The Great Game 🎲 Fallar Discordia & Aatari Lok

The Finest Ear-Muffs Money Can Buy

Knifestream gloated over the cryptograms Dactalla sent him every week.

Her liason with Qayam the Aatari security agent was developing slowly, as it must. Yet she had reached the crucial stage: Qayam had let down his guard and allowed her to be left alone for several minutes in his bedroom. In any case, this was what Dactalla told Knifestream. In fact, she released pelvic neural agents (or narcotoxins) that put Qayam out for hours. Sex with a Derelectan was so new to Qayam, and so mind-blowing, that he didn’t notice that his mind would go missing for hours, saturated as it was in that subtle mix of toxin and drug that Dactalla pretended to withhold from him, and yet reluctantly give to him when he begged for it with his head pressed up against her loins.

There was a gate behind which Qayam found what he was looking for, as the narcotoxins flooded his cells with bliss. He came upon one strange pool after another. Pink lily pads sang to him, and swaying mauve sponges of algae (their faces the many faces of Dactalla, her eyes glistening, her body humming) caressed his body, which was one with the clear blue water, deep in the very fibres of his brain. She was drowning him in her body, carving deep blue ripples in the tissues of his mind. Meanwhile, Dactalla slipped though the gate, and closed it behind her.

During the hours Qayam spent wandering through the redolent fantasies of his pent-up eroticism, Dactalla rummaged though his files and extracted a great deal of information that she had no intention of sending to her supposed boss. Knifestream forbade her to use the word boss, and instead said that they shared a deep mutual trust that defied labels. He hinted that one day, if she played her cards right, she might be admitted to his inner circle. And perhaps, if she tuned her instincts to perfection, she might be a part of his intimate life.

He saw himself as a godlike master of the waters, yet always true to the pretty young things he might lift into the higher world of his understanding.

He knew that the soft girls he saved would remain faithful to him. They were so lost in their amazement that they wouldn’t even notice he was gathering information about the watery worlds they knew so well. If anything went wrong, his knife could slice through the lily pads and make the piranhas of the deep, or whatever else was down there, shake with fear.

Buoyed with such optimistic thoughts, Knifestream sent Dactalla the precious exociphers that were necessary to infiltrate and decode the data streams of the Aatari agent. Knifestream gave her the exociphers reluctantly, for it placed a great deal of power in her hands. Yet the danger was necessary, since the Aatari streams had to be extracted without detection. They could only be scanned in millionths of a second and instantaneously translated into some other system. The process had to take place as if from outside — an exo process Knifestream believed only he had perfected. Knifestream also sent (without informing Dactalla) nano-scanners within the exociphers. Pride of the Demon Priests, these nano-scanners could detect, and partly decipher, the most deeply-encoded messages of the Vicinese Purple Guard, which passed through the security systems of the lesser species unnoticed. Knifestream had rightly assumed that such messages would be found lurking among the data banks of the overrated Aatari.

In return, Dactalla sent him (without informing him) fractal decoding algosensors, which floated within the data she sent him. These algosensors hooked into the nonoscans Knifestream spliced into the depths of his private network, which he called the Darkest Web, and What the algosenors detected was then relayed through a network of Crimson Stalker gravity holes back to Dactalla.

While Knifestream suspected Gascitar and Kaldriscat of all sorts of arcane scheming, it never occurred to him that a mere Derelectan would dare to spy on the likes of a Demon Priest. 

Dactalla had been given the fractal decoding algosensors by a Fallarian whose identity had always remained a great mystery, even to the Demon Priests, even though they had listened to his speeches and updates dozens of times: Farenn of Caldemar.

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Dactalla had met Farenn at a Math Cult mixer on the derelectan fringes of the university. He was a wild figure who, after three Discordian jugs of methamead, had strategically let slip to Dactalla that he knew a thing or two about Derelectan roots. He said that he was at the mixer to recall his student days, but Dactalla found it a suspicious coincidence, given how closely they seemed to feel about the politics of the universe. Farenn conceded, after another jug, that it was a fabricated coincidence, which he said were always the best kind, to which Dactalla agreed. He admitted that he had in fact connived to meet her there on the fringes of the dangerous capital.

Three nights they caroused along the trenches in the Derelectan Quarter next to the university. Yet they never slept together, since both of them instinctively knew that such an experience couldn’t be forgotten, and would likely mess up all of the other plans they were making.

When she went for her gruelling interviews, no one in the Order of the Demon Priests could so much as detect Farenn’s scent, let alone a whiff of his political philosophy.

Whenever Dactalla was alone and thought about those three days, she let her treasure-chest glow. After fifty years in the doldrums of the Aatari suburbs, after endless cups of insipid tea, her life measured with oxycoffee spoons, telling herself that there would always be time, always later, to murder and procreate, Dactalla still held a torch for Farenn of Caldemar.

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The information Dactalla sent Knifestream kept him riveted to the screen. He saw, to his great self-congratulation, that Gascitar was indeed far more dangerous than anyone (except him) had thought. He also confirmed that Kaldriscat was nothing but a common wolf in sheep’s clothing. In Fallarian, the expression was “a Vicinese in Fallixian mink.”

This clothing metaphor reminded Knifestream of the blackcloak Kaldriscat had so ceremoniously gifted him. In exchange, Knifestream gave him the finest fur earmuffs that a Fallarian could desire. Yet unlike Kaldriscat’s gift, the muffs didn’t scratch his ears or give him the very disease that it was supposed to alleviate. No, it just warmed his ears and clarified the sounds that went into them, just like a pair of sunglasses filtered the rays of the sun. Well, the earmuffs also doubled the waves entering his ears, allowing one set of waves to travel as normal, and another to travel on an angled bandwidth that Knifestream picked off like cherries from the empty air.

Not only could Knifestream hear what information Kaldriscat was taking in or saying out loud; his angled sensors had a subatomic cerebral wave-pattern recognition mechanism that relayed to Knifestream the contents of what Kaldriscat was thinking. 

Knifestream had obtained this wave-pattern mechanism from his Vicinese double-agent, the treacherous wife of Talfar of Breen, who assured him that the Vicinese had such devices and could detect their usage. Knifestream was free to use it south of the Middlebelt, yet anywhere nord of that it could be easily detected. For this reason, Knifestream stopped himself from giving Dactalla this gift of soft and fluffy ear-muffs. He would, and he gulped as he thought this, just have to trust her.

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Next: 🔮 At Sea

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