Pep Rally on Saturn (It's Your Fault)

Ariadne knew two things for sure about Theseus "Tess" Stuart: she was bad at picking a name, and she should never be in charge of party planning.

The Laundry Zone pulled every passing teleport into the entry hall, which at least prevented spies and children from penetrating deep into Atlas. Folding chairs of ivory had been grown by Jessie’s class, and Nagasaki had already organized an expedition into the sacred caves beneath the hotel, which kept the undead kindergarten busy and mostly pointed away from anything fragile.

Sky was already drunk, dancing with a cyborg abomination that looked like it had started life as a Greenland shark. Ariadne was pretty sure Sky had dated the creature's sister.

Jessie had arrived as a skull in a motorized wheelchair. Laurel, with the kind of cheer that made Ariadne nervous, had draped a banner over the chair’s back:

MINOR: DO NOT LEWD.

Jessie and Laurel were getting along, which was concerning but not surprising.

Most of the guests hadn’t arrived yet. Tess had fired off an invitation to the Mary Stuart Group Chat, which meant several hundred thousand people were theoretically invited. Ariadne doubted more than a few hundred would show up, but planning contingencies was one of the first lessons she’d ever learned.

The Rescue Patrol dog uplifts had been pulled in for logistics, which mostly left Ariadne as hostess for her own bachelorette party—an honor that felt less like a celebration and more like being assigned to manage a fire.

Erica, one of Ariadne’s nieces—currently wearing a biomineralized shell—had just left the entry hall when Atlas’s security system screamed inside Ariadne’s bit, the computer nested in her mouth. A fast-moving dimensional displacement slammed into Christian, replacing her with someone else as magic and science howled in protest at each other.

In the entry hall, a portal opened like a vertical slit in the air.

A girl in leather jumped through and hit the floor running.

Ariadne fired a burst of echolocation at the stranger.

Density anomalies in the breast tissue that didn’t fit conventional augmentation. Atypical ear shape. Rapid heartbeat. Facts her eyes would have missed. Visual inspection filled in the rest: an intense expression, flushed face, pale skin, and—helpfully—a clarifying detail that the garment was not “leather,” exactly, but a catsuit.

The intruder’s eyes scanned the room in that Stargazer pattern—micro-saccades shaped by the lack of a temporal fovea. Ariadne calmed slightly at the detail. It implied this was not a deliberate **** by anyone competent.

Incompetent assaults were still dangerous. So were distractions staged to look incompetent.

Ariadne stayed still. Sudden movement rarely made people calmer.

The intruder began making distance. Good. Distance was preferable to closing.

Ariadne tasted the air with a tendril. Baseline human sensory data was satisfactory, but access to the past was what she needed. The intruder had not been stressed before her arrival. She lacked the chemical trace of gunpowder and fossil fuel that would suggest military staging, and her fabric composition didn’t match obvious espionage kits.

Whatever this was, Ariadne suspected the girl hadn’t been informed in advance.

Then the intruder sprang.

The motion was disguised perfectly: a smooth shift from retreat to attack, muscle control precise enough to fool most threat models. Ariadne had only a heartbeat to react. She spun her tail low, aiming for the girl’s legs.

The girl jumped the tail easily.

Ariadne’s echolocation caught density shifts in the breast tissue again as something pushed the intruder into overdrive. A blow landed in Ariadne’s throat. Most Earth animals would have been stunned by the ****. Ariadne’s airway armor held.

She shrieked anyway.

It wasn’t pain. It was strategy: a high, mechanical scream—a deliberate mix of unpleasant frequencies at maximum volume. The girl stumbled, disoriented by the wrongness of it.

It was enough.

Ariadne’s next tail swipe took the intruder’s feet out from under her.

The girl bounced up instantly. Against a human, the recovery would have been perfect. Against a two-hundred-and-seventy-kilogram veriform transhuman, it was a gamble. Ariadne rolled into her, then over her, letting weight and contact surface do what speed couldn’t.

Pinned, the intruder smelled like controlled anxiety. Ariadne’s tendrils traced the girl’s cheeks. More precise pulses of ultrasound mapped what she’d caught, and it was… fascinating.

Cultivated human cells arranged into a human shape with architectural upgrades.

Sloppy upgrades, by Ariadne’s standards. Human features had been retained where only invasive inspection would ever notice. But the design still carried peculiarities that betrayed the lack of an origin in a uterus.

The disturbing part was the throat.

The maker had refused to grow a normal human larynx.

The girl would be mute without creative compensation or physical modification.

Ariadne hissed in ultrasonic frustration. Removing speech from a human body was the kind of primitive eugenic idealism that always thought it was being efficient. The particular expression of it felt novel. Ariadne’s best guess: a totalitarian **** program, or a gender-focused project that had decided women needed to be crippled.

She closed her eyes for a moment and let the girl struggle beneath her. The bioroid’s panic would burn itself out, given time. Her fingernails barely drew blood—she was targeting Ariadne’s underbelly, where she assumed softness.

Crawler ventral scales were designed as the primary contact surface with the ground. Ariadne’s dorsal skin was more ****, closer to boar hide than armor, but important damage seemed unlikely, especially with closed eyes.

Then the girl did something peculiar.

She began ripping at her own catsuit.

Ariadne stiffened. Either it was a distraction, or it was some intuitionist nonsense. The moment the fabric tore, the non-local energy transfer spiked. The bioroid’s agitation surged.

Ariadne hated what she did next.

From beneath her chin, her third hand extended and smashed the floor open. The tendrils were delicate sensors and manipulators, but the trunk in her chin was pure strength—crushing plates, ugly leverage, a kind of masculine power Ariadne had never learned to love. She hated her trunk almost as much as her ears, which still unfurled like a rabbit’s when she stopped retracting them.

She liked her teeth, though. She rarely had a reason to bare her beaver-like incisors, but they were cute and useful.

The trunk didn’t quite match the bioroid’s enhancements, but she was not going to try a wrestling match when she could escape into favored terrain. The floor covered the wet, tight, dark tunnels that linked to the shafts and crawlspaces of Atlas, the parts of the hotel made for her and her kind.

Ariadne rolled off the bioroid and flowed into the gap. She fired pulses through the floor, tracking the intruder’s movements. No weapons. No retrieval behavior. She appeared unarmed.

If Ariadne had to guess, the bioroid wasn’t responsible for her arrival.

Most likely: accident, prank, or distraction.

Ariadne consulted her bit. Atlas showed no other discrepancies. Skynet was interfacing with liaisons to track Christian. Laurel had taken over as emergency hostess for the bachelorette party.

That left Ariadne time to think.

First hypothesis: someone exploited the bioroid as a diversion while Christian was replaced. Second: accident. Third: someone’s idea of hiring a stripper—unlikely unless Laurel had access to resources she shouldn’t.

Ariadne tasked Atlas’s AI to audit any accounts linked to Laurel, just to be safe. The constellation of arcane financial instruments used by Ariadne’s parents could have been opened to Laurel, in theory. Ariadne’s father had a tendency to do shit like that for reasons he rarely articulated.

Above, the bioroid stood on the folding chairs, which reduced Ariadne’s echolocation resolution slightly. The girl’s head posture suggested she was scanning the floor for Ariadne’s return.

Ariadne smirked.

The entry hall sat beneath a water tower, above a shaft. If Ariadne wanted the intruder dead, contact wouldn’t be necessary. She could use a sling—rocks through the skull, a traditional weapon that was hard to dismiss as “accident.” Or she could lock the doors and starve the bioroid if she was willing to let a hostile agent fester.

None of that seemed necessary.

Sky sent a text: a match had been found.

The intruder was curiously lacking a conventional name.

Augmented Synthetic Humanoid Assassin: Unit 27.

She was from Sylvia 1IH3528’s season, which had extremely high ratings and a complex plot. Unit 27 had rejected attempts at a nickname.

Unit 27 was also illiterate.

Ariadne hissed in disgust and shuddered head to tail. The idiocy of removing communication skills from an agent designed for combat was a crime against logic as well as decency. The paranoia required to create a tool that couldn’t find alternative allies or leak information—and then send it into the world—was difficult to imagine.

Ariadne laughed as she read the next message. Above her, Augmented Synthetic Humanoid Assassin flinched at the noise.

Unit 27 was suspected to be responsible for the destruction of the organization that created her. All that paranoia, all that control, and it hadn’t worked. It was unclear whether Unit 27 acted alone or whether she’d been contacted by a host of Harem Hotel before the collapse—

Ariadne blinked.

Someone had looked at Unit 27’s history and decided to invite her into a dating show?

Ariadne’s mind caught up to the implication, and she let out an extremely impolite ultrasonic hiss—an old Crawler insult for baseline humans, literally “Children of the Sun,” with an irony the translation failed to capture.

Above, Unit 27 leapt down from the chairs, ripped open the entry hall doors, and darted out into the Atlas Hotel.

Ariadne nodded to herself.

This could work for her.

The halls of Atlas were a labyrinth, but a mundane one. Spatial warping was **** to interference; ordinary architecture endured.

It was hard to navigate without Crawler senses or a guidance system, but it was possible. Augmented Synthetic Humanoid Assassin moved with methodical intent, mapping exits and redoubts.

Ariadne stayed below the floor, tracking through vibration and echolocation. The bioroid had situational awareness, but it was the kind built for baseline human combat: eyes on surfaces, not attention to volumes, the way sonar enabled.

While she followed, Ariadne skimmed fan summaries of Augmented Synthetic Humanoid Assassin’s season. Recruited by a host. Consented to joining the harem of Nick Reynolds, a man she’d encountered as a child. He’d been kind to the mute girl—ice cream, patience, the sort of small decency the Audience loved to mythologize.

Now, Unit 27 was an adult. She had no reason not to join an alien game show, especially one that promised structure.

By Harem Hotel standards, the selection was downright ethical.

Dates: hide-and-seek, pottery, swimming, sex. Nothing unusually troubling. An excellent showing in a ****-adjacent paintball variation—showoff energy, but it read like proof-seeking, not cruelty.

Ariadne’s plan solidified as the bioroid continued through Atlas. Open doors and obvious signals would be ignored; trust didn’t come for free. Herding would require a lure she wanted.

Ariadne emerged at the end of a hall as Unit 27 entered it.

As expected, the bioroid chased.

She was faster than Ariadne’s body, but Ariadne could enhance her performance.

Signal-craft was always tricky when hosting on Harem Hotel. Style and spectacle were expected. “Cheating” was a term without definition, but with a terrible reputation. The middle ground was leaning on common tricks.

Ariadne had long favored matter conjuration: newly generated mass in motion, equal and opposite reactions, momentum without telekinesis. Subtle. Clever. The kind of trick fans called “fair” if you did it with confidence.

Jets of helium slid Ariadne along the ground, keeping her ahead until they reached the wide glass doors at the edge of Atlas.

Unit 27 slowed at the threshold. Ariadne didn’t.

She spilled out onto a field of asphalt.

Outside, hovering stands and pods had formed a semicircle along Atlas’s side. Facing inward were a hundred party guests, drifting for better views.

A line of alumni from the Mary Stuart School for the Gifted and Promising had assembled.

Jessie Russo’s skull sat in an ivory mecha suit. Vivian Rat—an overgrown Greenland-shark brain networked to a machine—floated inside a pressure vessel, ceramic legs and arms in a radial pattern. Melody Hill hung from a titanium frame, insect-bodies layered over her skin like clothing, while her emaciated human core relied on a respirator. Sally Freedom’s black exoskeleton of chitin was painted with pastels that did nothing to make the domesticated tyrranid approachable. C-130 wore only a spandex-like suit and cheer skirt, her eyes unfocused, her face just subtly wrong for a human, a mark of her true heritage.

At one end, three of Skynet’s avatars stood in identical Japanese bodies, wearing matching cheer skirts. At the other, Laurel wore the same costume, with arcane symbols painted across her chest.

Pom-poms in every hand. Arms raised.

They shouted in unison—this was the enthusiastic faction of the cheer squad and their less enthusiastic coach, and of course, Laurel had to be part of it.

“Bloody Mary, Queen of Hell, keeps her husband in a cell!”

Ariadne smiled at them, then conjured an umbrella out of nothing.

She held it out toward Unit 27.

Escape routes were obvious, but the fan posts had mentioned the assassin loved a modified firearm disguised as an umbrella. Reproducing it was trivial. Fan lore was a leash.

Unit 27 approached cautiously, eyes flicking between Ariadne and the cheer squad. With slow, precise movements, she took the umbrella and looked up, questioning.

From behind the stands, another cheer squad member stepped onto the asphalt.

Sue Dresden—lucky enough to inherit the power to become a dinosaur—lowered her head in a steady bow. Her eyes never left the bioroid.

Ariadne made a flourishing gesture to Unit 27: she could return inside or stay outside along the building’s flank. Choice, offered in a way the Audience could frame as romance or honor.

Unit 27’s attention locked onto Sue with something like delight—hunger, almost. She glanced at Ariadne again.

Ariadne nodded once.

It was up to the super-soldier.

Unit 27 stepped onto the asphalt and copied Sue’s bow.

Distance held. Eye contact held. Two warriors from different worlds: a bioroid from the eve of an apocalypse and a therianthrope from a world where apocalypse was ancient history.

Behind them, the cheer squad screamed support. Unit 27 ignored it, body language narrowing into pure focus.

She made the first move: gunfire from the umbrella.

It did nothing to the theropod.

Sue had offered to take a fall, but Ariadne had texted her: the blowback from a fixed match would be worse than the bruises. People wanted the plucky human to win. If she won, it had to be on her own merits.

Sue was careful. The dinosaur’s greatest threat was her own mass and the ground beneath her. A slip could be deadly; a bullet could be trivial.

The tactics of fighting as a dinosaur had been developed in depth by Ariadne’s maternal grandfather, back when the Audience discovered paleontology. Control and patience were everything in that body plan.

Unit 27 had control and patience, too. But she needed to take risks.

No one with combat experience believed they were safe against a Tyrannosaurus rex. Unit 27 kept distance, studied Sue, then bolted toward a low-flying pod and leapt onto it.

Inside, a girl in a witch hat shrieked theatrically.

Unit 27 snatched the broom the witch had been holding and swung it through the air, visibly disappointed when it failed to provide lift.

The witch nodded, suddenly. She patted the broom.

The broom animated.

Unit 27 balanced on the shaft—then, a heartbeat later, jumped off and landed atop Sue’s skull.

Ariadne nodded. Sensitive target. Clever problem.

Sue didn’t buck wildly; violent motion could injure herself as much as her attacker. Instead she lowered herself to the ground, then rolled onto her back.

The mute assassin looked like she would have used extremely foul language if she’d possessed a larynx.

Unit 27 scrambled free.

Then the gunshots rang out.

Sue howled.

Resurrection had taught the Audience something paleontology couldn’t: dinosaurs were loud. Large bodies with unidirectional lungs could vocalize like engines. There was no sound on modern Earth like a screaming Tyrannosaurus.

Unit 27 staggered as the noise hit her, pain in posture and muscle despite her enhancements. Sue rolled at her in a frenzy, one eye blinded by bullets.

Ariadne had hoped the match would stay friendly. It never had much chance.

Minutes of frantic running, gunfire, rolling, and screaming blurred into something beyond comparisons.

Finally, both combatants lay on the asphalt—injured, exhausted.

Unit 27’s foot was crushed. Sue was blind and too tired to rise.

Ariadne triggered the contingency.

Artillery in the stands euthanized Sue in an instant.

Jessie caught the soul fluidly, scowling at Ariadne. Sue’s annoyed ghost floated above the ivory mech. Melody let out a tearing noise as one of her insects rose. Jessie and Melody worked together, the ghost bound into a living form, and the shape shifter's magic enabled the insect to transform back into a human.

On the asphalt, Unit 27 was going into shock. Injury, stress, noise, and the artillery blast overwhelmed her systems. Ariadne slithered closer and mapped the ruined foot with a critical eye.

Unit 27 had enhanced healing—intuitionist modification layered over mundane augmentation—but leaving it like this would mean suffering.

Ariadne pulled off the shoe and studied the damage. Then she did the practical thing.

Signal-craft drained the pain from Unit 27’s body.

Ariadne opened her mouth.

A precise amputation of the ruined foot was delivered with her incisors.

Then, without drama, she crafted a prosthetic: a hard slab, a balanced ivory blade built from her own teeth, anchored into the ankle bones with a mechanic’s confidence. Ariadne flexed the joint, adjusted the alignment, and watched the load transfer.

Unit 27 stared at her.

Ariadne shrugged, then smiled.

A soft wave of power shimmered: an illusion of a ghostly foot lay over the prosthetic—cosmetic normalcy, offered like a courtesy. The lie could be made real enough.

Unit 27 shook her head.

She traced the ivory lines with her fingers, then gave Ariadne a quick nod and a small smile.

No illusion.

Keep it real.

Ariadne returned the smile completely. She doubted another season would allow the look, but it felt right to showcase something besides replacement—something earned, something chosen.

Together, Ariadne and Augmented Synthetic Humanoid Assassin limped back into Atlas.

Ariadne hoped she had made a new friend.