It turns out that Tasha can still walk. It's a lot harder to be wobbly-kneed when you're a hoofed biped. And even though her legs are technically knew, they clearly remember what was like to maneuver when their owner was less than steady after a bout of debauchery. This time, at least, there wasn't any nausea or hangover. It does take her a moment, however, to remember why she's walking: Gabriel wanted her to check on Yue, their smallest human. And the least seen one since 'The Ritual' that involved Samael. Even Professor Stanislav has put in more public appearances.
The last time Tasha had seen Yue, the human had staggered into the lounge in a bathrobe (the unofficial uniform of the Dark Horse), downed someone's drink, and staggered off again. So she's probably in a room off of the lounge.
Tasha considers searching from room to room, but decides her new, smarter, less self-damage prone lifestyle demands a better answer. "Niss, do you know where Yue is, please? And what did you think of the idea to teach me?"
"We do not need to teach you where Dr. Sen is," the Niss reply. "She is in Miss Liza's quarters."
Tasha remembers she must be direct with immortals. Also, that the Niss may or may not have been paying attention to their conversations in their rooms. She begins walking towards Liza's quarters. "Thank you. About teaching, what I meant was teach me wizardry. Gabriel suggested as a teach you're the least likely to have ulterior motives."
"Why does he think that?" the Niss ask, as Tasha reaches the door.
The red woman pauses, taking a moment to rub her thighs. "Thoth seems to have some greater plan and Samael works for Thotep who is known to have ulterior, dangerous motives for everything. Given the circumstances of our first meeting you have much less reason to endanger me or sabotage our efforts. You have never struck me as ugrateful or plotting. Your goals are generally internally directed."
"You bring us to interesting places," the Niss reply to that analysis.
"And I will continue to do so, so aiding me aids me in aiding you. You may have noticed my recent death; I'm not sure I'll come back from the next one." Tasha keeps massaging, which is nice, and hopes the shower and scent hides what the howling and crying out did not. "Samael must serve his master, and Thoth has his own reasons. Will you teach me? You needn't teach just me, I'm sure my Titan's AI would like to participate and would be more suited to advanced mathematical elements of wizardry."
"We can attempt to explain our interactions with the physical world, if that is what you mean," the Niss note by way of agreement.
"That sounds like a start. We'll discuss it in more detail later. For now, I must check on Yue." Knowing the Niss aren't one -- really, ones, millions of them -- for pleasantries, Tasha assumes the conversation is over with her indication it should be. She turns to the door and pokes the chime.
The door opens and a yawning brown fluff blob answers. "Is it wake cycle already?" Liza asks. "You look pleased with yourself, Tasha," she then notes once she's rubbed her eyes.
"I am pleased with myself, but that's besides the point." Tasha leans in to look around, brows arched. "Yue is here. We're worried about her, and by 'we' I mean Gabriel and I, but also the Captain and I."
"We're taking care of her," Liza claims, using her ears to try and block Tasha's line of sight. It may help that the room is still dark. "Is she needed for anything?"
"I need to assess her condition, she was subject to significant psionic stressors." Tasha seems undeterred by the ears, because she keeps staring as if they weren't there, then leans back. "As this is also the Captain's worry, this is a ships' matters. If Gabriel doens't know how well she is, then the ship as a whole has lost track of a crew member. We can't have that. It's especially dangerous out here."
"Wait here, I'll see if she's presentable," Liza says, and then closes the door. It isn't long though before it opens again, and Yue appears. She's got a bath towel around her this time instead of a bathrobe, and her hair is.. disturbing. She looks to Tasha like someone who hasn't left bed in a long time, and since humans don't have fur to muss up, her skin somehow manages to look rumpled instead. "Yus?" she asks. She isn't quite awake.
"You look terrible." Tasha leans in once again, ears back, body leaning this way and that to inspect the other woman. "Which is a terrible thing for an agent such as yourself to look, especially for this long. The Captain is worried about you and so am I." The young woman leans back. "Are you having Human problems? You can tell me, fellow Human." Her ears then snap forward at the offer, emphasizing her attention and deemphasizing her humanity at the same time.
"No, I'm just being kept in a state of distraction so that I don't dwell on the horror that is lurking just out of my line of sight," Yue claims. "I think I've killed off whatever foreign substances I had in me, and almost feel ready for solid food. Do we have solid food?"
"You'll be pleased to know it is extremely solid in most cases. You will be displeased by the taste." Tasha looks around for a moment, then gestures to a nearby couch and snatches up Yue's hand to help lead her there -- and catch her if she falls over. "So which horror is this? One we've met before, a new one, or horror in that vague and ill-defined way? Maybe horror in the vague but outside of reality way?"
"Oh, there were so many of them," Yue says, and lets herself be led to the couch. "But.. Samael.." she chokes. "The others probably don't know, thankfully. Once I'm back in normal space, I'll be able to handle some real treatment. But this place makes it all so raw. And I was linked to everyone else, too. Now that they seem recovered, I'll do better."
"You saw some of what Samael really is? That is, what he is when he doens't look like me, or even like something alien? More alien than me, I mean." Tasha sits beside Yue and lifts a wing, offering her shoulder to lay upon. "Maybe some of the ... psionic imprints he's collected? And you mentioned fighting off foreign substances?"
Yue gazes at Tasha. "He was inside of me, and not in a fun way," she explains. "It was like.. eating someone alive.. and they were still screaming all the way through my bowels. Except the screams were memories and.. other things. The Lapi have been keeping me grounded, according to Liza. Her idea of keeping me distracted has been pretty successful so far though."
"I know a bit about Samael's anatomy, such as it is. You don't need to couch anything with me, unless you don't want to deal with it right now. All I need to know is that you're safe and there's no lingering threat to the ship or it's people." Tasha reaches her free hand over and begins stroking Yu'es head, feeling on some lingering, Human level that this is the correct thing to do. It's what her Human self would have done. "But if you want to talk about Sam, I can do that, too."
"No threat from me, I'm not a projective psychic," Yue says, leaning into the stroking. "I can stay moderately lucid for over an hour now, before I need the bunnies to short-circuit my higher brain functions again. I'll survive. Is Samael alright?"
"He'll survive too, but he's only somewhat better off. Worse, depending on how you look at it." Tasha shifts so that Yue can actually lean on her at an angle, with her shoulder braced against the couch corner. "What he lost was something like mass, except he's not made of mass. In a way, he's a moving universe, complete unto himself, like a ... a shadow amoeba, except made of conceptual elements and real-world elements brought together. What you felt was the memetic elements burning off, I think. Something like soul matter, the exact nature of we're still coming to understand. From what he told me he can regenerate it, but it will take some time. Right now he looks like my tiny little brother." She then leans in to mock-whisper. "It's very cute."
"They aren't quite holographic, but close to it," Yue says. "He is his surface. If he loses some, he loses.. that part of himself. I don't know how he grows. I assume through experience."
"It's something they have in common with the Vril-ya, they are what they know, which is the memetic part. In a way, Sam isn't real, just like the ... " Tasha reaches in to her cloak and rummages around until she has the blue Marker, which she places in Yue's lap. "The Markers. Like Colors. That object has neither mass nor substance, but appears to to us, because it manifests as a projection of our mind and soul's awareness and expression of it. I think the Marker is actually like Sam's essence, but from me. It is what I know. As for how he grows ... " Tasha hesitates, then nods. "Experience seems to be one way."
"That can't be all of it, because some of those entities are big.. huge," Yue notes, eyeing the Marker. "I think they eat one another too. Or whatever their equivalent is. Eating souls."
"I wasn't going to mention that part but yes, they eat souls. For many of them it's an addiction, one so strong it can destroy them. But, they don't seem to require it. It may just be a way to cheat, to grow fast and to soothe their hunger. It seems to depend a lot of their nature, what Fundamental they skew towards, and their individual selves." Tasha reaches down and taps the Marker, wiggling it back and forth. "This one's Persephone's, so it's a copy, a kind of forgery and not like a true Marker which only the Vril-ya create, but it has the same properties. You can touch it, you can take it with you, but once you stop looking at it it's back with me. I have to dig around for it, I think, because we reject the idea it can appear from nowhere. Maybe if I understand magic more, that won't happen anymore."
"Maybe after living long enough, you lose your sense of object permanence and stuff really does disappear when you aren't looking at it," Yue suggests. "So she's not in this one like the Vril-ya Markers then. And.. well, I don't know about the other one. These can be totems, or windows or two-way passages I suppose, depending on their origin."
"I don't sense anything from it, so I don't think it's alive," she also notes.
"This one's a portal of a sort. I can speak to her if I open it, but I try not to be a bother." Tasha pats the Marker. "I had hoped it's color would be soothing for you, but it doesn't seem to contain memetic Blue, which is summoned by the intensity of her mind and will not unlike the Confederates own psionics."
Tasha says, "Solipsistry," Tasha realizes, brows raising and eyes widening, "Perhaps it's like solipsistry.""
"I don't think the Confederates understand psionics," Yue notes. "I've never heard of any of them possessing psionic abilities, even though I'm pretty sure they're modified themselves for space travel. It makes me wonder about their ships, and if they really created them."
"Solipsistry?" Yue asks, looking from the Marker to Tasha.
"We don't know a lot about their origins. I don't believe the Vril-ya uplifted them because I don't have a Archon connected with any of them." Tasha picks up her Marker, gives it a kiss, then hides it under the couch before looking back. "Solipsistry is what I call a Nora-concept, a idea from her memories and her education. But, I understand them now. I have merged with them, but even so, I still recognize them as foreign. That said, I know the concepts as she knew them, even if my memories are not complete and never were complete. Solipsistisim is the belief that your mind is the center of the universe and which all other things revolve. A soul can become such a thing, and a mind can, too. It makes more sense when you see that minds are part of the world, and a powerful mind can do more than direct appendage and recieve information. It's weight and understanding can bend reality itself."
"So, beating reality into submission with your ego?" Yue asks. "I've dated people like that when I was younger. It may be like Don Quixote syndrome, but that is a bit more detrimental."
"It does work, though. If your mind is strong enough. The Niss do it, they might even teach me how, soon." Tasha reaches up and taps her head, at the same time not sure why she's talking shop right now save that she thinks her continued talking is helping Yue focus. "I've decided to put effort in to understanding these things. Maybe some day soon 'll know more."
"The more you learn, the less you know," Yue proclaims. "It's a vicious cycle, because you first learn how much you don't know, then when you think you're making progress, you find out there's even more stuff you don't know. Be prepared for that."
Tasha smiles at that. "Oh it's been like that since I started. Did you think being a backwater bumpkin barbarian made for a tremendous education?" She snorts a laugh at that and her tail goes straight and makes a little circle-spin. "It does not. It was Nora's lesson that made be long for everything I didn't know and didn't have. The world where we came from, ships that traveled an empty sky. I wanted that. What's more aluring for an explorer than that which she doesn't know?"
"Good quality toilet paper," Yue suggests. "After you've been exploring for a bit, you really begin to miss that. For me exploring has been a bit more specific, which made me a candidate for Terragens Intelligence. But that's how most spies are found. They aren't trained in some military base or anything, they're just people with skills and interests that put them where they can learn things of interest to governments. It's not very glamorous. Popular media lies about it."
"Before I was recruited, I didn't even realize I was psychic," Yue confides. "I thought I was just good at understanding people. It's not like they test you for that sort of thing as a child."
"They don't mention being on a ancient private yacht with exciting alien species to bed and a boss that's some sort of self-replicating zombie?" Tasha looks agast. "And I don't know if I should /shock. you with this, but we don't even /have/ toilet paper where I come from."
"Well, cloth works too," Yue notes. "Nothing beats a bidet, but you can't carry that with you. I've heard Confederate toilets have tongues."
"This is becoming very weird, Yue." Tasha pats Yue's head. "And rambling is my thing. Did you need anything? If not, i've a mind to put you back with my strangely suspicious personal assistant." And red woman frowns, then leans over to look Yue in the face. "Why does it seem to be that she's so suspicious of me, anyway?"
"Suspicious?" Yue asks. "She probably doesn't want you to know that they've been keeping me in a constant state of sexual pleasure until I pass out from exhaustion. And it's hard to say that most of it even counts as sex, but.."
"Am I interrupting anything personal?" Thoth asks. Tasha didn't sense him arriving, and even Yue looks surprised.
"You'd think she'd realize that sort of thing wouldn't bother me at all. I just spent four hours exhausting Gabriel and answering all my questions about male Karnor anatomy." Tasha then blinks and looks up as Thoth arrives. She spreads her hands in a shrug. "Nothing anyone as wise as yourself couldn't intuit. My relationships and Yue's illness is hardly a secret."
"Wisdom is relative and often specific," Thoth claims. "I have been to the fabrication unit. These are for you." He then holds out a small rectangular box. It looks like wood, but obviously isn't.
"Oooh." Tasha accepts the box and looks at it with a restrained eagerness, as it is a present, mystery, and possibly mystic secret wrapped all in to one. She looks at it for a moment, then up. "Can I open it?" She then remember sher manners and so adds, "And thank you."
"Of course you can open it," Thoth says. "It is a box, the two halves come apart."
"I meant, "can I open it now,"" Tasha corrects, but she leaves any frustration behind as she turns to the matter of having a box to open. A secret, mysterious box offered by an ancient deity of magic and alchemy. She briefly considers many gods have used her, obfuscated their intentions or asked the impossible, but she dismisses that voice as being a downer and not appreciating the spirit of mystery containers. The box is opened in short order.
The box contains a stack of cards, slightly larger than playing cards. The surface that shows has the black chess piece knight in a white circle that is the ship's logo. Around this is a gossamer border that seems to have swirling patterns that shift between blue and yellow depending on the angle of light.
Tasha blinks at this, head cocking this way and that in the manner of birds discovering perplexing, but shiny, objects. After this visual review, she picks up one of the cards and turns it in her hand, looking at both sides.
The opposite side of the card is blank. All of them are blank.
"Am I to paint these?" Tasha inquires in a moment of insight. "Convey my personal touch and intent upon them?"
"Yes, you are to create your own personal Tarot set," Thoth says. "The only rule is that the images need to have separate meanings depending on their vertical alignment."
"Vertical alignment?" This Tasha has no insight for. "How do you mean?"
"When you place a card, it can be viewed right side up or upside down," Thoth explains. "Each orientation has a different meaning."
"Oh." Tasha nods to this, she has at least seen the art of pre-existing Tarot cards and the way they can be viewed at different angles. "I'll do that, then. We still have time before we return and the canvas isn't very large, sooo ... " She turns the card to its blank side again, clucks her tongue, and nods. "It's lucky for us I haven't had the time to paint much, so my pots should be mostly full. I've been thinking of making new paints from objects we find along our journey, and now I think using objects of consequence and meaning could convey even more. What do you think, Thoth?"
"You seem to work best with symbols and people," Thoth says with a nod. "They seem to be what motivates you, or inspires you. They are good subjects to work with. Have you painted anything since being reassembled?"
"No, I've had too much on my mind and painting takes a certain mindset." Tasha pulls Yue down so she can rest on her lap, moving the box to an empty portion of the couch after replacing the card. "But our situation is calming and at least I and a few others are recovering, so now may be a good time."
"I do have a suggestion for one of your cards," Thoth says. "Your old and new selves, such that one is dominant depending on the alignment of the card. The meaning and name will be up to you."
"Should I replicate the arcana used in the example deck or create a deck of my own with my own orders?" Tasha did go back and read more about the decks and cards themselves, at least the universally applicable parts. The Terran-specific history was very Terran-specific.
"If the old structure suits you, you can take from it what you like," Thoth says. "But it is better to create something that is uniquely yours. I do not expect you to use all of the cards, and you should not feel that it is required. As you grow, new cards will come to you."
"I'll use as many as I have ideas for, then." Tasha reaches over and pats the box; it will give her something to fill her quiet hours with. "It shouldn't be hard to come up with a few. I think I'll even make one about you, so you may be asked to sit a while so I can paint you properly."
"Standing still is one of my skills," Thoth claims.
"That does explain the statues," Tasha agrees. She nods, then looks down at Yue. "I should get Yue back to her place of rest before she falls asleep out here."
"I'll have to ask about the cards later," Yue says. "But yes, I am going to take a shower, have Liza brush my hair, and send Aaron out to forage for food and coffee."
"And I am going to have a nap. Gabriel and I were very busy and he should still be there for me to curl up next to. I will think on the cards more when I wake up, so if you feel up to it, you can meet me in the Owner's Area." Tasha helps Yue sit up, then tucks the box under one arm while offering her free hand to the Human.
Clutching her towel with her other hand, Yue accepts Tasha's. "I worry that I am becoming a pet," she tells Tasha.
"That's okay, I do too." Tasha nods respectfully to Thoth, then guides Yue back to Liza and Aaron's quarters where she hopes she can get some rest. And, in short order after, tasha sees about getting some rest herself.