small metal nut marked with a scorched rune and tightened it into place, then leaned back to admire her handiwork. The creation that came to life was what she could only describe as a mechanical chicken. The beak was different, and it bounced comically when it walked, but it scoured the surface of the table with its purple glowing eyes and spied a small metal clip. With haste, the clankity contraption bobbled and bounced over to the clip and gobbled it up. Quinn’s eyes went wide as a tiny wisp of smoke came out the back end of the device with a soft hiss.

Enthusiastically, the clinking mechanical chicken trotted across the table and, finding a spare metal gear, made a rather realistic squawk and gobbled it up as well. Again, a tiny puff of smoke out the backside, and the gear was no more than a memory.

Harlequin howled with laughter as the device cocked its head, spotting a shiny pendant that Ansel kept hanging over the bedpost where he slept. Ansel was way ahead of this new rival, and puffed up menacingly, lowering his head in warning as he guarded the pendant.

“Enough, enough!” Quinn laughed, catching the contraption as it made straight for the pendant, and she tucked its head under a mechanized wing. Instantly, the thing fell silent and still. Ansel, unconvinced, uttered what could only be construed as a growl as he stared down the new toy.

“There, there. Soon he’ll be Gray’s new pet, and you’ll have nothing to worry about.” She fluttered her fingertips soothingly on the top of the pied crow’s head and flounced off to her study to write a letter.
_________________
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
~Paul Laurence Dunbar

Harlequin · Journeyman Joined: 07 Feb 2010 Posts: 140

“Honey, I’m hoooome…” Quinn sang out quietly as she shut the door behind her and lit a lantern on the table. A pied crow sat roosting in the corner of the cabin on her bedpost. In the darkness, he was nearly invisible but for the tuft of white on his chest, where his beak was deeply nestled in slumber.

Harlequin crossed the room to a cupboard and pulled out a loaf of bread. The bread no sooner hit the countertop than the crow fluttered to perch atop Harlequin’s shoulder.

“Hungry, Ansel?” Harlequin tore off a few small chunks of the bread and poured them out of her hand onto the table. Ansel hopped onto the table and pecked eagerly at the bread.

The tempest raged in her mind as she began to digest all that she had discussed, and learned, in her meetings with this child genius who now consumed her time with plans, and theories, and schemata for the silver clockwork arrows which would ensure each shot she fired into the eyes of her prey, would be the last.

Gray Smythe was only a child. Borne of tragedy, resurrected from the claws of death. If pressed to guess, Quinn supposed there was more science than humanity in the twelve-year-old body that hobbled and trembled as he moved. He couldn't speak. He could barely walk. But in the child's mind lay wisdom which belied his age. Or, indeed, that of anyone she had ever known. Yet the single condition he had set forth before opening the door to this world of wisdom, gnawed continuously at her – fretted her at the edges. He knew what she was. And he knew that what he'd asked was far too much.

Ansel lifted his head with a bob as he downed the last piece of bread and watched intently as Quinn removed her crystal earrings. They sparkled in the candlelight as she shut them away in a wooden box. She smirked at Ansel, who stared at the box, wide-eyed.

“I’m onto you, my friend. No sparklies for you tonight.” Ansel fluttered across the room again to perch atop the bedpost, as Harlequin sat down at the dressing table to remove her makeup. She soaked balls of cotton with spirits that smelled bitterly of herbs, and worked meticulously to remove every last smudge of paint. She fanned herself, allowing her pale skin to dry before putting on a painted mask and tying the long, black satin ribbons to hold it in place. She examined the frozen, sombre expression of the mask she wore in the mirror and tilted her head.

Harlequin lifted the mask to blow out the lantern and the candle, then lowered it again into place as she dove onto the bed. She gathered her pillow beneath her chin, her face mere inches from the windowpane. The full moon’s light illuminated the white of her mask, so that the the reflection of her visage glowed back at her from the glass, a silvery spectre in the night.

Simultaneously, two thoughts struck her, and she allowed them both to sink in, rather than letting them battle it out in her head.

I must speak with Gray.

The child will have to die.

With the maelstrom hidden away securely in the darkness behind the sombre expression of the mask, Quinn watched the autumn leaves painted silver with moonlight as one by one they abandoned their refuges and fluttered softly to their winter grave.
_________________
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
~Paul Laurence Dunbar

Harlequin · Journeyman Joined: 07 Feb 2010 Posts: 140

“Y-you’re……p-poison?” The young lycan girl trembled and convulsed in pain, doubled up on the forest floor.

“Like a dart frog, b*tch.” Quinn knelt, gasping in agony as she tried to calmly assemble a silver mechanical device the size of a backpack.

The girl wailed, her muscles spasming, and she turned her head to vomit bile onto last autumn’s leaf rot.

“Watch the boots!” Quinn mustered her strength and stood, giving a guttural cry of pain as she kicked the convulsing lycan in the face. Blood spattered on her boots and flowed from the girl’s nostrils, but further injury didn’t seem to affect her convulsions as Quinn knelt and returned to assembling the mechanism on the ground at her feet.

The ailing lycan rolled over to turn her back on Quinn, moaning and writhing, choking on blood. Quinn sighed and spared a look toward her. “Can’t you see I’m trying to work here? Shut that gaping bloody maw of yours so I can concentr--“

A gasp and a desperate cry escaped Quinn as she crumpled over the mechanism and tried to catch her breath. Panting, she lifted her head and slid the final silver rod into place. The girl beside her rolled and writhed, attempts to shift her form evident as her features changed, then reverted.

“Why can’t I change...wh-what have you done to me?”

“Me?! What have I done to YOU??” Quinn stood with some effort, her fists clenched at her sides. “You bit me, you freak. YOU did this to you. Do you see this?” Her gesture circled her face with one hand. “This is the face of death. YOUR death. THIS is what I was made for. THIS is what I live for. If you think I’m going to just back down because Judas wants a dog, you’ve got another thought coming.”

“Judas?”

“And you can’t shift because my paint contains luminescent fungi. In humans, it’s a mild hallucinogen. It makes them smile. It makes them feel things more intensely.” Quinn pulled a hefty silver clockwork arrow from her quiver and notched it. “In lycans, it renders them unable to distinguish between phases. You can’t change because you can’t feel the difference. And the pain? That’s wolfsbane. Don’t worry though, it’s only temporary. You didn’t get enough to kill you.”

“But who’s Jud—“ The girl’s question was cut short as Quinn drew back her bowstring, cocked the lever on the mechanical arrow, and fired it into the lycan’s face. A hundred silver needle-like arrows exploded through her flesh, exposing bone and brain.

“None of your business.” Quinn collapsed into a heap on the ground, using her last vestiges of strength and control to push twelve silver needles deep into her flesh around the bite wound on her thigh. Then she pressed the mechanism’s two nodes into the center of the wound, anchored to the skin by silver brads. With a groan, she flipped the lever and lay back flat on a bed of leaffall. Her body began to convulse in pain and – something else she could not place - as the mechanism whirred to life. Above her, spring’s new leaves fluttered and began to take nightmarish forms.

By god, Gray better have been right…
_________________
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
~Paul Laurence Dunbar

Harlequin · Journeyman Joined: 07 Feb 2010 Posts: 140

“I know you’re a strong woman, Quinn. But you don’t always have to be.”

Paine’s words echoed through the hollow shell her body had become, as Quinn struggled to climb the stairs without showing pain – without betraying weakness as he watched her. But you’re wrong, Paine. I do always have to be. The weak, die. But I guess you don’t have to worry about that. You never will.

Quinn wondered as she settled into her nest for the night – how complete the change was becoming. Gray had told her it could be stopped. Told her this would not be the end. Told her it could be contained, eradicated. If she did what he told her to do. And she had. But the fever wracked her body, and the pain was nearly unbearable. What if he was wrong? He was, after all, just a child. A prodigy. A genius. But a child, nonetheless.

The hour had come, and Quinn pulled the blankets off the small mechanical silver cube and unraveled the nodes. Without ceremony, she pushed in the twelve silver needles into her thigh around the bite wound again. And, with a wince, she pushed the silver brads into her flesh, securing the nodes in the center. With a glance of trepidation toward the stairs, she flipped the switch and lay back in the pile of pillows and blankets. The cube whirred to life again, with a soft cacophony of clicks and clinks. Paine would most certainly hear the sound. But then, he had most likely guessed the source of her affliction, already. He wouldn’t bother to look in.

Sleep claimed her, not gently. Shadows and nightmares tore at her soul. Whispers and screams converged as she withdrew further and further into herself. Smaller, and smaller, the space that contained her, and they took over the rest. Bloody, merciless hands tore away parts of her until this space was all that was left. And then, there was the moon. Full and bright, and hopeful. She crawled forth from her hiding place, and she reached for it with all her strength.

I am not yours. The moon spoke, and drew away.

Quinn struggled to form words, to beg – to plead. Don’t leave me. Please…

But no words came. Only a cry, high-pitched and desolate. A howl, disembodied, but for her own body. Sorrowful and alone. It became more urgent. And she watched the valley, and listened for answer. None came.

Silently, the moon withdrew into darkness, and the mountains sank into the abyss. Quietly, night crept over her and stole away the shadows and whispers and cries, until nothing was left except Quinn. No moonlight, no fear, no desire but to draw breath…

And with a gasp, she woke. The first glimmer of dawn painted the windows with rose and gold. There was silence in the sprawling house. The silver cube was spent – blackened and quiet. A symbol glowed faintly at its core – a golden rune that pulsed. The fever was gone. The pain had departed.

And Quinn was Quinn.
_________________
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
~Paul Laurence Dunbar