Run, Part 1: Gem

Why aren't you happy, Sine X. Cosine?

It figured. In the absolute quiet of the museum, the voice had to fill the silence as Sine floated downwards. Fine. Let it talk. She'd gotten good at ignoring it.


Look at everything you have. A brilliant mind, a mind that lets you do so much. Yes, perhaps it's not something you earned, but it's not something you stole either. It was handed to you; you didn't have a choice in it. The price was what you had to live with, but you paid it. You were the one who took all the raw data and memories and made something of it. Look what it gave you. Endless possibilities, the option to remake yourself in ways few ever could...

Why do you spend so much time pointlessly reviling it? Why do you let it define you so much?

Why do you feel such a deep need to be alone, when your existence suggests you have always been anything but?

Why do you not realize the one obstacle that you've never been able to escape is yourself?

----

His name had been Deonte Mainx. He had been born into money, but he'd worked hard to earn it, working first in his father's steel company, branching out into electronics and computers as they were developed, and even spending some time as a U.S Senator. Now he was nearly ninety and dying of cancer, and he'd given Sine a very special and specific request.

"I want...a blue ruby."

It had been for his granddaughter, Sapphire, one among five grandchildren he had that he was closest to. When she'd asked him what her name meant, Deonte, not being a geologist, had told her she was named after a 'blue ruby'. Sapphire had never pressed about the misinformation, but now that he was dying, Deonte wanted to give her something to show her what she had meant to him, something to remember him by. The backup plan was a necklace with a special combination of sapphires and rubies, but Deonte had learned enough, and met enough people, during his life, that he'd been able to contact Sine to try and achieve his dream gift. His request to her had been simple: a blue ruby.

Easier said than done. While rubies and sapphires had the same base mineral, corundum, rubies got their fierce red color from impurities in the chemical element chromium. It was still possible to have a sapphire with a red-esque or pinkish tint if it had purer chromium in it, which meant that, by some technical standards, a sapphire gem was ALREADY a 'blue ruby'. That was not what Deonte wanted. He literally wanted to find a ruby that had chromium in it that, instead of turning it deep red, turned it deep blue. An anti-ruby, as it were. Normally, Sine would have just encouraged him to see past the bizarre nature of this request...

But she wasn't herself. She was angry, pissed off, and still considering exactly what she was going to do with her 'friends' who had betrayed her so quickly, so easily, over such a stupid misunderstanding. Instead of seeing the blue ruby as a snipe hunt, she saw it as a challenge. She knew thousands of universes, possibly millions. What she didn't know, her Fate Locus would (and it should; she'd given up fifteen years of her life and her chance to ever have kids for that book, and she'd still had to escape the fact that no one ever made a bargain with a fifth-dimensional genie and came out clean again. She hoped that Qwsp had found something else to attract his attention...). Surely she could find one where the table of elements worked differently, where imperfect chromium caused a deep blue tint instead of a red tint. And considering Mainx had been offering a literal truckload of gold, enough money to set Sine up for months, she'd taken him up on it. She'd find him his blue ruby.

Her first tries hadn't worked out so well, due to dragons and inexplicable basketballs. The last one had pissed Sine off even more. So here she was.

The people of this world called it Orthines. It was an earth-like planet with a few vital changes. A slightly lower gravity was one, but the main change was a lack of any asteroid or other disaster to wipe out the dinosaurs. However, the shifting climate over millions of years had resulted in dinosaurs going extinct anyway, their lines evolving into birds. However, the ecosystem lacked mammals to the same degree Earth had, and as a result, evolution had followed the birds instead, the avian creatures eventually evolving into humanoid bodies and gaining sentience, their civilization progressing through the ages, having currently reached the high-level levels of the Level I Karashev scale. Though the people of this world, who called themselves the Auspex, no longer possessed wings or the ability to fly, their avian heritage had manifested in other ways; they preferred to build their cities up against mountains, and preferred short-range flying vehicles to ground based ones, their military and police forces even having access to personal flight systems that compensated for the Auspex' lost wings (and were, in more than a few ways, far more practical).

They also had the vital chemical shift. Imperfect chromium turned rubies blue here. All she had to do was get one.

Maybe if she'd been in a better mood, she wouldn't have made the choice she had. She might have tried to mine it herself, or trade for it, carefully keeping her primate-based heritage hidden under her helmet. Time was not an issue; she could return, at least, a few days after she'd left Deonte Mainx, and he doubted he would have kicked the bucket by then. But her patience over this issue had long between frayed down to nothing, greatly exacerbated by Jonesy's stupid overreaction and what it had done, and how quickly her so-called friends would turn on her. So she's taken a shortcut.

The museum's name could be translated to something like the Vaunted Heritage Of Our People Museum, and it had many aspects of history and the Auspex's discoveries on display. Including a set of various gems, which included several blue rubies.


Sine figured they could spare one.

One would be fine! She wasn't trying to steal one of their equivalent to the crown jewels, for Christ's sake! There were just one display among many in a large museum! All these gems were doing here were sitting under glass and looking pretty!  One could make a difference, show a girl how special she was, maybe inspire her to BE something special! Sine wasn't even going to take the biggest or the shiniest gem, just one of the secondary ones set off to the side! It was the size of her fingernail, they could spare it! She would pay them, should have, but she knew they'd never understand and damn, she'd had enough of bullshit. She had better things to do...

----

Like what? Repair the relationship with your friends? You think stealing is going to be the key to making them re-endear yourself to you?

Sine would have told the voice to shut up if she could spare the sound. They'd never know. When she had the money, she could relax. Sit down. Figure things out. All she had to do was get the gem...

Easier said than done. The Auspex were no fools; they had criminals as well, and hence the room with the gems had a fair degree of defenses. Sine was no fool either, though, and had brought her own counter-measures, including this floating tech (anti-gravity discs that she wore on her shoulders, wrists, belt, knees, and ankles) she'd actually swiped from an Auspex police station (the Volo, they were called) to lower herself down from the ceiling after she'd made her way to said ceiling through the vents. Floating down from above took care of avoiding the pressure sensors in the floor, but the Auspex figured that plenty of 'people' had had the same idea Sine had, and besides said floor sensors had, they had cameras covering every inch of it, as well as having laced the room with both motion sensors and laser triggers. Anything triggering them, any of them, even one, put the museum in lockdown and called the Volo.

In truth, Sine shouldn't have had any reason to be worried. The Auspex didn't have Sifter defenses, did they? She could parade in like a bull in a china shop, smash the glass by whatever means, grab a gem, and just VROP out, right?

Of course not. Sine had been so pissed off by her so-called friends that she'd forgotten that the way she'd currently programmed her Sifter (which both masked and jammed her passage, which kept Zephyrus from tracking her down) ate power like it was going out of style. Her battery had burned out with this last jump, and to her extraordinary annoyance, Sine found that she'd grabbed a nearly dead one as a backup instead of a fully charged one, not noticing due to her angry egress from her home. While she'd luckily taken to carrying a miniaturized fusion engine for emergencies like that these days, it meant she still had to charge it. Normally, she'd have done just that.

But she'd been too mad. Too pissed off to show a little patience. She didn't need her Sifter. Between her current bag of tricks, and her intelligence, she could out-think a bunch of literal bird-brains and their defenses any day of the way. Hell, Zephyrus always told her she was smart, she should damn well use it...

So that's it then. You're the fallen friend. You'll probably end up fighting them in the arena with the Cosmic Cube at this rate.

Bullshit. They'd never know. This was her secret. HER job. HER life. What claim could any of them have on any understanding of it?


Keep forging the distance. Keep making excuses. Simple, easy excuses...

Sine began overtly ignoring the voice again. She had to focus.

The cameras were the simplest to deal with; the Auspex were a lot like humans and the 'people' guarding the museum were so used to quiet that none of them noticed the slightly altered picture of a feedback look Sine had invoked by attaching a device in the computer room. The lasers criss-crossing the room, visible with her helmet, were dealt with with mirrored floating spheres, a concept she'd modified from a blueprint copied from a disturbed inventor called Jebediah Morningside and usually kept on her to help deal with light-based offensive weaponry. The motion detectors were the hardest, but she'd managed to solve that by jamming them with a signal emitter and one of her computer programs that she used to help deal with inertia, the motion sensors briefly becoming confused and being unable to detect any motion at all. She didn't exactly have all the time in the world, but once she was in position and checked her watch, she knew she'd have enough. So she'd released herself from the ceiling and begun floating down, the mirrored spheres going before her to deflect the lasers and clear her a path to the display below her and the glass-like material that protected it...

You know why you aren't happy. You don't want to be. You want to play the victim. You want to be blameless. You want everything YOUR way. You claim you don't know why Zephyrus did what he did...you even bother to ask him what his situation was when you yanked him away?

The glass was in reach. Had she done this the 'simple' way, it would have been her lone obstacle; not actually glass, it was a dense plastic, shatterproof and highly cut and heat resistant; Sine could have used a modern blowtorch on it for half an hour and not gotten anywhere, never alone all the defenses she'd have to avoid. Breaking through it was out of the question.

So Sine had brought out her fractal cone, activating the coin-sized machine pinned to the palm of her right glove and reaching down. In this case, this was her one shot desperation 'skeleton key', being used on an unconventional lock. Her hand briefly pressed up against the top of the glass case, and then phased through it, the cone tweaking physics to briefly 'remove' the glass...and ONLY the glass, as Sine reached down and quickly grabbed her choice of rubies, the tiny machine only rendering the glass-shielding intangible. She extracted her arm with two seconds to spare, the cone's small power source burning out with an inaudible hiss as the display case fully settled back into reality. Good thing she'd gotten it on the first pass. If the cone had run out while her arm had been phased through the glass, the best case scenario would have been the glass destabilizing, ie shattering and setting off every alarm in the place. The other possibilities involved a lot more maiming and pain than Sine liked; one thing about anger, it kept you from hesitating sometimes if something had too much risk for not enough reward.

That was, in the end, irrelevant. She had her blue ruby. When she had money, she could stop and think. Figure things out.

Oh yes...I'm sure you think it will be simple. You can figure all of them out, when you can't even figure yourself out. Sine X. Cosine, trying to do trigonometry when she can't even see how things add up, subtract...or divide.

Sine would have asked if there was a point to all this, but she figured her efforts were better spent getting back to the ceiling, as she began to float back up, craning her head to check the clear path...

You think you can easily fix the complex problems...that's your THING, Sine. You're so busy trying to take in the forest you ignore the trees.

Which let her spot the twinge at the corner of her eye. Her floating mechanism let her do two things. Move up and down slowly, and turn around. She did the latter, to stare at the Auspex staring back at her, the bird-man's deep set eyes bulging out in surprise.

Like how you can work around all the mechanical defenses you want, but a schedule is just a piece of paper on a wall, and that doesn't mean it will always be followed like clockwork every night. Too bad for you.

"...well, fuck." Sine said, and snapped up her hand.

The Auspex were descended from birds, and maintained certain traits of the creatures. Instead of hair, their heads were covered with fine feathers. They tended towards being tall and gaunt, and their skulls and jaws had an ever so slight protruding aspect, the last vestigial traces of a beak. Their skin color followed the range of human primates, and including a few more exotic reds, yellows, blues, and even greys, the legacy of colorful feathers. Their general clothing was usually recognizable when it came to uniforms; casual clothing could be a lot harder to grasp for an outsider, but the Auspex looking at her was clearly wearing his equivilant to a security guard uniform. His 'hair' was a deep yellow, his eyes a sharp grey...

And he, like his kind, possessed a complicated respiratory system that left them highly susceptible to gas-based weapons. Sine did not do things without a few backup plans.

The orb struck the Auspex, erupting into the tranquilizing miasma. He was asleep in four seconds.

That was two seconds after he'd slammed his hand on the button on the wall.

You blew it again, Sine. You always blow it. That's why you're not happy. You're a failure, and you know it.

As the alarms filled the room, Sine felt her irritation and grief twist deep down within her stomach. She could hear the doors closing; fortunately for it, the Auspex guard had fallen out of the frame of the door he'd just walked through, and hence was saved potentially being cut in half (though in truth, safety measures would have made the door open again before it fully closed, like an elevator). He was no longer the problem though.

She was. She'd reacted to her problem not like a smart person, or a clever person, but instead as a thief. And now she was being locked up.

...Like hell.

Time to run.

And as the doors continued to slam shut, Sine slipped the blue ruby into a belt pouch and did just that.

Go on then. Go run back to your 'friends'. 

After all...misery loves company.

And with that truth rattling around in the back of her head, Sine did her damnedest to escape.

-------

"The world is a vampire, sent to drain
Secret destroyers, hold you up to the flames
And what do I get, for my pain?
Betrayed desires, and a piece of the game

Even though I know - I suppose I'll show
All my cool and cold - like old job

Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage...
Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage...
Then someone will say what is lost can never be saved...
Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage..."

------

"Burning Moon, enough of this delaying. Either indulge Sky Song or don't. You know what will happen. Just decide-"

"DON'T ever think of giving me ORDERS, Cloud Runner. I lead for a reason. I've considered everything you said long before you spoke."

"And?"

"We go. Mark the territory. Prepare for the others. Sky Song can claim her own toy in the process, I'm more interested in how the others will react. Perhaps this will finally give us the advantage, Cloud Runner. Perhaps, finally...we can WIN."

"I obey and agree, Burning Moon. Victory is truth."

"Just prepare the Honor Field, Runner. Sky Song has given me enough of a headache already."