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[beekeeperofeden]

Plot twist: the two boys you're choosing between are polyamorous, but they also hate eachother's guts so you still have to pick one

[beekeeperofeden]

The Killer

So I was hanging out with some friends last night, and for whatever reason, we got onto the subject of whether or not we sleep with the bedroom door closed. Apparently it's safer in case of fires? But it turns out that most of my friends keep their bedroom door closed because of concerns about The Killer, aka, a person breaking into their house at night with the express intention of murdering them.

For the purposes of this poll, "I share a house/apartment" is for situations where you have your own bedroom, but there are other people living with you; "I share a bedroom" is for situations where there is another person sleeping in the same room.

[beekeeperofeden]

combine your first real fandom with your current one to create a terrible, terrible au

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"I could make him better" "I could make him worse" I want him to be in a polycule with both of these people simultaneously so I can study the cumulative effects

[beekeeperofeden]

I am the opposite of an apologist. I get personally offended if you pretend my faves didn't do horrible things. If you can't accept them at their worst then RIP to you but I'm stronger.

[beekeeperofeden]

Lots of Reddit threads on FFN recently having trouble.

Last May there were posts about FFN being abandoned. Anyone have links to those?

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I often wonder what happened to authors of unfinished fanfictions.

[beekeeperofeden]

there's so much pathologizing over why enemies to lovers is a popular trope (something something the normalization of abuse something something) when the simplest and less moronic answer is that narratives thrive on irony and reversals, and there's no greater irony than characters going from hating each other's guts to loving each other unconditionally. raw thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

[beekeeperofeden]

The inherent homoeroticism of killing your enemy and immediately regretting it

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i just saw the tag “canon complicit” instead of “canon compliant” and im laughing its like “canon is a criminal act that i unfortunately support with this fic”

[beekeeperofeden]

Pre-canon fic.

Post-canon fic.

That-little-bit-in-the-middle-that-canon-skipped-over fic.

Needs-to-keep-its-voice-down-because-canon-is-sleeping-in-the-next-room fic.

Peering-over-canon’s-shoulder-and-making-weird-faces-when-canon-isn’t-looking fic.

[beekeeperofeden]

y'know sometimes fanfiction is just an increasingly convoluted series of setups to make characters sit around and talk about their feelings, and that's ok

[beekeeperofeden]

fic: the synonyms for ‘barrier’ include hindrance, obstacle, and trammel

Summary: Ability to speak does not necessarily confer the ability to communicate. Entreri and Catti-brie are still learning this the hard way. Opposite of Arrogance AU. (Basic premise of the AU is that Catti-brie started working for Bregan D’aerthe during Starless Night in order to convince Jarlaxle to help rescue Drizzt.) Wordcount: 2880 

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[beekeeperofeden]

Fic: Prophylaxis

Wordcount: 1405 Summary: Space Opera AU. Vierna wonders sometimes if the flaws of the old jumpships have fallen wholly out of human memory; Jarlaxle would know, perhaps, but she daren’t turn his mind to the question if it isn’t already there. Takes place between But Only So An Hour and Underbelly. [Warnings for canon-typical drow sexism.]

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[beekeeperofeden]

fic: the synonyms for ‘barrier’ include hindrance, obstacle, and trammel

Summary: Ability to speak does not necessarily confer the ability to communicate. Entreri and Catti-brie are still learning this the hard way. Opposite of Arrogance AU. (Basic premise of the AU is that Catti-brie started working for Bregan D’aerthe during Starless Night in order to convince Jarlaxle to help rescue Drizzt.) Wordcount: 2880 

They were on stake-out again. Catti-brie had noticed that none of the drow soldiers were sent out in pairs, and she wondered what it meant that Jarlaxle kept making Entreri work with her. She didn't need a translator to recognize the "it takes two humans to do the job of one dark elf" jokes as they left, but she didn't think that was Jarlaxle's reasoning. At least, that wasn't all of it.

Whatever Jarlaxle's rationale, it had resulted in the two of them sitting on the roof of a crumbling building, watching the street below for—someone. Catti-brie wasn't actually sure who they were looking for, but she had been assured that Entreri would recognize them. Which meant that, while Entreri studied the sparse crowds and watched for their target, Catti-brie had an idle mind and no one else to talk to.

"What're ye muttering?" she asked him. He'd been frowning and saying something under his breath for the past half hour. It almost had the rhythm of a poem, and she wondered if it were possible that the man who had haunted some of her nightmares would really be reciting poetry in his spare time.

Annoyed grumbling, followed by "Vocabulary." Not poetry, then. Far more practical, and Catti-brie was annoyed at herself for not guessing that first.

"That'll be in drow, then?" They were speaking in Surface Common. Catti-brie had half expected Entreri to insist on speaking drow in order to avoid talking to her, but he seemed to enjoy hearing a surface language again too much to argue.

Entreri rolled his eyes instead of answering.

"Drill me," she said.

"What?"

"I need to practice and so do ye." She nodded at the street. "It's not like we're going anywhere for a while."

He rolled his eyes again.

"Brane'sa," he said. Catti-brie grinned.

"Insect, pest, or annoyance." She'd heard that one a few times already.

"It also means 'prey,'" Entreri pointed out. He looked much less amused, though Catti-brie wasn't sure if that was just his face or if he'd gotten sick of hearing it muttered at him in the hallway.

"My turn," she said. "Delmah."

"Headquarters or fortress." He paused to watch someone exit a building across the row from them. "Uln'hyrr."

"Liar," she said. Entreri nodded.

"The synonym for that one is Jarlaxle," he said. Catti-brie started to etch the new word into her memory before she realized that Artemis Entreri had just made a joke. She searched for some hint of humor, but he kept his face totally blank.

"Uln'hyrr," she said. He raised an eyebrow.

"We just did that one. Choose another."

"Vynnessia," she said, grinning as he frowned. She'd remembered this one because it was pretty, but suspected Entreri might not have bothered to memorize it. He scowled.

"You made that one up."

"It means 'butterfly.'"

"You must be joking."

"Nope."

"Why do drow even have a word for butterfly?" He gestured at the ceiling, at the walls, at everything around them. "We are miles below the surface. There are no butterflies down here."

Catti-brie was silent for a moment, enjoying the view as Entreri's face shifted between astonishment and disbelief.

"Mayhap they're invisible butterflies," she said after a moment. His mouth opened and shut a few times before he responded.

"It's not a matter of visibility—butterflies could not survive in the Underdark. They're too delicate, and there is nothing for them to eat."

Catti-brie frowned and gestured at a pack of rothe down the street. "There's plenty o' food."

Entreri blinked. "I thought butterflies ate flowers."

"And meat. I saw a flock of them nibbling on a deer carcass once. Looked like a patch o' daisies until I got close enough to see their wings move."

He stared at her, clearly hoping for some indication of untruth. She could see the idea but they're too pretty to be dangerous flutter across his mind, unspoken. She shrugged.

"Ye've met Jarlaxle, and he's awful pretty. Are ye gonna tell me he's not dangerous?" She leaned forward. "But more importantly...if I'm lyin' about the butterflies, then why do dark elves have a word for 'em?"

He looked away, staring at the deserted street below them.

"We should move on to verbs," he said. "Run."

Catti-brie blinked, then considered whether she was supposed to run. "Oh! Er,  z'haanin."

"That's 'running.'" He stretched one leg, then the other, without losing sight of the road. Catti-brie realized her own legs were stiff from sitting and started to stand as well. "Usstan z'haan, dos z'haan, il z'haane, udos z'haan, nind z'haan—I run, you run, she runs, we run, they run. Dos z'haanus. You ran."

Catti-brie sighed. This was less fun than nouns, but she couldn't deny it was necessary. She winced, remembering the times she'd heard a goblin mangle verbs in common or dwarvish and how easy it had been to discount them as real people. At home, she'd wanted the others to respect her as an adult, as someone who could be trusted to make her own decisions. She had thought she wanted that. But the basic respect that came from acknowledgement that she was a person...she hadn't noticed until it was missing, and she hungered to have it back.

"I hate this," she said.

"Usstan phlith nindol." He eyed her for a moment, then turned his gaze back to the abandoned street. "And in third person singular?"

"Er, il phlithe. She hates."

"If you hate this so much, why not leave?" Apparently satisfied with the results of his stretching, he sat back down cross-legged on the edge of the roof. "You could probably convince Jarlaxle to return you."

"Why would he do that?"

"Gold. Surely your father could pay a ransom that would interest him."

Her own bed. Seeing friendly faces again. Sunlight, rain, a soft breeze. She wasn't sure what season it was on the surface. Autumn, perhaps? There would be fresh apples falling from the trees. Everyone would be taking stock of their supplies, getting ready for winter. Usually she'd be helping buy preserves, storing turnips, deciding which spices to purchase and how many before the roads became too icy for merchants.

If she mentioned it to Jarlaxle today, maybe she could be home before the first snow fell.

Jarlaxle's words echoed in her mind. Drizzt may even outlive you, if they have their way. House Baenre is not known for killing its enemies quickly.

"No. If I leave, then Jarlaxle don't need to hold up his end of the bargain."

"Do'Urden must be quite gratified, to have so persistent a rescuer."

Catti-brie shook her head. "He'd hate it if he knew I was here. He told Regis to hide it from us."

He looked at her, his regard frighteningly intense. "Then why pursue him?"

Empty hallways. Her father, red-eyed and silent. The guilt that would eat her away if she didn't go, if no one went. Alustriel watching her with unexpected hope and respect.

She closed her eyes.

"I already lost one friend." Whatever arguments they had had, whatever Wulfgar had been to her before he died, she could still say 'friend.' "You killed him attacking Mithril Hall."

"One of the dwarves?" He frowned, clearly unable to put a face to her description.

"Not one of the—" Her throat ached with the effort of stopping tears, but she held them back anyway. She would not cry in front of Artemis Entreri. "Wulfgar. He died in the attack."

"But I was not the one who killed him."

"Ye helped." Her voice trembled. "If ye hadn't, perhaps the battle would have gone different."

"Perhaps. Perhaps not." He shrugged. "If I had not been involved, it's possible you would have died and Wulfgar would have gone chasing Do'Urden to the Underdark."

"Or no one would have died!" She was vaguely aware that she was standing over him, her voice raised. He didn't seem the slightest bit intimidated, and that only made her feel worse. "We would have beaten them off and kept living our lives."

"Does Jarlaxle strike you as incompetent? If I had not been there, the drow would simply have used a different tactic to pry Drizzt out. Teleportation spells and a larger army, perhaps. Alchemical explosives in the mineshafts. Smoke, like hunters use for foxes."

"So ye joined them to reduce the body count?"

"Hardly." His lip curled in scorn.

"Then what does it matter, if I blame ye for his death?"

"It doesn't. But you hardly have cause to be upset. You did not wish to marry him anyway."

She stared at him, flummoxed.

"How do ye know—"

He arranged his features into a politely neutral expression that she'd never seen him wear. But she'd seen it on Regis's face a few times, when she needed to confide to someone. Like she had before drow attacked, when Regis had been...oh.

"You spying weasel," she spat. "That was—it's none of your—" She kicked a piece of decorative metalwork sticking out of the roof. Pain shot up her foot and spread like lightning through her leg. She cursed, still angry, but it was a pure, hot anger, something she could burn out. Grief was a dark tunnel that she couldn't afford to follow right now, not if she wanted to rescue Drizzt.

"How was I supposed to stop you?" Entreri's voice was harsh. "Say 'I cannot listen to your girlish woes right now, as I have espionage to commit and a prisoner to check on'? Or would you prefer that I simply pretend not to know?"

"Let's go with that."

"Very well." Another strange expression, this time an obvious caricature of sympathy. "I am so sorry about the death of your brutish fiance, whom you were so very excited to wed."

"Someone should have drowned you as a weanling."

He shrugged. "What makes you think no one tried?"

Exhausted by her anger, she sat down at the edge of the roof, close enough to speak but far enough away that he wouldn't think he was forgiven. I'm not sitting with ye, we just happen to be sitting in the same tunnel.

"Why do ye care if I go home, anyway?"

"Jarlaxle would need to give you a map, or send a scout to show you the way out. I could use that."

"So you're just bein' selfish."

"Yes. You could try it sometime."

"I think you're selfish enough for the both of us, aren't ye?"

He bared his teeth in what might have been a pleased grin. For a while they sat in silence, watching the street below them. Catti-brie's stomach growled, and she unpacked the fruit and cheese she had brought with her. She took a bite of the fruit, first. It was unfamiliar to her, but apparently commonplace in the Underdark. The skin was soft pink that faded into green. It tasted like a plum that wasn't ripe yet, but sweeter. She'd found she liked them.

Entreri glanced at her, then at the fruit. "Have you had a chance to look at the drow orchards yet?"

The question was so innocuous that Catti-brie was instantly suspicious.

"The drow have farms?" This far down, with no sunlight or rainfall to speak of?

Entreri nodded. "They're much like the great farms in the south, with aqueducts. They build in terraces to maximize space."

That...actually sounded rather nice. She'd seen aqueducts used in mining, to help carry away dust and debris. It could make sense for farming, too. She felt a pang of homesickness, thinking of the mines. Perhaps it was the case for Entreri, too.

"Do ye miss it?" He blinked, and she clarified. "Calimshan, I mean?"

"Parts of it." This time he didn't manage to hide the note of wistfulness from her. Was that him loosening up or her getting better at reading him?

"Like the food?" Her visit to Calimport had been too brief, too fearful, to really understand the city.

"Like the freedom to kill anyone who talked too much." Catti-brie took another bite of the fruit, and Entreri smirked. "But yes, some of the pashas keep fine gardens. Keeping plants alive in the desert requires time, water, money—it's a chance for them to show off."

Catti-brie didn't remembering seeing any such gardens, but she supposed that they were probably walled off. Knowing that Calimport hadn't been as barren as it looked but that all that green was simply hidden away didn't make her like the place any better.

"Is that why the drow grow fruit? To prove they can?"

Entreri thought about that, then chuckled. "Perhaps. Although, water is not the problem down here."

"Sunlight." She frowned, thinking. "Light spells?" But surely that would take too much magic to maintain, and the dark elves barely tolerated torches along crowded streets. They couldn't possibly be casting enough light spells up to keep any sizable farms alive.

"Some of the fields have light, yes, but plants don't need to get their energy from sunlight. Some can get warmth from the ground." He grinned wolfishly.

"And most of the plants down here get their energy the same way we do—they eat."

Catti-brie finished chewing her bite of not-plum and swallowed. "Eat what?" she asked.

"Meat." He jerked his head at a goblin corpse, already being dragged away. "Whatever kind is available."

Catti-brie looked at her mostly-uneaten fruit with disgust. Entreri huffed in annoyance, then took it from her.

"If you won't eat it, I will."

Catti-brie swallowed her objections. It wasn't like eating a person, not really. She couldn't shake the certainty that it had tasted like blood, nonetheless. Entreri rolled his eyes.

"A few days of hunger, you'll get over it," he said, carving the not-plum into small pieces. He popped a piece of fruit into his mouth. "Or you'll starve. I care not which."

Catti-brie scowled at him, then snatched a piece of the not-plum and ate it, never breaking eye contact. He laughed.

She raised an eyebrow, considering how, when she'd first known him, he'd butted heads with the guard from Luskan for no apparent reason other than that it seemed to amuse him to insult the man.

"Do you have to work to piss off all yer potential allies this much, or do it come natural?"

"It took practice."

"Oh, so ye want otherwise neutral parties to be looking to take yer head off," Catti-brie said sarcastically. Entreri nodded.

"It weeds out the opportunistic leeches. Anyone who sticks around after that is probably just planning to kill me."

"Or mayhap they weren't planning to kill ye until ye opened yer damned mouth." Entreri shrugged, as if people wanting to murder him was a natural consequence of existing. Then he perked up, like a cat that heard the skitter of rodent feet nearby. He jerked his chin as an armored figure down the street.

"Our target." Then he stood and started climbing down the building, not bothering with a rope. Catti-brie peered over the edge after him, then down at the rapidly-approaching drow.

"What am I supposed to do?"

He sneered but didn't answer. As their target got closer, Catti-brie recalled Jarlaxle's instructions: I need him alive, but not undamaged. She growled under her breath, drew her bow, and fired into the target's leg, pinning him to the nearest building.

Entreri, halfway across the street, whirled to scowl up at her. She made eye contact for a long second, then deliberately lowered the bow. She looped a length of rope around the decorative metalwork and started to climb down the side of the building. By the time she got down, their target was bound and gagged. He whimpered through the gag as Entreri roughly tourniquetted the wound on his leg. When Catti-brie let go of the rope, Entreri knotted the bandage and stood up.

"What were you thinking?"

"I was thinkin' ye hadn't exactly shared a plan, and this seemed like a halfway decent one. If ye were expecting me to do something else, ye should've said."

He tilted his head, and she expected an attack. A shove, a slap, something. When it didn't come, she ground her teeth and maintained eye contact until a particularly loud groan from their target drew her attention. Entreri was still frowning at her.

"If you get in my way again, I'll leave you at the bottom of the Clawrift, Jarlaxle's orders be damned."

With that, he dragged the captive to his feet and shoved him toward Bregan D'aerthe's base.

"Walk," he ordered in drow. A glance at Catti-brie suggested that the imperative was targeted at her, too. She pulled her rope down and followed.

"I don't suppose ye can tell me how drow say 'thank you,'" she said, draping the coil of rope over her shoulder. "Given that ye don't seem to know it yerself."

"If you shut up, I'll express gratitude by letting you live." He ran his thumb along the pommel of his dagger. "If a drow were going to deign to thank iblith for anything, I suspect it would be by killing us fast instead of slow."

She spent the rest of their walk in silence, wondering if he was right. When they returned, Jarlaxle smiled in delight, praised their work, and offered not a single word in thanks. By Entreri's grim smirk as they left Jarlaxle's office, he'd noticed too.

[beekeeperofeden]

@mortsix said:

1. You're back! : ) 2. I just inhaled all the parts of this AU and it's, ugh, so good. Really like the worldbuilding (loads of great visceral detail), and the interplay between the characters is fascinating. This is such an interesting episode of Jarlaxle interacting with an alternate version of Vierna who's still fanatical but much more cunning and icily collected than she was in canon.

I'm back-ish. For a number of reasons (which mostly boil down, weirdly enough, to my mental/emotional health being pretty good) I've been having difficulty focusing on FR stuff. This kills me, because there's a handful of fantastic-looking fics out there (including yours!) that I really badly want to read but can't muster the focus for because I'm too distracted. My interests tend to be cyclical, so hopefully the cycle will bring me back to FR sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I can clean up some of my mostly-done stuff and see if it accelerates the process.

This particular fic has been about two sentences away from completion for months. ladyzwei reblogged a list of my WIPs, which reminded me about it. (WIP #3 on that list is also 99% done. I'm planning to give it another pass of edits tonight after gaming, then post that one too.) If anyone out there is wondering how to get me to write, I am highly, HIGHLY susceptible to flattery and peer pressure.

I’m so glad you like it! The space opera setting has been a lot of fun to play with. I can't remember why the drow are creepy bioengineers, so it's probably the fault of either cohabbitation or Lois McMaster Bujold. (Menzoberranzan is has a non-zero amount of overlap with Jackson’s Hole.)

Vierna fascinates me because she's one of those characters who could have been glorious if she hadn't gotten stuck in RAS' mold of female antagonists being "crazy." She's the last of her family (other than Dinin), dealing with a fall from power and a smirch on the family name, trying to regain everything she once had. She was (if we can trust Drizzt's childhood memories) the least vicious of her house, which means we can trust her to make the smart choice instead of the stupidly evil one, and she's willing to look past prejudices and assumptions to make the best use of the tools she's given, as evidenced by the fact that she's the one who sent Jarlaxle to recruit Entreri. She has a lot of potential to be a ruthlessly smart, pragmatic player in power politics, and I would love to see what would have happened if she had returned victorious from the capture mission in Legacy, because she'd be simultaneously working with/threatening Matron Baenre. (It also doesn't hurt that I crack-ship her with Sharlotta Vespers because Reasons.)

[beekeeperofeden]

Fic: Prophylaxis

Wordcount: 1405 Summary: Space Opera AU. Vierna wonders sometimes if the flaws of the old jumpships have fallen wholly out of human memory; Jarlaxle would know, perhaps, but she daren't turn his mind to the question if it isn't already there. Takes place between But Only So An Hour and Underbelly. [Warnings for canon-typical drow sexism.]

It is a warning known to every every cosmonaut—when you sail the stars and go through a wormhole, you are forever changed.

Forever lasts until the next wormhole.

Before long, humans had developed better travel, faster travel, that didn't require them to send their sailors through rips in the fabric of reality. But the old wormhole-jumpers had never been mothballed, and there were still a few ships out there with the capability, with old engines that can't run along the stars but can skip right through them.

But the old ships grew rarer and rarer as human captains became skittish about their fatal flaw:

When you go through a wormhole, reality reverses itself. You reverse yourself. You come through backwards, down the molecular structure. Your DNA goes widdershins in your blood, and your proteins flip symmetry. You went in right-handed, and you come out right-handed still—but you return to a universe of lefties.

When the body digests malformed proteins—prions—it fails to understand them, then tries to incorporate this failure into its entire being. Men have died with seafoam on their lips and whalesongs in their head trying to bring the universe into a body not ready for it.

After you go through a wormhole, the entire universe becomes incomprehensible, a file your body can't read. All food becomes poison, unless it's gone through the wormhole with you, been translated into protein that is compatible with your new hardware.

And then you go through another wormhole, and the sinister universe rights itself.

To compensate, most pre-faster-than-light fleets had rules about never stopping after an odd wormhole. Battle maps and trade routes went by the rules of two by two by two. Sailors followed this guide for centuries, for so long that, even today, many space captains with faster-than-light engines still take a short break during their journey, long enough to pause the ship, to study a nebula, to wait—what they're waiting for, they don't know.

Some of the older fleets, of course, still use wormhole technology. The universe does not throw away a tool that works. Evolution does not invent so much as it recycles—vestigial traits linger, are given new purpose, until they become necessary again.

The drow fleets, for example, depend on wormhole jumping. They could switch over to faster-than-light—even galactic sanctions are not so powerful as to keep them limited to obsolete spaceflight—but the matriarchs find it a useful tether on their ship-captains. Two by two by two, they say. Two by two by two is eight, and our lady abhors odd numbers. Oddity is for heretics.

Heresy is punishable by death, and death conveniently applies itself to any captains (and their crews) who may have ventured off the carefully cultivated map. The drow matriarchs, every one trained in genetics and bioenegineering, must surely know the real cause of the Death of the Heretic, but they find it more convenient to hide that fact.

They have built control into their sons' blood, carved obedience into their bones. But power held loosely is apt to slip out of grasp, and tools, however crude, should not be simply abandoned. Not when they work.

In a shielded bubble, hidden in the shadow of a crater on the scarred surface of Lloth's eighth moon, Vierna the houseless, formerly of House Do'Urden, frowned at a microscope and studied her brother's blood.

"This is the only sample?" she asked. She didn't look at Jarlaxle. If she looked at him, she would be able to tell that he was lying. If she caught him lying, she would have to do something about it.

Better not to know. If she were of House Baenre or Del'Armgo or even Mizzrym, she could send soldiers or spies to search his base and confiscate any material. But it's just her. She has no soldiers, no spies. His base is also her base, her laboratory and home.

By not asking, she may have made it easier for him to commit blasphemy, but she couldn't solve that right now.

Later, she promised herself. When she's redeemed herself and her name to the great houses, she will have the power to undo whatever damage she has allowed Jarlaxle to do.

"Of course." He perched on a counter, boot heels kicking against the cupboard doors. He could have been a coddled child sitting on a kitchen counter, not in a bioengineering laboratory with rigid expectations for safety and protocol.

Vierna reminded herself that she couldn't just kick him out or tell him to get his ass off the counters. It was, technically speaking, Jarlaxle's lab.

Why was he still here? Vierna squinted at the blood, barely seeing it.

He wouldn't ask what she had found, surely. That would be too bold, even for him. So, she told herself—he was lingering in hopes that she might let some information slip. He would be looking for the same thing she was, no doubt—the key to her brother's survival away from Menzoberranzan's atmosphere—but all of his researchers were male. Even if they had the training to know what they were looking at, they wouldn't be as good. He needed a real bioengineer to tell him what there was—he needed Vierna.

She smirked.

"Get off the counter."

He swung his boots up onto the opposing counter instead, ignoring how it made the glassware clink. Vierna felt her smirk fade.

"Dinin told me you haven't allowed anyone into the lab for months. I thought that surely you would appreciate the company."

"Dinin may appreciate your company." Far too much, by Vierna's reckoning, but she had long ago accepted her brother's limitations. "I appreciate your absence more."

"You wound me." He sounded pleased, though, and Vierna knew that he enjoyed her company as little as she did his.

"What else did you find?" She was aware that Jarlaxle had raided several human labs before acquiring this sample, and still had the stolen computers. Trying to pry answers out of simple machines was a mundane task, suitable for the male researchers. Their minds were too shallow to grasp the fractal complexities of biology, but the binary simplicity of humanity's machines seemed to suit them well.

"Nothing yet."

He was lying again. She decided to allow it. After all, the truly important knowledge, the real answers, were in right front of her, in a language only she could read.

Finally he took the hint and left, abandoning her to blessed silence. She closed her eyes for a moment, letting the darkness calm her mind, before going back to examining the blood sample.

She had expected some kind of cludge. A sturdy virus that would keep his immune system too busy to destroy vital organs. Or a hatchet job, cutting out the entire immune system—which would leave him vulnerable to many other diseases, but would stop him from dying immediately. Instead she found a work of art. She studied the sequence that had been grafted onto the end of the strand.

She was humming, she realized, tracing holy geometry on the countertop with her fingers.

The new genetic sequence was a work of art, modulating the subject's immune response rather than distracting it or cutting it out entirely. Whoever had done the work had built in a response to the signals that organ failure would send to the rest of the body, telling the immune system to reduce activity if the liver or kidneys or lungs started to die. Vierna felt her breath catch in the way that sudden understanding always granted—the solution was elegant. Beautiful, in its own heretical way.

She started planning viruses to counter it—and it would have to be viruses, because the kind of intensive gene re-writing to undo it would require custody of her brother, which she did not have. Perhaps if she keyed it to attack the organs first, it could make the immune system surrender without a fight...

She started growing a copy of the blood for testing purposes, then kept studying it. It was the work of an hour to prepare a cludge-virus that would accomplish the task.

She frowned, considering how brute-force that approach seemed. It seemed wrong, to use such a blunt instrument to destroy such delicate work. She felt like a virus was the right approach, but perhaps she could make it neater. Something a little more elegant, to show respect for her anonymous counterpart.

She tossed the first version in an incinerator and began again.