While arranging the apparatus of her style, Ghiselle studied Bunnibal’s reflections carefully. Despite cumbersome sexual characteristics, the Sebiestor’s shifting posture lurched rapidly between masculine and feminine. The soprano could adapt half to stage, and invent responses for the rest. At first, she gave the boy only simple tasks, expecting him to stumble. His proportions stretched all wrong. Stringy muscles twitched without discipline. His gaze never focused. He moved constantly. But while Bunnibal flirted with catastrophe, he never tripped over willow legs, misjudged the distance long arms needed to travel, or slammed his head on an obstruction. Strangely scented spider’s fingers never fumbled. He fastened delicate clasps, smoothed fabric, and held utensils still even as tremors ran the rest of his remarkable body. And it was a remarkable body. When not occupied with some other task, his hands traded turns beneath clothing. The hygienic implications initially gave Ghiselle pause – and did much to explain his aromas – but over time, she found herself anticipating even those disquieting moments of autonomous hedonism.
Then, the Lady realized she was late for dinner.
Her gown flowed like molten carnelian through mirrored corridors, down grand stairs, between fountains and over marble. Social gravity warping space, Ghiselle appeared neither melodramatic nor frantic, but a lioness on the hunt. Alighting on the dais of a cavernous dining salon, she shifted from lioness to eagle – the fabric of her brilliant gown the creature’s settling wings. Titans of art, politics and industry warmed as she passed, sharing with each some kind observation. Humble, unapproachable, radiant, charming, gliding to the captain’s table, she towed appreciation in her wake. “The Lady should be late to dinner more often,” a suave chieftain chuckled to his companions. The other headliners sat in positions of honor around the captain’s table. From eagle to hummingbird, Ghiselle touched them lightly, saving her most effusive charm for the young Gallente targeted so unkindly by his own people. Ghiselle had intended to sit beside Javierre Babelle. But at the last moment, a new plan seeped into the Amarrian regions of her brain, and she tucked Bunnibal beside the star instead.
Youth should enjoy its company, she insisted, and not feel separated by “some old lady.”
Javierre pleased her, and Ghiselle no longer felt satisfied with simple peace. She resolved to pull the star into orbit of her House. With him, she could impale those Gallente fashion bastards in their own market. Bunnibal would serve as her shaft. Ghiselle had cracked some of the Lupe’s code. At distance, his unusual proportions forced an eye to linger long enough for that constant motion to hypnotize. Seen in action, his unnerving muscle tones demanded closer inspection. But close in, the complex smells he accumulated across his body lit subconscious desires, pulling the victim closer yet. Very close, rapid bursts of contact – gentle fingers along the arm of a lady; playful shoulders against men – doomed his prey.
The meal was fantastic; conversation, better yet. When desert had been cleared, Ghiselle suggested that the young men explore the ship. Babelle’s keeper – a sharp Intaki much like Rengal – knew to retain control over her charge. But one seat removed put her under Bunnibal’s spell, too, and she could not object before the bouncing pup carried away his newest friend. Ghiselle toasted their horizons. The following morning, she raised a mimosa to Babelle’s athletic back as he raced passed her breakfast nook, not completely inside the previous evening’s suit. Her spear’s tip worked toward Luminaire. Liltingly, she called for Bunnibal. Of course, the Lupe had made no effort to fit back into any night’s suit. He slunk through the doorway, unkempt, bashfully uncertain if he had done well.
“Have some toast,” Ghiselle said with a smile, sliding a plate forward.
As the “Four Winds” drifted from New Caldari to Pator, local performers boarded at stops along the way to provide entertainment. The headliners only took the stage at capitol stops. Because nitpickers and naysayers would subject every beat of every song to intense scrutiny, nights off were but quick respite from the calculations furrowing Ghiselle’s days. Her team floated in projections: proposing, analyzing, recommending, and rehearsing. With a week to go, they settled on a selection of harrowingly beautiful hymns from the earliest periods of each empire – predating the rediscovery of space, and so devoid of insidious contemporary subtexts. With three days to go, Ghiselle changed her mind.
“Don’t hate me.”
It was Bunnibal’s fault. In the Lupe, that clever Sebiestor mind concentrated on physical aptitude. After prolonged contact with Babelle, Bunni’s ambient motions about the suite mutated into elaborate dance sequences. Ghiselle saw Pator as an opportunity to “showcase native talent.” Hold on, Rengal interjected. Any benefit from Bunnibal’s tribal ancestry would be overshadowed by his “peculiar status.” Bunni was too alluring for vindictiveness! Rengal saw a serpent’s scheme beneath the twinkle in her lady’s eye, but played her part through. The Gallente would feel mocked. Charming. Caldari would cry commercial capitulation. Charming. Amarrian elements would demand excommunication. Only the ones nobody listened to anymore. Ghiselle asked for an appropriate selection of Gallente pop divas on which to base a new routine. Rengal jokingly suggested Angelika Kartel – Brutor drag queen and reigning monarch of Luminaire’s club scene. Perfect! But…. But it must be their little secret. Well, Etienne Saroux needed to know. “Producer General” only needed to know Ghiselle would change her routine midway. He could improvise from there.
“Dear God,” the flamboyant Gallois lamented at Rengal’s news.
Headliners appeared according to a plan: host, foe, ally, lesser foe. In Pator, Ghiselle was to follow Qaim Bok. As the liner settled into its assigned path, the Republic unfurled opening ceremonies. The “Four Winds” concert hall rested safely near the mammoth vessel’s core, but immersive projections allowed the audience to see space as if through a vast, clear dome. For their display of pageantry, the Caldari brought the ship close to home, perching it between day and night while technicians painted the atmosphere with sublime effects. In contrast, the Matari kept the liner distant, leaving Pator only a glowing disk in an upper quadrant of the hall’s projection. Squadrons of frigates swarmed in remarkable acrobatic displays and raced to dance among sails of much larger ships. As Saroux guided his orchestra and adjusted lights, steel and fire beyond the ship built into a choreography that anticipated Bok’s triumphant emergence on stage.
A mongrel fusion of Vherokior and Brutor, Bok’s rumbling vocalizations originated in a mystic tradition expressed as force – not loud, fast or thunderous, but deep and inexorable. Earth sustained his shamanistic affinity, and that massive body – a boulder of slate with an enormous smile – anchored the chamber. The behemoth augmented his percussive chants by pummeling flesh and slamming great feet down powerfully. Around him, three women completed the elemental metaphor – Fire, Wind, and Water – moving with graceful acrobatics and vaulting from his limbs as if their muscular bodies weighed nothing. Beyond, another two dozen dancers added chorus and counterpoint, spinning torches glowed in the sweat of their limbs. The undulating mass shifted observers back to a truly remote time. At its conclusion, the audience cascaded adulation.
Watching from her distant command center, arms folded, eyes missing no detail, Rengal grew anxious. Bok summoned the jaguar queen, rode the raven prince and honored the stars. Those rituals exalted the soul of his people, just as Mareiyaa’s sylvan whispers had engraved the snows of Kaalakiota on the wind. Two for two, the host representatives surpassed mastery and planted seeds of respect for their cultures. Following the jaguar, raven, and stars – an Amarrian Holder now intended to appear with her favorite slave, Pator gleaming overhead, and mimic a Gallente drag queen. It was a horrifying reversal of Scope’s editorial slight. In a command center of his own, “Producer General” Etienne Saroux dimmed the lights and prepared his orchestra. Just what was the Amarrian witch scheming?
Ghiselle emerged to an anticipatory hush.
A voluminous, hooded gown in her people’s ecclesiastic tradition flowed around and behind to settle in waves at her feet. She began to sing. The lady would transcend on stage as an actress or dancer, but her art above all others was song. With a prodigy’s insight for breath, moving wind through and out – wrapped in diaphanous white and illuminated by simple lights – Ghiselle Arghelos staggered audiences with the force of her tone. Above New Caldari, she had sung secular favorites of love and life, leaving no eye dry eye. Near Pator, she opened with the hymn of a young hunter guided by a single star in a night’s sky otherwise fallen black. Rengal did not recognize the piece as one of those originally selected, but Piehtor smiled. They discussed it, he explained, but there were fewer reasons to go with it then. He understood the ancient Matari, and narrated. Rengal quickly understood what had changed.
Yes, it was all her fault.
Following his star, the hunter pressed north against wind and across ice, coming to a den of wolves. Weakened, he feared they might overwhelm him. Instead, they shared the meat of a kill. Sorrowful noises drifted to the young man through the night. Come day, he followed the sounds to a crevasse where the ice had separated from rock. Seeing him, two pups called brightly from the depths. The climb looked treacherous; and if the ice moved again, it would crush them all. But he could not abandon the small creatures to their fate, and descended. Slipping frequently on the slick, jagged rock, the hunter suffered many wounds. When he reached the pups, they cleared his blood with joyful licking. He could only carry one at a time and make the climb out, and so twice descended into that maw. When at last he returned to the wolf den, the damage to his flesh and bone was severe. Nature would drive the wolves to kill such a wounded animal, the hunter understood, but he took comfort knowing the pups carried his spirit in their jaws. The wolves kept him warm, however, and brought food as he recovered. The young hunter grew into a ferocious warrior: first Twin Wolf Shaman.
Matari who displayed the pups Geri and Fricki after Voluval vanished into the wilderness to cut their bodies on rock. While recovering from those injuries, they learned this hymn and sang it for their final initiation into the reclusive Twin Wolf Sect. The voices of those youths rang true, possessed of an intense conviction to embark upon lives of martial rigor and holiness. Ghiselle Arghelos did not know what it meant to be a warrior on frigid steppes, but her soul burned with a ferocious faith of its own. Before her audience, she transformed into a young shaman embarking on that first journey – while retaining all the skill and experience of accumulated decades shaking the highest windows of Dam-Torsad’s cathedrals. It was magnificent, and as her final piercing howl faded to a fierce whisper, Bunnibal emerged from the shadows.
A contraction pulled through the audience – not an audible gasp, but a silent tightening. Did the beast belong? Rengal’s heart paused. Ghiselle stood motionless and silently statuesque in her bishop’s shroud as Bunnibal advanced. Illumination seeped across the topography of his long, naked torso, revealing a creature born of nightmare – yet, hypnotic. The broad bluish white pantaloons of a Gallente hipster flowed from his narrow waist, swaying as he moved – a motion both like and unlike that of a man. Ghiselle’s penetrating mind had connected some dots as it studied the Matari hymn. These Lupe, which Saoul found only in central Amarr even having looked extensively abroad, descended in some way from Sebiestor bearers of Geri and Fricki’s mark. Back on Amarr, watching breathlessly atop one of Dam-Torsad’s architectural leviathans, Rengal began to think it just might work after all.
Should she take credit?
Bunnibal circled his prey. In his own control room, Producer General tensed. Slowly, long slender fingers fluttered over Ghiselle’s arms, rising to her shoulders, down and up. Do it, do it – do something, Etienne Saroux scowled silently. The clock was ticking! Too quick to see, Bunnibal’s fingers closed over fabric, his long arms twitched, and he pulled the bishop’s robe up and away to reveal a metallic body suit of outrageous design and a crown of brilliant diamonds.
An undulating combination of interjections erupted from her: the phrasings of jazzy blues matched to precise, dramatic gestures and mechanically tilting head. Unprepared, uncertain, shifting, the audience waited for guidance. Recognizing one of Angelika Kartel’s dominating hits, Producer General exhaled. “This… I can work with. Light!” The interfaces of his mind sparkled, his orchestra slammed a beat – and there was light. Ghiselle remained statuesque in her spot, moving head and arms with Bunnibal’s in a clockwork interplay. The Sebiestor’s limbs and long body merged into the abstraction of a great cloak with her former frock, spinning and billowing, catching the light and snapping occasionally to the orchestra’s chops. Ghiselle had voiced the hymn fluently in its ancient tongue, and now she pushed the Boulevard’s slang through herself and across space as if a native of those garish depths. With measures half sublime and half profane, the soprano bridged her foes from distant past to breaking future. Having delivered, she took her bow. Bunnibal bowed with her playfully – as if his entire life, not merely the last half hour, had been spent upon the stage.
