Chapter 378 - Far Future Ch. 88 – Let’s Just Keep It All in the Family (1/2)
My Bad Girls kept me cheerfully informed about their seizure of power. It actually went pretty smoothly once they identified all the Amourean cultists and hard-line loyalists and bodyhoppers... not that doing that hadn't taken a bit of effort. Still, they got a considerable amount of help from younger sisters with appropriate Talents and no sympathy at all for either cultists or mentalist body-stealers.
When a thousand Rantha Hags move, even a millennia-old mafia house is going to have problems dealing with them.
It could have been far more violent, but with Ranthas stepping right into the positions of power that had been spontaneously released by bullets, and furthermore having instant access to the secrets and connections of said positions by vivic-nomming those holding them, the transition of power was basically not very noticeable. The fact they could alter their appearances as perfectly as a dop, and tended to have much, much better Charisma scores to convince people that they didn't want the change to be false, also helped immensely.
The Map of Underspire was much, much more extensive now, although there were still huge areas in it dark and blank, as the area was just that damn big. There was both no reason to go into certain areas, and certain areas didn't let you in, period. Still, the city defense teams would have been aghast at how up-to-date and extensive our maps of the higher tunnels and complexes were, and we didn't apologize about them at all.
I moved through the tunnels as easily as if I lived down there, and Inigo did have a lot of travel up and down the Spires, getting around more than all my other Extras... and was one of a special breed of Marked who went into unMapped areas on a lark to find out what was in there.
I wasn't going to the Themis headquarters, which was currently being remodeled to get rid of a lot of suspicious stains, holes, burned furniture, smoke damage, and death traps of various sorts. The mini-nuke going off would have been a nice touch... as long as the matriarchs knew it was coming, most of them could have jumped right to new bodies, while the demon in the dop could have just gone and taken over a new shapeshifter.
The jail was just a food warehouse with a section set aside for special prisoners, now completely empty except for a grey-skinned, three-fingered, smooth-faced humanoid with a nihilaen spike (Energized Hardened Lead Crystal Glassteel to the pedantic) sticking out its skull. Any normal human would have been completely unnerved by its alien biology, and probably had a hard time believing it was either a shapechanging or cannibal once-human who had gotten too much into the 'You are what you eat' mindset, and Amourae had blithely gifted them with the status.
Of course, their kids would inherit the dop genes, too, which activated the first time they ate another human and likely took their place. I understood first-time lovers were preferred for this purpose...
And there was the Dancer, sitting inside it, looking out the lidless eyes at all of us, sneering at the circle on the ground that was preventing it from retreating to the Warp, and then finding a way back to come back and reclaim its power and position.
Mahsh was the only one there, although Marked were standing guard at a couple locations, and the rest of the defenses was mostly cybered stuff.
Mahsh had yellow and brown hair worn very short in a layered, almost scaled pattern (Compressed, naturally), and disturbing yellow eyes which she had slitted to make her look even more disturbing and let everyone think she had cybereyes or reptile genes. She moved like a serpent, which put a lot of people on edge, and I gave her a nice friendly hug as I wandered in by way of greetings.
”How has the purgings of the dops been going Down here?” I asked her conversationally. It was a nice way to earn cash, so Ranthas popped them whenever they saw them. All those eyes wandering around with True Sight was really a nightmare for the creatures.
”We're in the thousands,” she replied back, not caring if the dop and its multi-lobed head heard us, or the demon riding inside. ”That's spread across the city, of course, and doesn't make allowances for other mega-cities. The Sweiss were not happy to find out the dops had swapped in for some of their engineers, and had rewritten their own detection protocols so their sensors would ignore them. We ended up picking off one of their Veeps, and they had to thank us and pay us for it! Was damn funny.”
”Do you think you've won?” The voice of the dop was multi-leveled, like two or three women whose souls it had eaten were speaking at once. ”I am eternal! The Warp itself will bring me back if you kill me! I will hunt you down like the puny mortals you are! I will eat your family and replace them with my brood, I will-”
”Shut. Up.” I turned my eyes on it, and that ranting strangled in its hole of a mouth. ”I'm talking to my daughter here. There's no need to be rude before you die.” I looked back at Mahsh, who looked quite impressed. ”Possession?”
”Selective, but... yeah. Those orgy ceremonies make a lot of money, so the Themis just set them up and turned a blind eye to anything that went too far. They mostly just supplied the raw materials and prepped the settings. However, the databases on who attended those things are... extensive.”
I rolled my eyes and sighed. ”And people wonder why I have so many daughters,” I asked the durasteel ceiling above.” Mahsh snickered. ”I imagine the Themis know a whole lot about infiltration of the Spires by all sorts of things.”
”We are everywhere! The Warp cannot be denied! All mortals live to serve-hkk!” I turned my eyes on it again, and it choked and shut up despite its frenzy.
”There's massive jRaztl influence among the Scythilians, the Trikes, the Yaku, and the Sweiss, all in competition with one another. Riggibuhl has influence among the Steiners and has been trying to get into the Askar, but the zealotry of the Cult of Man is pretty strong there. Klaw is hooked into the low levels of the Skraeling, but the top end we're pretty sure is Wilder body-hoppers or Warp Sorcerers manipulating the low-end, who would not be happy to find out what happens to the successful ones among them.”
”As the Bad Boys are finding out,” I agreed, and just lifted a finger to shut the dop up and shrivel it up as it became aware that I really was something dangerous to it. ”Looks like you've got a lot of work cut out for you.”
”There's nine other Themis branches on Janus III,” she hissed quietly.
”And how many Vats?” I inquired.