The Quicksand Singularity ArQive: Array.init:0

A0T5.3 The Ëchüha Incident (Part 4)

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Fhá had just finished tying her hair back into a loose pony tail when one of the Knotworx from the 3rd basement level showed up at her desk. Why the Ministry kept the treehuggers in the basement was beyond her, though she had overheard an Overseer muttering under his breath in the elevators about "keeping the freak show where it belongs." This, of course, came only after he'd extracted his Quband display from his retinas long enough to realise he'd stepped into a "confined space with a fucking tree fucker".

They were an odd bunch, the Herbalists, but the general disdain the Imperium had for them largely eluded her. Mayhaps it had something to do with being simultaneously essential to and largely outside of the governance of the Imperium. Though she couldn't be sure, Occam's razor gave her confidence in her conclusion's odds. As the saying went, the two official spellings were Imperium Galacticum Káè-Tan and Xenophobia.

The Knotwox's sudden appearance, had Fhá anything left in her bladder, would have caused her to soil herself for a third time. Not that her bladder didn't make a collegiate try. It very much did. Several glorious spasms and her pelvic floor muscles had completed their animatedly angry phone call with Fhá BioSystems: Customer Concerns Hotline. To the great elation of the operators at the Complaint Desk-Trousers Division, rain was not in the forecast that day.

Sighing with relief, Fhá turned around to address the rota's latest unwelcome intrusion.

She, the Knotworx, was a short petite woman. Athletic in build and graced with a magnificent mane of dark dreadlocks decorated with bits of carved wood and twisted wire that she let hang loose and unbound, the Knotworx was typically eesome. As was the way of her kin, she wore very little, only a thin band of fabric over her chest, and one covering her loins. Predictably, her backside was left entirely uncovered, reminding Fhá of perhaps the single-most obvious reason why the Ministry was perpetually nonplussed with their presence.

One could not, under the Mythic Treaty, order them to dress like a normal person. One could not even insist they dress themselves at all. To do so would incur the wrath of the local Mythic Sanctuary or, gods forbid, the Grove. Nobody, not even the most suicidal unpaid intern processing that Lune's archival audits in B9, wanted a squad of Shift showing up to remind everyone that only by the grace and mercy of the Valkyries had they all not been atomised in an acts of most holy and glorious retribution for their crimes against the Mythica.

Wait...no, Fhá thought, realising she had mistaken the Imperial Codex Aribtraria's sentencing guidelines for a ministerial agency who had hosted high nobility in a subpar manner. Demanding Mythics dress themselves in a manner that was anathema to them was a chastising offence.

Given what she knew she would have to handle tomorrow, Fhá briefly entertained the thought of caving the mostly naked woman's skull in with a paperweight. After all, she couldn't be forced to relive more of Hvórþ's worst day if she was being held for murder in a Mythic Sanctuary.

Another sigh.

Life, unfortunately, had yet to lose the last of its lustre. That, and if she didn't finish the job, some other poor, unfortunate sod would be assigned it. Then there was also the Duchess. Fhá couldn't rule out the possibility that Tví had some fancy tech that would, by miracles unknown to science, drag her back from the great beyond to endure ten thousand indignities before being, after an impossibly extended lifetime of torment, at last allowed the sweet embrace of death.

Such was life in the service of Imperial nobility. One could not even cark it without being ordered to, and that order receiving authorisation from the Census Administration, an approval stamp from the Ministry of Health, a CX12-990(f) being filed with the Bureau of Imperial Collections, all of which needed to be delivered in Triplicate to the local Imperial Arbiter Garrison, Ministry of Provincial Administration, and Office of the Planetary Governor's Secretary of Human Resource Administration, and served to the party on behalf the High Court of Justice of the Prefecturate following adjudication by the same. By the time the wheels of bureaucracy had finally finished grinding the death warrant's way through all the interminable reams of wasted paper, the subject would, in all likelihood, have died three centuries ago, and the judgement would have to be passed onto their descendents. All of them.