#okay maybe this is gonna sound deranged but i picked up on this pattern almost immediately

[genderqueer-karma]

manifesting works !

NEW MANA IMAGE/TWEET 🦅🦅🦅💥💥💥💥‼️‼️‼️

[nihlisticfireball]

The Graviton Lance

Wielding the Lance is like handling a stick through thick mud, he knows this, but he watches her use it anyway, arms jerking as she visibly drags the gun upwards to kill targets. A hot purple line leaks from the barrel, bright neon void splattered in a dash through Cabal carcasses or zapped into the sickly green Ioan ground where the Taken spiraled back into their void. He knows she carries another gun, a better gun, a gift from some scavenger back on Earth that punches with fierce accuracy and tears through gunmetal like paper. It has a scope which looks to the horizon and back and uses standard issue ammunition, whereas the Lance’s sights are heavy and short and Void charges sometimes burn your fingers numb and leave cold voices in your head; he knows this.

He knows his already thin patience is being run even thinner every time he hears Nebula call out warnings to her Guardian as she falls in, thoughtless and catastrophic, among the Vex.

“I remain perplexed,” he snaps out over the comms, “as to why you do not alternate your weaponry accordingly.” There is the three-burst sound of the Lance firing and the hard kick of the final shell, followed by the warbled scream of a dying minotaur. “Just use a different gun!”

“But, Asher,” she coos back on the line, her voice a high falsetto of compassion, “I wouldn’t dream of changing this gun, because you gave it to me!”

His sneer is thick and dark and compulsive. He knows she is being facetious, and kicks the tiny voice wishing she wasn’t into a dark corner to die in. “Yes, well,” he sniffs, “far be it from me to endeavor to keep you breathing. Perhaps with you dead I could finally accomplish something in peace!”

“Aw, you’d miss me if I was gone,” she gloats (he bites back the urge to snap he knows that, because he does, he knows it all) her voice a bright grin that makes his head ache. “‘Sides, I’m like an old bad penny. I just keep comin’ back.” A thunderous roar of Cabal gunfire, the thrush of a Sparrow, and he knows she’s speeding up the Giant’s Scar under a hail of Centurion ion crossbolts and Vex linerifle streaks.

He busies himself at his terminal in order to disregard the concern for her wellbeing that trickles up through him like the Light once did, even entombed within the Pyramidion; he reorganizes datasets he’s situated a thousand times over, sifting through numbers unchanged across ages. His Ghost, ever silent, gives a nervous twitch, maybe hums a note, but he buries that underneath duty and fear, along with the nanotech he can’t feel crawling in his right hand, and his nervous feelings for the woman— a girl, really— who is probably (definitely) kicking in the door of the Red Legion firebase screaming “HEEEEERE’S DECIE!” at the top of her lungs.

He queues up Ikora’s frequency. “Your ‘paragon’,” he growls, his voice dripping almost indecent with scorn, “is a buffoon.”

“She keeps me young,” is the only response he’s dignified with, in the stolid tone he knows is her laughing. He cuts the line halfway through his grumbling, goes back to monitoring the data of Decima’s encounters. A spike of concern cuts through him, because the data starts to hint at Taken— Taken on the planet, in his vicinity, that’s what he’s worried about, he convinces himself. Not that they’re miles away, manifesting directly around a very specific signal already buried deep in enemy territory. He relays his warning over the line, in a perfectly sensible and understandable fashion.

“He means watch out for Taken,” Ikora Rey says. “You should hire a translator, Asher.”

He does not deign to waste breathe on a response because the comment was insipid and unnecessary, and not because the air has gone out of him with worry. The first force was the lack of a cackled response, something frivolous and crude along the lines of how do you manage such big words with so many dicks in your mouth, Asher; the second being the change in sound from the Graviton Lance’s triplicate shot to a scout rifle’s thick notches, and the sound of charging feet and panting breath. She’s running headfirst into the enemy, he knows, and not away from them because she is a stupendously deranged idiot, and he hates it, he hates how simple she can be and yet still produce results, he hates how fearless she is in the face of pain and death, how her fears manifest in objects she can go careening into while he has to sit twitching and tweaking in the Rupture, ruminating uselessly amongst the curving bones and dry, dead ammonites; and he hates, he hates, most of all he hates, the pitched sound in Nebula’s voice as she calls “Phalanx! PHALANX!” and there’s a whoosh of air as the spectre activates its shield, and the sickening crunch of a body hitting a hard unforgiving surface.

Asher Mir has been boiled down to a creature of logic, and fear, and hate— but the silence over that line fills him with dread.

It is a catch-22, an inconceivable, infuriating paradox, to be of a mind to love hypotheticals and yet exist in terrible fear of them; to be a logically driven system which must rely almost solely on faith. He cannot denounce her incensing recklessness without applauding her bravery, and he cannot commend his own intelligence without announcing his awareness of the situation. He cannot say he knows and also say he does not know. He cannot acknowledge Decima’s death without saying he worries.

So he says nothing, and instead pushes through a new series of equations that he knows will result in impossible answers. He seeks the comfort of numbers and knowledge to take his mind off the deadness of the line. Some part of him, deep down, twists with the desire to cry out, perhaps with a sense of impudent anger, more along the lines of his own character, that Ikora Rey says nothing. Her beloved disciple, the Guardian she lauds and extols, broken in a dark corner of some Cabal facility, and the esteemed Warlock Vanguard utters not a sound. But then, this is a testament to her faith, how she knows the Light will draw her exemplar back to life. To Asher, it is only a testament of his self-control.

He chocks up the squeeze in his chest to almost catching a beneficial change in the data, and not to the line crackling back to life. “All-fucking-right!” She crows, voice echoing, the click-clack of a clip sliding into place. The sound jumps with the telltale pattern of sprinting feet, and she’s— she’s just— she’s just sprinting back into the fray, and his right hand clenches and sparks with frustration and he cuts the signal just after Nebula’s dull exclamation of “Ugh, Decima—,” and even though he knows they can’t hear him he turns his head away to growl in frustration because he just does not understand. And this, in itself, is a problem, a terrifying conundrum, beyond even her boneheaded battle tactics and her apparent deep-routed disrespect for anyone better than her, because the last thing he did not understand cursed him and killed his soul.

His soul in question gives him a trembling, but obvious, look.

He reactivates the connection in time to catch the warping, gut-dropping effect of a surge of Void energy. When the feedback clears, he says, “You are aware of the saying, ‘the definition of insanity is constant repetition of the same actions while expecting different results’, yes?”

“Why, Asher,” Ikora Rey comes through melodiously on the line, “I never knew you as one to speak in idioms. Especially not incorrect ones.” If he’d had a bluff, she’s called it. But he doesn’t!

“Hush, you,” he growls, “I am merely attempting to convey a point: careening in headfirst is an asinine strategy!”

“It almost sounds as though you are concerned.”

He hopes the feed didn’t pick up the catch in his breath. “Concerned for the accuracy of my data and the conclusion of the mission, yes, very much so; especially in the ‘capable hands’ you, Ikora Rey, claim to have left us in!” His rambling has canted downwards from ‘gloating’ to ‘defensive’. He knows Ikora knows it.

“The only accuracy you need to be concerned with, old man, is how awesome I am,” Decima oozes over the comms. “Which, spoiler alert, is is pretty damn awesome.”

Nebula is laughing (“Des, that makes no sense!”) and it takes all of his faculties to not let his eyes slide to his Ghost, to search his (vast and impressive) memory for the last time she laughed with him, at him, ever, at all. He swallows bitterness at Decima’s ease, her life, her Light, and finds himself face-to-face with another catch doubledeuce: he cannot be concerned about the jeopardy of the mission and also angry with her progress. Ah, logic, you terrible, terrible thing.

The static slide of a door opening is broken by Decima wondering, “So, is this Warmind we’re going to see, is it Rasputin? ‘Cause, last I checked, he was not real happy with us.”

He chuckles before he can mute himself. “You managed to irritate one of the most powerful artificial intelligences in the known universe? Why am I not shocked.”

“Dunno, maybe ‘cause you’re too busy having an artificially intelligent stick up your ass?”

His outraged spluttering is cut with a sharp, “Decima, I told you to stop antagonizing him.”

“He asked a question!”

“IT WAS RHETORICAL!” But even at the highest volume his injured ego can produce, he finds himself drowned out by her obnoxious (charming) laughter. She is absolutely breathless with it.

“I—I’m sorry, Ikora, I—,” a splutter of intelligible wheezing static, “Okay, I’m not sorry, but— oh, my god. I’m gonna throw up.”

The silence on the line turns colder than a Vex’s radiolaria output chute on Pluto.

“You,” Ikora finally announces, “are worse than Cayde.” And the line goes dead, and he’s left with his own fuming, fist-clenching insult, and Decima’s unseemly squeaking.

“Could—,” she can’t speak through all the spluttering, “could you try— maybe— being a lit-lit-little less, even— fuck, my chest— even an iota, less, adorable?”

He freezes so suddenly he’s almost sure it’s audible. All he can feel is the heat in his face and the twitching of his right fingertips as they jump in millimeters.

When he finally gets himself under control, he finds his words spewed with a fire that is not entirely anger: “I am not adorable,” he growls. “I am intelligent, and I am vindictive, and I am eagerly looking forward to seeing how you make it through the rest of this Cabal base entirely unaided. Good luck, assistant.” And he mutes— doesn’t kill, mutes— the line.

The last thing he hears on the opposite end are her snickers as she mutes it, too. She knows he would never leave her hanging, not entirely, by virtue of his desire to achieve a practical result, a difficult end to arrive at when your means keeps ending up shattered on shields and blown to bits by rifle fire. She knows he is still with her, and he knows she knows.

He thinks— hopes— she is comforted by it.