Dream and Reality (//Dunc- and me)

[Enkidu]

Nishi licked gently at her dry, dusted lips, savouring the brine. It was clotting. Good - even heaven could be hades when you had the gentle itch of your blood on your jaw. She breathed; lungs in, lungs out, with a conscious deliberation. She metred herself, the steady atrophy of her muscles into sluggishness irritating her. She yearned to move, and yet, couldn’t appear to have that yearning. Everything must be still. Every leaf must remain pristine. As the agent tightened her restraints, her gloved fingers pressing against her shoulders, her neck, her thighs, Nishi remained immutable. She was the ice-queen, the wicked witch, the prize pig, the prime b**ch; they could not make her melt. She gave her chin a nonchalant scratch on the coarse polymer of her shoulder strap, and felt better.

“…Names. Of course. We need something to affix to profanity, don’t we? Luisa Neumann, Chancellor of the Bundestag. Daimyo Nagahide, feudal liege-lord of the blood dragons. Chairman Cheng Cong, guild master of the Gas Mining Guild. Carina Regina, protector of the taus, blah blah something of the near omegas and a bunch of other highfaluting titles I don’t care for; queen of Bretonia by all the dubious authority pertaining to accident of birth. Please; didn’t your mother ever tell you not to get into strange ships with strange people with a kinda’, mhm, Screamesque, Friday the Thirteenth discount slasher movie vibe? Mine did.” Nishi locks her gaze onto the blank, seamless slopes of her accuser’s mask, searching for her eyes. She decides, and fixes on a point a fraction of a millimetre too high. It still cuts. “I feel like I should be yelling for a violation-whistle so I can play you a merry reel. I’m not going to take you seriously if you lock me up in some seriously funkily fragranced bondage bunker wearing what looks like Ronald Mc Donald’s mummified face. Goddess pity you; you look more incarcerated in that fetish gag locking over your jawbones that I do strapped to a chair. Next you’ll start lactating or paddling yourself or something. Cut it out. You’re meant to be interrogating me, not swanning around in circles gussied up as pint-sized transexual Jason in an unreadably exposition-bloated unsexy neural-net fanfiction. Call me back when Order sends some real interrogators, not their good-time girl on spring break.” She spat, open lipped, catching the rim of a barely visible boot with a bolus of bile and phlegm. Nishi twitched - she wondered if she’d wasted the moisture.



“Look, I get it. You’re really trying, girl, you truly are. The light, the stench, the chair, the ties - you’re trying to disorient me so you can rip bits out of my brain at your discretion. This Halloween get-up you’ve got for yourself, mhm - bit try-hard-esque, but at least you exerted yourself… yeah, it makes you look a bit more in-the-closet than Monster-in-the-closet. Hell, you you gave it a go, girl.” She shrugs. She gives little - she takes none at all.


Nishi grins, a slow, glacial line of a smile that crinkles her jaw. She’s mocking you. “Want… to start… again, perhaps?”

The Chrysanthemum winks: “Be a pal. Take the mask off.”

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)

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