[TAS] Volume 2 - Intermission 107.1 - The Game

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------------------- Start of Pre-Chapter Author Note (Patreon-only) -------------------
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Hello everyone, LunaWolve here!

RR has received Intermission 106.2 - Experience today with no major changes.

For the Wolf Lords, this chapter has received a NEW EPIGRAPH! The previous Epigraph will be used for the NEXT chapter, instead.

And also: Please do not read the chapters here on Patreon, but go for the googledoc, .pdf or .epub instead. Patreon butchers all forms of formatting and you're missing out on easier and more enjoyable reading experiences.

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I've decided on a final naming scheme for Intermissions/Interludes now.

They'll just be counting up from 1. That's it.

So 107.1 -> 107.2 -> 107.3 etc.

Fuck all the other nonsense I tried.

This is not a multi-part Intermissions. We're back to Thea next chapter.

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I'm looking forward to hearing your first impressions and opinions on this chapter. \o/

I hope you will enjoy it!

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Here is the link to the chapter:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XJZQ8YCcrSZDuy_DImbWDJIKpH1MB-xWjn4weV56q3w/edit?usp=sharing

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Volume 2 - Intermission 107.1 - The Game

Ask any Legacy scion what "The Game" is, and they will simply smile at you. 

Ask a second time, and they will tell you it does not exist. 

Ask a third time, and—if you are very lucky and they do not have you killed—they will often tell you the truth: The Game is everything. 

The Game is the actual government of Legacy society, running silently beneath everything. And it runs almost exclusively on a single type of currency, that no amount of Credits in the Galaxy can directly influence or buy: Favours.

A Favour spoken aloud by a Legacy is not, technically, legally binding. 

No court in UHF space will enforce one, regardless of how well documented it might be. 

Yet, despite that fact, no Favour will ever go unhonoured regardless.

A Legacy that fails to honor a spoken Favour has committed the only true crime that Legacy society cannot forgive. Their word becomes worthless, and in The Game, a Legacy's word is the collateral behind every asset they hold. 

Honor-bound is, in practice, a stronger binding than laws, for the latter can be appealed, changed, or twisted, depending on the times. An honor-code carried forth by hundreds and thousands of Legacies, cannot.

The denominations of said Favours, from smallest to largest are as follows:

Minor Favours are the small change of The Game, and they flow almost constantly. 

A Minor Favour covers precisely what the name implies—an ask large enough that simple monetary or intelligence-based compensation would be insulting or too cumbersome to arrange, but small enough that no one loses sleep over owing one. 

They take the initial shape of a seat at an important gala, a customs inspection that takes four minutes instead of four weeks, or maybe a semi-important introduction. 

When cashed in, they typically resolve into intelligence sharing or a Minor-sized task performed in return, which is why they are also often called transactional favours: They mostly change hands back and forth, usually several times per generation, producing motion without ever producing large outcomes. 

A healthy Legacy holds dozens, if not hundreds, at any given time and thinks deeply about none of them until the very moment they are required to solve a minor headache.

Favours—unmodified—are where The Game begins in earnest. 

A Favour asks of a Legacy something that genuinely costs them. They take the initial shape of personnel handovers, a piece of institutional knowledge that took a generation or more to accumulate or maybe the creation of an entire task force for a specific purpose, should the need arise. 

Unlike their Minor cousins, Favours carry two properties that set them apart from their lower cousin: They do not expire, and they are inheritable—by blood and by creed. 

The Favour your great-grandmother spoke to a dying comrade's house is still owed, and the house that absorbed that house by marriage now holds it with the same rights and expectations as the original one did.

Major Favours, then, are rare enough that their utterance is, itself, newsworthy. 

When a Major Favour is spoken and accepted, it is entered into the official UHF Legacy ledgers and administered by clerks—my esteemed, former colleagues—who will track it across centuries if need be—and need be often. 

A Major Favour cannot expire, and it will find a party to latch onto. 

I once personally processed the inheritance of a Major Favour whose original recipient, their extended family, and everyone they had practically ever known had been dead for a hundred and forty years. Yet, we found a claimant anyway: Somebody distantly related to somebody five degrees removed from the original hand that shook on it. 

The ledger does not forget for it is not permitted to forget.

The reason is simple: Major Favours are, more often than not, what ultimately kill Legacies. 

A house overleverages itself—plays too much of its hand at once, clawing up the ladder on borrowed weight—and when the debt comes due, cannot repay in kind. 

This is why Minor Legacies are almost never offered one, and why a wise Minor Legacy refuses if they are. Recorded history holds only a handful of cases where a Minor Legacy successfully returned a Major Favour intact. 

The rest simply destroyed themselves trying to make up the difference.

Grand Favours, finally, are the ultimate expression of The Game, and the unspoken reason every Legacy plays and takes part in it. 

There have been perhaps one per decade across all of UHF space. 

A Grand Favour is what permits the unthinkable: Mergers, takeovers, the assimilation of one Legacy into another—because almost nothing can pay for a Grand Favour's impact except a Legacy's legacy itself. 

What drives a house to request one, knowing the price? Historically, one thing above all: The potential loss of their last heir. Without the heir, the Legacy dies anyway, and a house facing extinction will pay anything—be anything—to prevent it. 

Reserve-Fleet mobilization is merely one entry on the menu of what the great Legacies will offer, for the right price. Entire sector economies have been quietly redirected before, wars have been shortened… Or lengthened. 

Which brings me to the question I spent forty years behind the ledgers failing to answer, and which I leave to you, reader, as my parting gift:

When a Grand Favour is spoken—when one house saves another from the abyss and holds its whole future in collateral—who is actually winning The Game?

The one receiving the Favour, who keeps their Legacy and loses their freedom?

The one owing it, who now walks for decades with a hook in their mouth, waiting to learn which direction they will be pulled?

Or—as I came to suspect somewhere around my third decade of service, watching the same handful of ancient houses sit serenely atop a ledger everyone else bled into—

—a seemingly unrelated third party that somehow always comes out on top?

The UHF clerks, after all, never speak Favours.

We only ever note them down, and make sure they are never forgotten…

[Excerpt from "The Unwritten Ledger: An Outsider's Guide to Legacy Society" — Ossimin Darius, published posthumously, The Sundered Press, PFC 932]

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PoV: Evelyne Midra Sen

Evelyne's heart was beating rapidly, despite her very best efforts to calm it.

It was highly unusual—borderline unprecedented—for anything to rattle her like this. 

Her composure was not simply a product of mood—it was infrastructural, drilled into her across over a decade of intensive training until it functioned perfectly without conscious input. The list of things capable of genuinely cracking it was exceptionally short, and practically every single entry on it involved her MMM in one way or another.

But the announcement of Captain Cross she'd heard a few minutes ago—delivered mere moments after being unceremoniously ejected from her Advanced Skill Training—had earned itself a temporary spot on that list regardless.

There was very little she could do to stop being nervous, after hearing that.

She was standing in front of Major Quinn's office now, her back against the wall closest to the door, waiting for the Proprietor to return from wherever she currently was—undoubtedly handling the myriad of fires that came with an unscheduled Void exit; such as rerouted logistics, suspended training cycles, several thousand Marines' worth of cancelled sessions, and every officer aboard demanding answers all at once.

Which, quite frankly, was exactly the same reason Evelyne was here to begin with as well.

She needed answers.

A Recruit ship did not simply do unscheduled exits and route changes. 

The entire premise of a Recruitment Drive was its predictability—a fixed itinerary, filed several years in advance, insulated from the Galactic War's chaos precisely because its cargo was the UHF's very future. Something truly unfathomably problematic must have come up, and she needed to know exactly what that something was.

Or rather, whether she needed to activate her emergency communication setup and reach out to her mother—as much as she would loathe to do so—to request aid directly.

It was a massive, massive risk... Nobody aboard this ship—not the Brass, not even the Sovereign itself, as far as Evelyne could determine—was aware that she even had such capabilities at her disposal, and revealing them would burn a major, major asset her family had spent genuinely absurd resources developing and embedding. 

It was truly a one-time-only tool, meant for the truest of emergencies and nothing less.

But if her life was in danger… Or that of her MMM…

'It leaves me with very little choice, doesn’t it…'

There were only a handful of possibilities her mind could conjure for why, in the Emperor’s golden chestplate, a Recruit ship should ever possibly have to Burn Astros like this, and not a single one of them was below catastrophic in nature. 

Her mind immediately listed them off in sequence of most to least likely, ‘A Void-entity on an intercept trajectory… A front collapsing too close to our planned route... A priority redeployment order from so far up the chain that even the Drive's sanctity stops mattering... Or maybe something aboard the ship itself—

'And given the amount of resources the UHF is about to invest simply refunding everyone's cancelled sessions—'

Her thought was cut short as she heard heavy-set boots approaching with measured, purposeful steps from the corridor to her right. 

Her mind immediately raced through the various sound profiles she'd catalogued over the past months—gait length, armour weight, boot-strike pattern—hoping, briefly, for overlap with the Proprietor's.

'Ah… Of course. That does make sense,' she couldn't help but think as the profile quickly resolved into an exact match.

There was only one other person aboard this ship—well, perhaps two, depending on how far that monstrous girl's Legacy training had advanced before she had evidently slipped out of it, somehow—who would know to immediately come to exactly this door after hearing that earlier announcement, aside from Evelyne herself.

A brief moment later, the shine of a Masters' golden hair caught the ship's sterile corridor light as she turned the corner and walked toward her.

The other Legacy's eyes widened ever-so-slightly at the sight of Evelyne already in position—then quickly settled, and she offered a simple nod of acknowledgement. She had likely just worked through the same exact chain of reasoning Evelyne herself had, step for step, and arrived at the same conclusion for the very same reasons.

It was only natural and expected they would both land here.

'At least she hasn’t entirely forgotten her Legacy training about how to behave appropriately to all situations,' Evelyne noted, returning the nod with precisely matched depth. 'Potential growth? Of a sort.'

"The Proprietor's not in?" Masters asked, the moment she was close enough that their conversation couldn't be casually eavesdropped on.

"She is not," Evelyne confirmed.

A click of the tongue, before Masters took up position against the wall on the opposite side of the door, mirroring Evelyne's posture almost exactly, and said nothing further.

The two of them simply waited.

And neither of them, Evelyne observed quietly, could truly hide their nervousness. 

She was fighting her own heart rate with breathing patterns she'd learned at four years old—and losing, slightly—while Masters shifted her weight from foot to foot far more often than someone of her training ever should, the movements small but recurring, metronomic and subconscious in nature.

They had both been trained from a very young age to suppress exactly these tells, without a shadow of a doubt in Evelyne’s mind. 

The Sen way and the Masters way differed in nearly everything—but not in that.

They were, after all, both Major Legacies. 

That distinction came with a considerable amount of decorum-shaped baggage, demanding they know how to hide their true feelings even in situations exactly like these.

But there was only so much one could really do, when hit with unexpected news like this.

'If a Masters is rattled too,' Evelyne thought, filing the observation without any satisfaction whatsoever, 'then at least my read on the severity is independently corroborated…'

Thankfully, the wait did not last much longer than a few minutes—minutes in which they both remained respectfully silent rather than waste breath discussing what they each already knew the other knew.

"Major Quinn has returned to her office and is now available," the Sovereign's voice sounded from the corridor's speakers—level, measured, and perfectly uninflected, the standard service-register of a ship AI processing one request among ten thousand. 

It sent a shiver down Evelyne’s back, considering how often she’d heard the Sovereign’s true voice in recent weeks—far more often than she’d ever have wanted, frankly.

"She will receive Recruit Sen first, then Recruit Masters, or both parties simultaneously, if that arrangement is acceptable. Please indicate your preference."

Evelyne's eyes met Masters'.

Both of them briefly considered their options—and Evelyne could practically watch the same calculation run behind the other Legacy's eyes that was running behind her own: Whatever answers Quinn was willing to give, she would give the same version to both of them anyway. 

Separate audiences would merely double the Proprietor's wasted time on a day she had none, and earn them both a corresponding share of her displeasure.

They nodded at each other at the same moment.

"We can both go at the same time," Masters announced to the ceiling.

Evelyne let her take the lead without comment—it was the Masters' prerogative, after all. Being out front was what the woman had been trained for; made for, even. 

And a Sen had only ever to gain by someone else standing in the doorway first.

The door to Major Quinn's office slid open with a quiet woosh, and they both stepped inside.

They found themselves in a rather… mundane-looking office, all things told.

The desk was standard-issue, as were the two chairs facing it. A terminal, a caf dispenser whose worn dispensing button betrayed years of heavy use, and a single shelf of what appeared to be actual paper manuals on Marine field doctrine rounded out the entire room. 

Evelyne's eyes quickly swept the walls twice and found nothing else—no diplomas, no trophies, no framed commendations, despite an educational and service record that could have filled every wall of this office several times over if the woman had cared to display even a fraction of her true status. 

There wasn't a single piece of art or memento anywhere in sight, either. 

The only remotely personal item in the entire office was a small holostill sitting at the corner of the desk, angled deliberately away, so that only the person sitting behind it could see what it showed—and Evelyne would have killed a great number of people to get a glimpse at what, exactly, it showed. 

But it was not why she was here today, so she buried that urge immediately.

The entire office’s appearance was both extremely surprising to Evelyne and, simultaneously, utterly expected.

Because this was exactly what made the Proprietor of the Kuigon Sector the person she was—a person that even Evelyne's own mother respected; feared, even. Although she knew for a fact that her mother would sooner lead the entire UHF to ruin than ever get close to admitting that fact out loud.

Zephyr Quinn, of all the many things she was, was utterly incorruptible—for she had seemingly no earthly desires whatsoever. There was nothing to bribe her with, nothing to blackmail her over, and no vice that could be leveraged against her or ambition to be redirected for other purposes anywhere in her life. Even the usual last resorts led absolutely nowhere, as the woman had no family nor loved ones to truly threaten and no vanity to flatter. 

The Proprietor lived and breathed for the UHF's core mission, and that was—as far as anyone had ever been able to determine—genuinely all there was to her. 

The Sen as a whole had spent many, many decades—and tremendous resources across them—trying to find a single thread with which to draw the Nullwarden into their web.

Every attempt had failed, spectacularly. 

Several of them had cost the family assets that had taken decades to rebuild, and at least one had ended some important people’s careers that Evelyne was not technically supposed to even know about.

To the point that the Sen had eventually done something that, as far as Evelyne knew, they had never done before or since, for anyone: They had capitulated.

Zephyr Quinn had simply been reclassified in the family archives from “prime strategic asset, pending acquisition” to a category containing exactly one name—”impossible.” The woman could not be drawn into anything she did not already, fundamentally, want to be a part of.

Which made the fact that she had agreed to receive two Recruits at all, in the middle of what undoubtedly had to be the most chaotic hour of her past few months, all the more telling.

Major Quinn looked up from her terminal as the door sealed behind them, her expression giving away precisely nothing—as it always did, when she chose as such.

"Recruit Sen. Recruit Masters," she said with light nods to each of them, before gesturing towards the seats on the opposite side of the table. "Sit."

The two of them did as ordered.

"So," the Major said, leaning back slightly. "What brings you to me?"

Evelyne kept her face perfectly still.

All three women in this room knew, fully and without the slightest doubt, exactly why two Major Legacy Heirs were sitting in front of this desk within minutes of an unscheduled Void-exit announcement. The question wasn't a question at all.

Which told Evelyne quite a lot about the situation already.

'She's making us ask, formally.' The Proprietor—the woman who famously despised the game in all its forms—was willingly stepping into the political ring to force the hands of the Legacies aboard. 'No freebies, then. Unfortunate. Which means, whatever this is, it's problematic enough that she intends to make us pay for it properly. We'll be burning actual resources for clear answers here today…'

Masters, judging by the brief tightening at the corner of her jaw, had seemingly arrived at the same conclusion.

She pushed onward regardless.

"Proprietor Quinn," she began, her tone polished and carrying exactly the measured respect her position demanded—the public register of a Masters, worn like parade armour. "We would like to know what, precisely, led to the decision to exit the Void today. I'm fully aware this is not intelligence a Recruit is entitled to… However—I am the Heir to the Masters Legacy. And I would be willing to consider it a Favour, done to the Legacy itself, were you to share that information with us."

Evelyne kept herself perfectly steady.

Inwardly, she was downright reeling.

'A Favour?! As the Opening bid?! She went straight to formal Legacy debt—no probing, no soft inquiry, no testing where the line even sits?!'

It was an extraordinarily aggressive play. 

Far harder than Evelyne herself would have gone, and she would have ever expected from anyone with six generations of accumulated political doctrine behind them. 

A Favour from a Major Legacy was not pocket change in the least—it was a bankable, inheritable asset with no expiration date, and Masters had just slapped it onto the table inside the first exchange of the entire conversation.

'Does she know something I don't…? Or is she once again betraying her ancestors' efforts with a distinct lack of political acumen—overreacting to the situation and overpaying for the privilege?' 

Evelyne couldn't tell at all, as she found both options equally likely, given the girl’s prior lack of decorum in several places, and that bothered her almost more than the overbid itself. 

'She didn't even bother inching toward the Proprietor's actual line first! There might have been a version of this conversation that cost us a respectful request and nothing more…'

With rapt attention, she observed the two other women.

The Major's face told her precisely nothing, as expected. 

Masters' face, however, betrayed a distinct—if nearly invisible—undercurrent of stress: The faint over-stillness of her hands, the half-breath she held and then released before she’d spoken the word Heir…

Which was a given, really. The woman had just mortgaged valuable family resources on her own authority, potentially for the very first time ever.

Proprietor Quinn took a long second to consider, then leaned back fully in her chair, its leather creaking slightly under the movement.

"That is indeed not something for the ears of mere Recruits," she said. "But we all know that's exactly why you two are standing in my office, and not any of the others. They don't understand the gravitas of what is occurring on this ship right now—and for very good reasons. Not everything needs to be known to everyone…"

She folded her hands atop the table, then met Masters' eyes directly.

"I will do you this Favour, Miss Masters—" her eyes darted to Evelyne, "—and you as well, Miss Sen. Unless you'd prefer to leave the office while I finish this conversation with Miss Masters?"

'Fuck,' Evelyne thought immediately. 

She’d been cleanly and effortlessly caught in the net of Masters' inelegant negotiation—either walk out with nothing, or stay and have the same Favour entered into her family's ledger at Masters' opening price. A price she could not even try to renegotiate on her own after the fact, because the Proprietor would never lower it, when it had already been paid once.

'I knew I should have taken control of the initial bid. Damnit!’

Outwardly, she projected unbroken calm and simply inclined her head with practiced grace. "I will remain, if that is indeed acceptable."

"Very well," the Proprietor replied.

Then she rose from her chair, leaned lazily back against the edge of the desk—and pulled up a holographic projection of a starchart.

Evelyne stopped her eyes from widening through sheer trained reflex.

'She's showing us our actual location and path?!'

That was utterly unheard of. 

A Recruit ship's live position and routing were among the most tightly sealed data of any Drive—a major breach of operational security to display to anyone without clearance, Major Legacy or not. That was—

'Wait… This is Proprietor Quinn… She does nothing without reason. Especially not politically,' Evelyne forced the alarm down and refocused. 'Which means she's decided we need to see this with our own eyes… Whatever this is.'

The projection showed their intended flight path—a clean, plotted line terminating at Eonon Station. Except the line had been crossed out by now, struck through by the system's routing overlay, and replaced by a new path that bent away at a hard angle.

Then the chart zoomed out… And kept zooming out.

Both Evelyne and Masters went dead still.

A shudder of pure terror ran down Evelyne's spine—the likes of which she had rarely experienced before.

'We—We're moving three lanes?!'

The Sovereign was abandoning their entire Voidlane and crossing two more, a displacement so vast that the original route and the new one barely shared a map square.

The three of them simply stared at the projected flight path for a moment. It was, in truth, all the information the Proprietor ever needed to provide—the chart told them everything.

She gave them an additional explanation anyway, much to Evelyne's surprise.

"There is a Titanicus-level Void Entity somewhere within the Sector Cluster," Major Quinn said, her voice level and unadorned. "It is responsible for the disappearance of the Monarch, and of everybody aboard her. We have reason to believe it may lie along our current trajectory—so we are avoiding it well ahead of time, to ensure an incident like the Monarch's does not repeat itself."

"Titanicus-level Void Entity…" Masters quietly mouthed beside her. Then the golden-haired Legacy shook off the daze, spine straightening. "The UHF is hunting it though. Yes?"

Major Quinn's eyes rested briefly on Masters, visibly deliberating something—and then she breathed out an uncharacteristically emotive sigh, and nodded.

"Proprietor Nkosi is heading the charge," she said, then added after a brief, pregnant pause. "... And your father is among the Legacies that volunteered to participate, personally."

Masters froze entirely.

And, for once, Evelyne could not blame her for it. Not one bit.

She felt something stir in her own chest that she had seldom felt in her life—one of the dangerous emotions she’d been warned about and that many, many hours of conditioning had long since converted into an optional toggle: Sympathy.

Hearing that the Masters Patriarch himself was among those leading the hunt for a Titanicus-level Void Entity was a major shock to Evelyne—and she wasn't even his daughter; his Heir. Against a thing that had torn apart a vessel the Monarch's size and swallowed every Soul aboard, the chance of Zeroing was… immense. Proportionally beyond practically any other assignment that existed in the entire UHF.

"He—He volunteered? When?" Masters asked quietly.

The Proprietor—for all her properness, and for all her legendary distaste for the game she nonetheless played at the highest level whenever she needed to—gave her answer with genuine compassion, in the only currency she truly liked to deal in: Truth.

"During the Grand Viewing Gala your family hosts every year. The UHF at large was informed of the Monarch's demise and the nature of the threat during the broadcast that evening. Your father was the first to pledge his support, and that of your Legacy… He is, of course, not going alone."

Her eyes moved to Evelyne—and Evelyne tensed before she could stop herself.

'What did mother pledge?!'

"The Sen Legacy equally pledged their assistance. An experienced Astropath, to aid in the hunt."

Evelyne held her breath without meaning to.

'An experienced Astropath… That's… Incredibly expensive.' Her mind ran the valuation automatically, almost gratefully, retreating into well-trodden arithmetic. 'But adequately proportionate, measured against another Major Legacy's Patriarch going personally. Calibrated to the decimal, as expected of mother…'

"Twenty-three other Legacies, Minor and Major alike, have also pledged their assistance," the Proprietor continued, her voice regaining its usual iron as it moved away from their families specifically. "The hunt has already begun—though only for a few days now. Not even remotely everything is in place yet to make it efficient. But several ships are already moving into position to locate the Entity, at the very least, so that the Recruit ships—ours included—can continue their Drives as normal. Rest assured: You are beyond safe aboard the Sovereign. And as much as that is a line every Proprietor tells their charges, by duty and necessity alike—there is truly no ship in this Sector Cluster more prepared for a run-in with the Entity than ours."

Her eyes fell on Evelyne as she said it, and Evelyne recognised the exact nature of the unspoken words immediately.

'We have the Black Sigil aboard…'

Masters, meanwhile, spoke up again. "With all due respect, Proprietor Quinn… I don't see how our ship would fare any differently than the Monarch did. What could a troop transporter like the Sovereign possibly do against a Titanicus-level Entity?!"

"Luckily, we are not alone," the Proprietor deflected smoothly—and Evelyne carefully filed away the fact that she was not revealing the Runepriest's presence to Masters, for one reason or another. "You'll remember the three escort ships that have been protecting us since Kovalsk Station?"

Masters' eyes widened in recognition—she had, evidently, forgotten. "…Right."

"One of them is equipped with dedicated Anti-Void-Breach technology, which would make it difficult for such an Entity to even approach us. So—once again—rest assured that you are safe aboard this ship."

Masters breathed out quietly.

Evelyne did so as well, after another half second of consideration. With the Runepriest aboard, three escorts specifically equipped to deal with a problem like that, and half the quadrant's entire UHF assets now actively hunting the Entity… There was no imminent emergency here.

Which was very good. 

It meant her plans could remain exactly what they needed to be: A secret, last-resort.

"Anything else the two of you require of me? I am quite busy today, as you might imagine," the Proprietor said, succinctly ending the discussion.

Neither of them had anything left to cover, that would be worth the asking price. 

They rose, offered their respects, and quickly filed out of the office.

For a brief moment, the two of them simply stood next to each other in the corridor, digesting everything they'd just heard and seen in silence.

The Proprietor had not, of course, mentioned that none of this information was to be disseminated. 

To say so out loud would have been a grave insult—it was obvious, and more than implied. Both of them had been raised from the crib to understand the weight of what went unsaid.

Evelyne met Masters' eyes for a long moment.

Then they both ultimately nodded at each other once, and went their separate ways…

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