Infinity Inc/Chimes/Discordant
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
Mature Roleplay Warning: This page may contain references to:
- Mental or psychological coercion
- Bullying and violence, including a beating bad enough to put one character into a coma
- Overt sexual activity, including one teenager seducing another teenager
If the reader prefers to avoid the sexual content, but is not disturbed by villainously violent content, please skip now to the Talk page for Chapter 4, which includes a brief summary of all you need to know from Chapter 3 in order to understand Chapter 4.
"The contract work this afternoon was in this building," Opal confided to the exquisitely muscular figure walking at her right. "We should have a day or two before a new claimant makes access difficult."
He was perfectly, precisely her height. If she took off her heels, they would have the exact height difference of every romance novel cover ever. Opal felt deliciously aware of every move the man next to her made.
He said nothing. He did not look in her direction. They might as well be strangers passing through the corridor of the training wing.
Fehral better have been right, Opal thought darkly. I will peel her hide off and feed it to her, if the Killing Dance does not warm to me.
Ahead, her white tiger Alpha Hybrid paced carefully along the dimly-lit office hall. Iceberia remembered the layout of the joined buildings, but was prudently alert for opportunists. The enemy made such an inviting large hole in the warehouse portion of the complex.
Opal thought about the poetry in contrasts. Their makers returned to her an elegantly feminine form, strong but not bulky, solid and yet streaming fans of gossamer firelight behind her like wings. Even the curving ridges of scars scattered around the edges of her face and elsewhere were decorous, graceful, lovely. She wore carved armor from jawline to toe, bright brassy gold hugging her skin, gloriously crimson accent lines pasted thickly where it best accentuated her form. Her assigned Alpha, Iceberia, had been a great hulk of a man before his genetic and surgical transformation into a black-and-white tiger. He, too, wore armor on his torso and upper limbs, leaving tail and lower arms and legs free to ripple and sway and strike. He could not have made a more pleasing contrast to his Delta even before the makers granted him the ability to suck the heat out of the air around him.
And yet, not more than six months before they made Opal into Brigid's Verse....
Opal stole another concealed glance at the figure who glided effortlessly along. Supple, charcoal-black leather poured over every dimple and curve on a strong dancer's build. Stitch-lines bulged out where segments of the armor connected across the stress points: only after long, covert study had she noticed that the stitching itself formed a subtle pattern. Buckles fastened the armor tightly at its wearer's neck, and more buckles attached to straps just below his deltoid muscles, at his elbows, between the tops of his boots and the bottoms of his knees.
They must have to oil the man to get that on him, and off again, Opal mused.
Cloth flowed up his neck to cover his hair and the lower half of his face. Shadowy makeup obscured most of his skin between that cloth mask and an armored skullcap. She knew he was actually pale only because she was close enough to see the point where makeup blended into the line of the cloth.
For the same reason, she could spot the two sword sheaths buckled to his back, if she cared to hesitate a step: Opal was close enough to pick up on tiny nuances, and she knew they had to be there.
Just like she knew he would not let her move behind him.
We would make such a lovely simile, Opal sighed to herself, with the vivid red of my hair draped across his chest as those long, lean fingers trail the crisscrossing lines above my waist.
She suspected that his tastes ran instead to equally masculine creations. A woman sensed when her form was appreciated on first encounter, and this one barely deigned to look at her. She was pretty sure he was not having an affair with the Fiddler, either, which left the remaining options fairly scarce.
Opal did not mind being spurned. She minded very much being ignored.
Iceberia stopped to peer rightward for a few heartbeats. When satisfied that no chance of combat loomed, he wandered a few steps further into the distance before settling against the wall.
"Good, it has not been disturbed," Opal deduced. She quickened her stride to cover the last yard before the side room became visible. "I found this during the search for our kill target today. He no longer needs it. It does not serve my art, yet it seems a shame to let such a careful arrangement go to one who will not appreciate such things." Realizing she sounded nervous, Opal forced herself to take a quick breath. She dropped the pitch of her voice half an octave. Gesturing dramatically, she announced, "I give it to you, Killing Dance. I hope you find pleasure in it."
The older Delta studied her shrewdly for a long, silent moment, his eyes narrowed. Slowly his head swung to look at the sunken exercise chamber. His feet moved of their own volition as he moved to a clearer vantage point. Another brief hesitation, and then Killing Dance flowed down the eight steps, past twin target dummies, into the center of the room. His head tilted briefly to watch the targets' chimes ripple in his wake. Then his careful scan of the room's contents, for which he rotated in place on the center mat, stopped for a second on each subsequent chime.
Opal estimated there had to be around fifty of them hanging: from weight-lifting machines, a wide treadmill, each barbell or dumbbell on its respective rack, suspended gymnastic rings for pull-ups, a set of parallel bars, and various targets arranged for punches or kicks all about the room. Some even dangled at various heights from the ceiling, no doubt to accommodate an athlete who practiced flips or high jumps.
The Killing Dance halted when he had finished his visual search. He stood nearly motionless for a long time, with his back to the intersection, flexing muscles in synchronized sequence: fingers, then palms, then his forearms, then his lats; on the third repetition to reach his shoulders, the pattern continued down his back. Opal thought he might not even be aware that he was doing it.
Is he imagining uses of the room already? she wondered.
Without warning, too fast to see, the Killing Dance drew both of his swords and exploded into a storm of destruction.
He met Calliope in history class.
She didn't know he was alive.
It wasn't so much of a problem until the third year of high school, when one of the more dictatorial teachers assigned seating rather than let his students sit in cliques and clusters. She sat in front of him, close enough to touch, far enough away to be on the most distant ends of the Earth.
Her hair sometimes touched the top edges of his notebook. He was always very careful to make sure its ends did not get caught in the spiral binding.
But she was a cheerleader, dating the quarterback of the football team, and he was only a dance nerd.
He was in the school's dance studio practicing one of his sets for the winter competition when the air changed. It made him bend his left knee at half a degree too sharp an angle, which threw the rest of his timing off. Before he could recover, Calliope -- dressed in high-cut biking shorts and a sports bra -- flicked open the memory chip bay on his mp3 player. She dropped her chip into place, tapped it shut with one crimson-polished fingernail, and bumped the control screen a few times.
His music abruptly cut off, which infuriated him. He was just nerving himself up to speak coldly to her, politely of course as Momma insisted he always be a gentleman, when Calliope's selection burst into life.
He knew Boléro by its first three notes.
He had never seen a woman move like music personified.
Calliope swayed up to him gradually, hips rolling in time to the rhythm of the flute's melody, arms out and fluttering with the snare drum's beat. She stood close enough that he could smell the rain-scented perfume in her vivid fire-red hair, feel her breath caress his lips. He stood frozen, helpless, hypnotized as she met his black eyes ... flicked her long lashes down briefly to glance at his lips ... looked back at him, into him, as she whispered softly, "Do you hear it?"
Her body slid, rippled, rocked to the bassoon line, all barely an inch or two from him. He could feel the heat of her arms as they drifted past his shoulders. One hand came back to trail a curving loop across the tight Lycra of his tank top, sharp edge that scratched just hard enough to not tickle. "I hear it. I hear the music. Let's dance."
She turned to press her back against his chest, still gyrating, and he found that he was moving perfectly with her. Calliope turned again to face him when the second flute joined the snare drum, and the second clarinet took up the melody.
They danced.
He had never felt anything like this. He suddenly understood, instinctively, the connection between dancers that had always been missing between himself and his partner in every prior duet. They were not mirrors, they were complements: puzzle pieces that fit together naturally, positive to negative, halves of a whole even when the music spiralled them apart.
On the eleventh renewal of the melody, Calliope's lips found his. Ropes of intense white light shot through his nerves, exactly synchronized to the trombone. She rocked harder against him, the dance never hesitating, her tongue caressing the tip of his while he slid to the right in the eternal slow rise and whirl of the glissandi.
This, everything we feel, this must be love! he realized in a fierce epiphany. It stole his breath, his reason, the last faint drop of his caution.
By the fourteenth renewal, he vaguely noticed that quite a bit of their clothing scattered around them on the floor; before the trumpet and the second horn traded places on the snare rhythm in the fifteenth, she pressed him greedily to the floor.
"Wait," he gasped as the cold hardwood floor shocked the burning nerves in his spine. "Calliope -- I love you, of course I love you, but this is too rough, this is not how it should be between us, please!"
Her hands seemed to be everywhere and he was powerless to resist. "Come on, lover," she cooed along with the insistent orchestra. "Would you rather feel a little pain, or nothing at all?"
They lay together afterward, limbs entwined, as one of Ravel's piano concertos played softly. "I have a gift for you," Calliope said languidly. "Stay right there." She wiggled away toward her outflung shorts for a moment, leaving him oddly cold until his breathtakingly expressive beloved crawled back to his side. "You love my hair," she said, "I've caught you staring at it so many times. I made you a trinket to think of me by."
The thin loop she held up smelled of her perfume, glowed like firelight. As he peered more closely, he saw that it was made of her hair, braided and rebraided and knotted into an unending pattern. "Give me your hand," she ordered. He had to twist his fingers carefully so no strand would break as she dragged the bracelet past the heel of his palm, but then he stared in delight at his gift: her hair, surrounding him, so bright and solid and real against his pale skin.
"Thank you, it's perfect," he said softly.
Calliope giggled. "You weren't so bad yourself. Come on, we should get dressed." She sprang to her feet again.
He had his soft dance slippers in place, his Lycra tights, and was just reaching out to offer Calliope her tiny shirt -- his mind shied away from "sports bra" suddenly, mustn't picture his beloved running around in only her undergarments -- when the studio door banged open. A huge figure paused on the threshold long enough to pose for absent admirers.
The quarterback stormed into the room, leading an absolute chorus of hangers-on from the popular clique, and everything went straight to hell.
He stood in stunned silence, shocked, disbelieving, betrayed, as Calliope shrilly laid the fault for their dalliance at his feet. Rape, she actually said; nerd-boy forced me, and the words had no meaning he could comprehend. The quarterback loomed over her and snarled, something about her standard seduction mix as he pointed at the nearest part of the sound system.
Apparently they all wanted to believe whatever craziness the cheerleader provided. Disgusted mutters turned into outraged snarls. He halfheartedly started to explain, though deep down he knew they would not listen.
But when the quarterback charged at him, he danced nimbly aside. Let the idiot bounce off the wall a few times, that should tire him out, and then Calliope will admit the truth!
She never did, at least not before witnesses.
When the quarterback could not get a solid blow after several tries, the passel of fellow football players stepped in to surround him. Then the fight started to go badly. He had never fought before, never really thought about violence beyond its portrayal in dance; the moves translated well, but the enemies were stronger and more numerous and long in the habit of dealing out pain.
He might still have done all right for himself. Two of the enemy sprawled on the dance floor, trapped by their overconfidence, trapped by his superior knowledge of weak points in joints or nerve clusters.
Then he heard Calliope, his redheaded goddess, tell her clustered cheerleaders-in-waiting that he had not been enough to make her nerves sing, how could he be, he was only a dance nerd after all. They laughed.
It was the laughter that killed him.
Oh, the fists of his attackers were what put out the lights, turned his awareness into a sea of unending hurt, broke his limbs and beat him until his mind retreated far into inky blackness; but it was the laughter, the cruel laughter, her abjuration of their love as a figment of his imagination that took the will to fight out of him in the first place.
She would pay for that.
Opal had not actually been aware that swords could cut through a metal frame like this.
Desperate to escape the flying bits of shrapnel, she tossed a cylinder of flame into the space immediately in front of her. It warped the air enough to curve the paths of larger pieces. Unfortunately, the smallest slivers flew straight and swift, and gained dangerous white-hot glows besides.
Opal waved her left hand at Iceberia, beckoning him to her rescue. He picked the damnedest times, some days, to stare at her blankly. He did not move; if she turned to face him, the rain of debris all too likely would hit some vital spot.
No way he'll hear my orders over that -- that -- tornado -- in there!
In the exercise room, the Killing Dance moved like a thing possessed. His swords shredded every chime, every target, every item of the room's inventory. He kicked and struck with his elbows and slammed with his shoulders. Everything gave way. Everything came apart. He had no care for where the pieces landed, only that it be broken past recognition.
The Killing Dance was not attacking Brigid's Verse. She knew that as surely as she knew her danger increased if she moved from that spot. Better not to draw his attention.
Iceberia retreated another step toward the relative safety of the northern corridor. He watched the spray rattling against the wall behind Opal, wide-eyed.
As suddenly as violence had begun, it ended. The man in black stood in the center of the room once more, breathing heavily. He surveyed his work with an air of cold dissatisfaction.
Deliberately, he turned to face Opal, who dismissed her fire cylinder just before he would see it.
"Never," he commanded darkly, "give me anything again!"
Sheathing his swords, he mounted the eight steps out of the wreckage. The Killing Dance walked past her, turned left, and vanished into the shadows of the office building immediately -- noiselessly, effortlessly, leaving only rage in his wake.
Opal stared after him for a long time.
When Iceberia found it safe to pad back into the intersection, Opal turned one last time to gaze at the exercise room.
Gift, my ass, she thought. Fury rose steadily through her, like mounting flames. "I am going to find that little leopard," she told her tiger, "and when I get her alone, I am going to make her scream until her voice bleeds! A gift? This was a trap! This was all a trick to make him hate me! Did you see the fury in him?! I could have been killed!"
