Lucyfer
Said you'd die for me, well -- there's the ground
‘Perfect.’
Perfect ought to feel exactly how Neveah Sonal felt within the confines of the Hera model Olympian. It was unlikely anything Neveah knew before, and it was the reason she wanted to stay within the core of the Olympian at all times. Training runs were no hardship for the woman with a mane of gold, braided around her head like a crown as she stood within the center of her ‘pod’, as the handlers called it. Around her eyes, she wore a visor that let her see through Hera’s eyes. It also helped her to issue commands to Hera, the visor picking up on the brainwaves.
Within Hera, she felt whole.
Complete.
Perfect.
“Okay, Miss Sonal, we just want you to focus on the targets. This time we want to try from 20,000 meters, for both timing and accuracy.”
“You do not need to repeat yourself,” Neveah said, the edge of a tease in her tone as she looked at the targets they had set up for her. They were far smaller than titans, but that was the point. It was easy to hit a titan – it wasn’t easy to hit a critical spot on a titan. Neveah was not worried, though. When it was her time, she would prove that they had chosen well when they picked her to pilot Hera.
They said it themselves – the link was perfect.
She’d show them what that meant.
For now, she’d have to continue showing them, and so she lowered herself with a ballerina’s grace to a knee, Hera mimicking her exactly. The suit she wore aligned her with Hera, supposedly; she didn’t know how, and the one time she’d asked about it, she’d gotten lost somewhere when they started talking about the weave of the material.
Hera’s proportions were not quite human, a bit too elongated for that, but she was still quite humanoid in appearance despite that lengthening. It was the wings that truly separated her, and those wings expanded out as Neveah both rose quickly, and pressed two buttons on the handles she held in either hand, throwing her arms down with the gesture.
The buttons weren’t expressly necessary – Hera would know what to do from her mind, but those of Olympus had suggested they be used anyways in that early period – and even after, although Neveah intended to stop using them in the future.
The wings unfurled from around Hera’s form with the press, resplendent in their teal and purple hues, so akin to a peacock, but translucent and forming up behind her like a butterfly. What had seemed a skirt were now lightweight wings that propelled her upwards at seemingly impossible speeds, both for something as heavy as Hera was, and as light as the wings looked. Of course, the wings were strong – not that Neveah ever really thought about the science of it all.
Not when the world was whipping past her, and she swore she could feel it on her own face. The chill of the rarified air practically bit into her own flesh, although she knew that couldn’t be true, no matter how well-connected she was to Hera.
The silence was beautiful. Olympus could no longer reach her at these heights. The buzz that always lingered in the pod from their monitoring was gone.
It was just her and….
And then, the drop – after taking the spear from its place on Hera’s back, Neveah twisted her own body so the mech followed into a dive. The way she was suspended in an arrangement of gyroscopic metal rings allowed her to manuever to the dive, and for Hera to copy.
The input from the scans constantly going on in the room, the controls, and the feed of information from the neural crown that Neveah wore fed Hera exactly what Neveah wanted done, and Hera continued to feed information into Neveah. It was how Neveah knew where the target below was as she descended with ever-increasing speed, speed that could break the Olympian itself if Neveah wasn’t careful, if she flubbed the landing, if she flubbed the blow.
But she wouldn’t.
‘But something’s wrong.’
Near impact, Hera fed the information of something moving into her field, something that would disrupt the landing, disrupt her ability to hit the target. Although Neveah couldn’t register it as fast as Hera could visually, she understood that instinctual jolt to avoid harm. There would be no pulling out of this dive, so instead, she hurled the spear ahead.
‘Target hit.’ Not how she was supposed to do it.
Not the important part either, as she caught herself on her palms. On the catch, she could see the appearance of another Olympian, who seemed to be kicking off from near where she’d landed, clearly aware themselves of the near-impact. Neveah had to keep the momentum going and pushed from those palms upwards, flipping the mech back into a standing position, sliding a bit and giving a dirty look at the interloper.
Not that they’d know. ‘Thank god these pods have the stabilizers.’ The gyroscopic rings helped, but they could keep spinning indefinitely from something like that, which wouldn’t have been good. Thankfully, they didn’t, and so Hera was able to get back to her feet.
Golden particles of dust danced in the air between her and the other mech, floating off of her wings.
The buzzing was violent after the silence.
The voices more so as the mech before her became obvious, shorter, slighter, and coming out of blending in, white and blue hues moving about the mech like clouds on the sky. Angelic wings came off of Hermes from is head, heels, and back, and they all fluttered closed around the mech’s body as it dropped into a too-extravagant bow.
But that’s how the pilot was.
“Mr. Dehlavi, what are you doing in the field? This is a restricted area—”
Olympus buzzed through, of course.
“Yeah, uh, kinda needed to warn Nevy here I got an asshole following, and ya know, warn all of you good people so you can rally the others or whatever.”
Neveah’s heart rate immediately picked up. Panic, excitement, fear, hope – all of it rushed through her in a moment. This was her moment to prove what she was made of – and without a second! Olympus claimed Hera couldn’t go unescorted, which was bullshit when she’d never even been given a chance. She could keep from being harmed.
“Thank you, Dehlavi,” Neveah said, ever formal despite his informality. She liked him, but she still didn’t quite know him. “Clotho, I will find the titan and engage.”
There was a pause, longer than anticipated, as Neveah retrieved Hera’s golden spear from the ruined target. “Miss Sonal, keep your distance, do not attack the titan. Lure it away from the city. Mister Dehlavi, find a safe place and set up.”
“Understood, Clothy~.”
Neveah resisted the urge to roll her eyes, “Understood,” she echoed, but didn’t mean it. If she saw an opening to strike, she would do so – but she understood the need to avoid harm to innocent lives. She had no qualms with that command, and making sure the fight didn’t take place right in the city.
She launched up into the air, scanning the area as she got higher and higher, seeking out the signature of whatever titan had been following Hermes.
“So, this titan, it’s a bit different. It doesn’t seem to be solid, I couldn’t pinpoint a weak part,” Altair was saying, though Neveah tried to only half-listen and focus on her scans.
She did find it. The titan was, indeed, making its way after Hermes trail. ‘So…this is a titan.’ Translucent, but not. It picked up the colors around it, but it had a green tint of its own. It didn’t walk so much as slithered, and it left a trail of miasma in its wake that Neveah was sure was doing nothing good. ‘So where’s the weak point?’ Her scans weren’t picking anything to suggest there was, well, anything solid about the titan. It was there, in the way that water was there. ‘You have to do something….’
She had to keep it away from the city until she could figure out what to do. ‘Okay. Let’s do this.’
With a burst of speed, she sped her mech right towards the titan, the golden spear catching sunlight and announcing her presence with a blinding flash of light. She didn’t touch the titan with it, but zipped by close enough to have done so – before curving away and upwards once it was clear she had its attention by the way it turned to follow her path.
Not that it could fly.
~***~
“Fuck,” Handler Clotho cursed aloud, fully aware the pilot of Hera wasn’t going to follow directions. ‘That mech is too damn expensive for this.’ Which just meant she had to scramble the others quickly, or hope Hermes could figure out the weak point, though Altair was blabbering on about the difficulty of it.
It gave her a few ideas of who this titan could be, from the tidbits of history they’d been able to dig up.
Oceanus, Tethys, any of them could have been disturbed accidentally by Hermes. “Continue your report, Hermes, and stay at a distance,” not that she needed to tell him, his sense of self-preservation was strong. Stronger than needed in some cases, but nonetheless, strong. He wouldn’t run in to be a hero if Neveah got in over her head, which Clotho felt likely in this first engagement where she didn’t know what she was up against.
She was too much like Hera.
With too much to prove.
‘You’re lucky I’m feeling merciful today.’ Her own orders had suggested she couldn’t chastise Neveah too greatly if she ended up having to engage. Ananke would not need to hear of this. “Lachesis,” she spoke to one of the others in the room, “Scramble the other pilots, we need to get someone out there ASAP to take the heat off Hera and Hermes while we figure out how to put this one down.”
“Do we know which one it is?” Lachesis asked, hovering near the exit to the room.
“I have some ideas, but nothing confirmed,” she said, “go.”
Out Lachesis went to begin making those calls, while Clotho gripped her tablet close to her chest, and monitors started to come up of the health of both Altair and Neveah, as well as of Hera and Hermes.
‘Exhale.’ Clotho sighed out the breath rather than exhale it properly, pushing back strands of dark hair that had escaped her ponytail.
This was going to be a long day.
Perfect ought to feel exactly how Neveah Sonal felt within the confines of the Hera model Olympian. It was unlikely anything Neveah knew before, and it was the reason she wanted to stay within the core of the Olympian at all times. Training runs were no hardship for the woman with a mane of gold, braided around her head like a crown as she stood within the center of her ‘pod’, as the handlers called it. Around her eyes, she wore a visor that let her see through Hera’s eyes. It also helped her to issue commands to Hera, the visor picking up on the brainwaves.
Within Hera, she felt whole.
Complete.
Perfect.
“Okay, Miss Sonal, we just want you to focus on the targets. This time we want to try from 20,000 meters, for both timing and accuracy.”
“You do not need to repeat yourself,” Neveah said, the edge of a tease in her tone as she looked at the targets they had set up for her. They were far smaller than titans, but that was the point. It was easy to hit a titan – it wasn’t easy to hit a critical spot on a titan. Neveah was not worried, though. When it was her time, she would prove that they had chosen well when they picked her to pilot Hera.
They said it themselves – the link was perfect.
She’d show them what that meant.
For now, she’d have to continue showing them, and so she lowered herself with a ballerina’s grace to a knee, Hera mimicking her exactly. The suit she wore aligned her with Hera, supposedly; she didn’t know how, and the one time she’d asked about it, she’d gotten lost somewhere when they started talking about the weave of the material.
Hera’s proportions were not quite human, a bit too elongated for that, but she was still quite humanoid in appearance despite that lengthening. It was the wings that truly separated her, and those wings expanded out as Neveah both rose quickly, and pressed two buttons on the handles she held in either hand, throwing her arms down with the gesture.
The buttons weren’t expressly necessary – Hera would know what to do from her mind, but those of Olympus had suggested they be used anyways in that early period – and even after, although Neveah intended to stop using them in the future.
The wings unfurled from around Hera’s form with the press, resplendent in their teal and purple hues, so akin to a peacock, but translucent and forming up behind her like a butterfly. What had seemed a skirt were now lightweight wings that propelled her upwards at seemingly impossible speeds, both for something as heavy as Hera was, and as light as the wings looked. Of course, the wings were strong – not that Neveah ever really thought about the science of it all.
Not when the world was whipping past her, and she swore she could feel it on her own face. The chill of the rarified air practically bit into her own flesh, although she knew that couldn’t be true, no matter how well-connected she was to Hera.
The silence was beautiful. Olympus could no longer reach her at these heights. The buzz that always lingered in the pod from their monitoring was gone.
It was just her and….
“Isn’t this what you always want?”
And then, the drop – after taking the spear from its place on Hera’s back, Neveah twisted her own body so the mech followed into a dive. The way she was suspended in an arrangement of gyroscopic metal rings allowed her to manuever to the dive, and for Hera to copy.
The input from the scans constantly going on in the room, the controls, and the feed of information from the neural crown that Neveah wore fed Hera exactly what Neveah wanted done, and Hera continued to feed information into Neveah. It was how Neveah knew where the target below was as she descended with ever-increasing speed, speed that could break the Olympian itself if Neveah wasn’t careful, if she flubbed the landing, if she flubbed the blow.
But she wouldn’t.
‘But something’s wrong.’
Near impact, Hera fed the information of something moving into her field, something that would disrupt the landing, disrupt her ability to hit the target. Although Neveah couldn’t register it as fast as Hera could visually, she understood that instinctual jolt to avoid harm. There would be no pulling out of this dive, so instead, she hurled the spear ahead.
‘Target hit.’ Not how she was supposed to do it.
Not the important part either, as she caught herself on her palms. On the catch, she could see the appearance of another Olympian, who seemed to be kicking off from near where she’d landed, clearly aware themselves of the near-impact. Neveah had to keep the momentum going and pushed from those palms upwards, flipping the mech back into a standing position, sliding a bit and giving a dirty look at the interloper.
Not that they’d know. ‘Thank god these pods have the stabilizers.’ The gyroscopic rings helped, but they could keep spinning indefinitely from something like that, which wouldn’t have been good. Thankfully, they didn’t, and so Hera was able to get back to her feet.
Golden particles of dust danced in the air between her and the other mech, floating off of her wings.
The buzzing was violent after the silence.
The voices more so as the mech before her became obvious, shorter, slighter, and coming out of blending in, white and blue hues moving about the mech like clouds on the sky. Angelic wings came off of Hermes from is head, heels, and back, and they all fluttered closed around the mech’s body as it dropped into a too-extravagant bow.
But that’s how the pilot was.
“Mr. Dehlavi, what are you doing in the field? This is a restricted area—”
Olympus buzzed through, of course.
“Yeah, uh, kinda needed to warn Nevy here I got an asshole following, and ya know, warn all of you good people so you can rally the others or whatever.”
Neveah’s heart rate immediately picked up. Panic, excitement, fear, hope – all of it rushed through her in a moment. This was her moment to prove what she was made of – and without a second! Olympus claimed Hera couldn’t go unescorted, which was bullshit when she’d never even been given a chance. She could keep from being harmed.
“Thank you, Dehlavi,” Neveah said, ever formal despite his informality. She liked him, but she still didn’t quite know him. “Clotho, I will find the titan and engage.”
There was a pause, longer than anticipated, as Neveah retrieved Hera’s golden spear from the ruined target. “Miss Sonal, keep your distance, do not attack the titan. Lure it away from the city. Mister Dehlavi, find a safe place and set up.”
“Understood, Clothy~.”
Neveah resisted the urge to roll her eyes, “Understood,” she echoed, but didn’t mean it. If she saw an opening to strike, she would do so – but she understood the need to avoid harm to innocent lives. She had no qualms with that command, and making sure the fight didn’t take place right in the city.
She launched up into the air, scanning the area as she got higher and higher, seeking out the signature of whatever titan had been following Hermes.
“So, this titan, it’s a bit different. It doesn’t seem to be solid, I couldn’t pinpoint a weak part,” Altair was saying, though Neveah tried to only half-listen and focus on her scans.
She did find it. The titan was, indeed, making its way after Hermes trail. ‘So…this is a titan.’ Translucent, but not. It picked up the colors around it, but it had a green tint of its own. It didn’t walk so much as slithered, and it left a trail of miasma in its wake that Neveah was sure was doing nothing good. ‘So where’s the weak point?’ Her scans weren’t picking anything to suggest there was, well, anything solid about the titan. It was there, in the way that water was there. ‘You have to do something….’
She had to keep it away from the city until she could figure out what to do. ‘Okay. Let’s do this.’
With a burst of speed, she sped her mech right towards the titan, the golden spear catching sunlight and announcing her presence with a blinding flash of light. She didn’t touch the titan with it, but zipped by close enough to have done so – before curving away and upwards once it was clear she had its attention by the way it turned to follow her path.
Not that it could fly.
~***~
“Fuck,” Handler Clotho cursed aloud, fully aware the pilot of Hera wasn’t going to follow directions. ‘That mech is too damn expensive for this.’ Which just meant she had to scramble the others quickly, or hope Hermes could figure out the weak point, though Altair was blabbering on about the difficulty of it.
It gave her a few ideas of who this titan could be, from the tidbits of history they’d been able to dig up.
Oceanus, Tethys, any of them could have been disturbed accidentally by Hermes. “Continue your report, Hermes, and stay at a distance,” not that she needed to tell him, his sense of self-preservation was strong. Stronger than needed in some cases, but nonetheless, strong. He wouldn’t run in to be a hero if Neveah got in over her head, which Clotho felt likely in this first engagement where she didn’t know what she was up against.
She was too much like Hera.
With too much to prove.
‘You’re lucky I’m feeling merciful today.’ Her own orders had suggested she couldn’t chastise Neveah too greatly if she ended up having to engage. Ananke would not need to hear of this. “Lachesis,” she spoke to one of the others in the room, “Scramble the other pilots, we need to get someone out there ASAP to take the heat off Hera and Hermes while we figure out how to put this one down.”
“Do we know which one it is?” Lachesis asked, hovering near the exit to the room.
“I have some ideas, but nothing confirmed,” she said, “go.”
Out Lachesis went to begin making those calls, while Clotho gripped her tablet close to her chest, and monitors started to come up of the health of both Altair and Neveah, as well as of Hera and Hermes.
‘Exhale.’ Clotho sighed out the breath rather than exhale it properly, pushing back strands of dark hair that had escaped her ponytail.
This was going to be a long day.
