your name is jade harley, once again.
what's lost is lost, but your name and your life has been found once again.
what once you thought you had escaped has returned once again. your name is the handmaid, and you will serve unto the end of time and space.
« au jade harley account. please read ooc before following. »
Now it is just between the Handmaid and Aradia Megido.
It is as if all else disappears and falls away, leaving an almost serene atmosphere. Both of them know, now, the vagaries of time splaying themselves open to be plainly understood, the circumstantial simultaneity of this event playing over and over in their heads like the time loop that it is.
The Handmaid will enlist the Eternal Servant, extending the same bargain once offered to her. It will be the sort involving neither negotiation nor possibility of refusal, expressed in terms plainly understood by the doomed Maid. The Eternal Servant, as thenceforth shall she be known, will once again manipulate timelines in a way the Witch of Space could not, and she will serve as her new master's maid, carrying out his work in places he cannot reach.
The two remaining combatants in the fray, surveying both Space and Time, will make each other pay for the crimes against their friends. Their payment will be mutually dealt in the currency of punishment and reward at once. The Servant will be rewarded with the power and immortality her new service entails, and punished by the grueling slavery for which it is synonymous. And the Handmaid, in turn, is to be punished by death at the hands of her replacement. And so too will this be her reward.
And thus carried out is the tale of the Demoness in human form.
The timepiece and its great pendulum strike their final movement, and the Handmaid falls.
The Void has drawn Equius away, making it impossible for you to strike him when you need it most.
Without the advantage of Time on your side—Aradia's constant temporal twelvefold distortion makes any attempt to leverage it somewhat useless—you're left with only Space.
And now Space is failing you in the face of Void.
The battle is at a standstill, and continues unabated for what seems like eons.
And then, critically, Caliborn's disgust with your work escalates to the point where he decides that perhaps allowing one of your aggressors to kill you might be the best plan.
Someone with dominion over Space had its advantages, he reasons, but this Handmaid's control over time had never really been up to his expectations.
With a mighty and noble DOOF, you get an Equius moving at full tilt to your side, and fall over gracelessly, careening into the desert sand.
With an inhuman growl, followed by a banshee-shriek, you take both needles and fire them both in the same direction, straight towards Equius, the high-pressure crackle quadrupling in size when the two beams meet halfway.
You're about to get the wind knocked out of you by a kick to the gut, and Terezi manages to land her feet on you for a split second. Enough to sting but not quite enough to knock you off balance entirely. With a snarl, you vanish from view, reappearing right behind Terezi and readying a strike of one of your needles.
The movement into the Void briefly disorients you, the sudden move into nothingness leaving your powers relatively useless for a split second. The robots being send by Equius reach you and strike you, but after you regain your bearings, you use a bubbling spatial rift and suck them into nothingness, detonating the small tear like a supernova and pushing everyone back from you.
Unfortunately, you can't take advantage of the gap in the temporal distortion, but you do vanish from fighting Equius for a second to try to lay chase to the Seer. Without her direction, it might be easier to take down the rest of them, you reason.
Like an automaton, your eyes don't even need to turn towards the robots you see coming. With a terrible flash of light, you whip one of your needles in the direction of the oncoming robots. The resulting lightning strike pierces the core of one of them, and the shockwave sends the others reeling backwards.
Now relieved of the first wave of attacks, you turn directly to Equius, looking to a place to fire. Aradia's already begun distorting time, and there are enough of them that it's almost impossible to get some sort of temporal advantage, so you resort simply to using your powers of Space to tear up one of the trees and bring it down on him with alarming speed.
The Handmaid goes after the renegade, the Maid who evaded her grasp under protection of the Void. A few blinks forward and back, and her constant time-travel begins to become annoying.
She'll deal with her later.
For now, she turns her attention to the mansion, the location of which she discovered by the first Aradia's foolish departure from the iron curtain of nothingness, held up by two Heroes of Void. Now understaffed by two, or, perhaps, three, should the second Maid not have made a return to defend to the last stand, and with the element of surprise on her side, the Demoness would have little difficulty making short work of the compound.
She appears right outside, setting her sights on the first target, the young Seer of Mind outside, leaning against a tree, eyes already downcast by the knowledge that no chance of success is provided to them. A lightning-fast, powerful long-distance strike is all the Handmaid needs to strike her from behind, and she falls, gracelessly.
Karkat sees her.
Gods, Karkat sees her and his eyes are crimson fire as he catches Terezi's body collapsing right in front of him, and when his eyes look back up to the Handmaid, they narrow to a pinpoint. There is death in his eyes and she knows it. There is no greater cruelty, now, than keeping him apart from her, keeping him alive for seconds longer.
She vanishes, leaving him to come to grips with the Seer's dead body.
When she reappears, she is at the throat of the Sylph unrealised, the rainbow drinker whose first attempt at death was made as a way of hiding her resurrection from the Lord of the Handmaid. With a brutal strike of a needle, light crackles through Kanaya's neck, and the spatial scar the Demoness tears into her has no solution, no healing.
The Heir notices the light—who wouldn't?—and makes a mad dash for the room where Kanaya had just been sitting, alive and unharmed.
By the time he has arrived, she is a corpse beginning to resolve itself into rigor mortis, and the Handmaid is gone. He, too, would suffer with an unheralded rage while she continued her assault.
Next, the would-be Mage. His death is fast, silent, tidy: one moment he is lolling on the computer, the next his head is slumped over on it, a gaping exit wound where his torso once lay, the scent of mustard blood permeating the air.
The Demoness returns, first, to Equius, holding him in stasis, his face twisted with unfathomable anguish, before punching a hole right through him with a needle, an explosion of Space and Time accompanying it.
She floats, this time, right out the window, back to the patio where, just minutes ago, Karkat and Terezi were sitting together wordlessly. There, the Knight nurses unimaginable grief and rage, eyes living but dead to the world. They turn, for a brief moment, to meet the Handmaid's.
Here, in this moment, she has an opportunity for redemption. For a recognition of her suffering. For an acknowledgement that this was done from assuagement of agony, from inexorable duty, and that one could still say that the Demoness is—actually and truly—Jade Harley.
Here, multicoloured patterns glinting from the Handmaid's eyes dissipate, revealing the brilliant green underneath. Karkat's eyes soften, for just a moment, and for a moment, he thinks there is understanding, that Jade Harley comes to say goodbye in the only way that she can.
There are no words that come from her mouth.
No reconciliation, no attempt to achieve some manner of final understanding.
A single shot, to the heart.
The Knight of Blood falls.
—
This finality achieved, the Demoness travels to the end of the line, the fork in the road that she now knows this timeline has been, not bothering to look for Aradia. She can easily be eliminated by the total extermination of the timeline.
With one hand, she tears the very spatial dimensions of the universe apart, travelling across it at a speed beyond light, beyond any possible conception, and trails that rift in space with a temporal distortion, leading the entire offshoot to begin to collapse upon itself, the boundaries of Space and Time curling inward upon itself. And with a satisfying crunch, the Universe itself is amputated from existence.
Now, the Handmaid has finished her practice round.
She travels forward down the alpha line, bringing herself back into place, right in the very same patio.
You’ve gotten better though, you think bitterly. This go round you’re in time to watch the destruction happen in front of you. And you barely even know the perpetrator. This way you won’t spend sweeps blaming yourself for this happening in the first place! Actually, that last part is a blatant lie. You will most definitely be spending a large part of the time you spend here blaming yourself for not getting here in time, for not getting a more exact read on where she’d gone.
You just don’t know that yet. In fact, you’re a little preoccupied with the fact that you’re facing certain death and you have no idea what to do about it. She’s spotted you alright, and you doubt you have more than a second of reaction time.
Instinct says, make the most of this second, and red runes flare up around you and Rose both, slowing time down locally for the two of you, giving you four seconds to think compared to her and the rest of the world’s one.
This is a wonderful time for your mind to be utterly blank. Any time you go to, she can follow, with hardly any delay. You could try to hinder her with psionics, but you have no offensive powers. You are, in a word, stuck. You can only try to put yourself between her and Rose.
The Demoness sees the spiral of runes curl around the two of them, and if she were someone else, she might have laughed.
But she doesn't laugh. Laughing's not her style, nor, really, is any display of emotion at all.
The temporal distortion on the part of the Maid is almost comically easy to disrupt, but she does nothing of the sort. Instead, she vanishes from sight, reappearing instantly at the edge of the bubble, and driving through it without heed to the temporal shockwave. A massive sonic boom accompanies her as she hurtles forward, one hand outstretched with a needle pointed straight for the Witch.
Before Aradia can react, before she can move, before she can think about the presence of the Handmaid within the small attempt at building herself a place to think, even if only for a moment, Rose is speared through the stomach by the needle, the crackle of time sizzling and flaring around her. Her eyes fluttering briefly, face twisted with shock, she falls backward as the Handmaid continues to drive her downward into the ground, her gut an explosion of viscera and bright-crimson blood, spattering against the brilliant green dress the Handmaid wore.
While her powers are unimaginable, though, her attention is still that of a normal human, and she remains focused on her kill, giving the Maid a split second to make her escape.
“It’s that or wander aimlessly, and that’s even less of a lead.”
A quick glance at trollian on your glasses top tells you that she’s not online. It couldn’t, of course, be so simple as sending her a message.
Moments later you and Rose arrive at the park. It’s disturbingly still and empty, nothing to indicate anyone’s been here in the last couple of months, much less the last couple of minutes.
You sigh heavily, and you’re about to say something to the tune of “I suppose we’d better start looking through the actual buildings” when a flash of green in the sky draws your eye, and your heart sinks. You’re too late, too late, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to do anything.
“Shit goddamn it we’re out of a job! Come on!”
You grab Rose’s arm and soon the two of you are running towards the terrified screams.
Aradia is one of few of their little group who has not experienced the fury of the Demoness in person. She knows only of the stories, of what Karkat and Kanaya and Equius have told her. She knows only of the plaguing nightmares Karkat had for a month that he could never remember upon waking.
But when she first experiences the wrath of a girl she once considered a friend, it is an awesome power to behold, and terrifying as well.
The first thing she can think is “oh shit”; the second, that this is not Jade. This will never again be Jade and this has clearly not been Jade for a very, very long time. There is a distinct sense of inhumanity behind her eyes, something Aradia can see even in lieu of the flashing lights signifying to whom she belongs. Her breath catches in her throat and every instinct she has is telling her to pick up her skirt and run like hell but she’s
just
frozen.
Frozen in place, frozen in time by nothing but crippling fear, frozen in shock with every neuron firing and screaming, yelling, pleading with her to move move move move move or she’s going to die.
By the time she recovers the Handmaid is already poised to strike.
She doesn't even move, at least not perceptibly. Her actions are on the order of indivisible units of time, each t1ck t0ck of the clock moving the universe forward, not by minutes, nor by seconds, but by the tiny, unfathomable quantum splinters, each Planck epoch crawling in and bringing with it another preparation, another colour shifting in and out of focus in the eyes of the Demoness.
The Handmaid, it can be said, can choose to move as a human or a troll would, to operate within the constraints of Time. But no prior Handmaid before this one, this vessel tasked with total annihilation not merely of strategic targets but of creation itself, has ever held such awesome power to flout the boundaries, the thresholds of both Time and Space.
And that in itself would—should—be enough to strike abject horror into the hearts of any faced with her.
So when Aradia comes into view, the Handmaid needs only for her to stay in place for that unimaginably small quantity of time, before she can descend upon her.
There is no rage, no anger in her face, as she tears a hole almost limitlessly deep into Space, violates Rule after inviolable Rule as she turns Time in upon itself, prepares a microcosmic supernova that serves as her tempest in a teacup. Feeding this nascent loop with power, she integrates a lance of lightning from a tip of her needle into the makeshift device of destruction she has prepared.
By the time Aradia has the slightest, most paltry opportunity to react to the fact that the Handmaid even exists, there is no hope for her. The equivalent of a multidimensional time bomb has been organised in front of her with a frightening economy of temporal and spatial expenditure, and then—
A single moment of peace.
The Demoness knows the look on the face of the Maid, that breathless terror of the unreal made manifest in front of one's eyes.
She knows the fear and the fury wound up like a ball in Aradia's heart.
She knows it better than one should ever know a thing.
But the cruel, dispassionate glimmer in the Handmaid's eye says it as much as the thought process in her mind. All she can think as she holds out a needle, drawing the rustblood girl forward inexorably to her fate, is a simple thought:
Much more impressive work than the last.
A snap of her wrist, and Aradia collapses into the densely coiled agitation of Time and Space. She vanishes instantly, initiating an explosion that vaporises three entire blocks.
And she'd be on her way again, but for the clear sky she sees when the destruction is made evident—
The area in which seven hundred years ago stood a mansion, great in its size and splendor, there is nothing but apartment complexes as far as the eye can see. Its inhabitants are nowhere to be found and Aradia sighs with relief. She is not in the mood for temporal confrontations right now, and slings her bag over her shoulder with a visible relaxation as she walks down the busy street.
She does not see nor sense the temporal distortion that hails the Handmaid.
That is her second mistake; the first was leaving.
Aradia knows she will only be in this particular time for a few days at most, and immediately treks toward the blooming epicenter of a city that won’t exist until at least three hundred years later than the period she just left. There are motels lining the freeways, hotels further in, but what catches her attention is a small inn. Homely, humble, family owned and operated. Just the sort of friendly feeling she craves without having to actually know anyone inside.
Anonymity. For once in her life, she is glad for it.
The Handmaid can feel the distortion of time near here—like ley lines, that ripple of time is palpable, to those with the right power.
Finally, a familiar ripple catches her attention.
The signature is unmistakable, and she knows what she needs to do.
She turns a corner.
She does not appear on the other side.
Instead, a muted flick of green light heralds her departure, and seconds later, she is high in the sky, following that faint trace of Time's bend. One last hint comes to her, an aftershock of Aradia's motion, and that is all she needs.
A brilliant tremor of chartreuse tears the sky for a split second, and then lances like a bolt of lightning to a small inn. Her arrival creates a shock wave, blowing out the windows. With a terrible flash, she fires a flailed crackle from one of her needles, drawn in a split second, and kills a swath of people in front of her, leaving an unbroken path between her and Aradia.
"Hello," she says, and her eyes glow with a practiced malice.
Then, there's a crackle of temporal energy and a spatial rift torn into the dark, smoggy twenty-eighth century atmosphere.
Then, there is the Handmaid.
The keen, nagging awareness that one of the Knight's friends had left the protection of the maddening had finally struck her, and the dreaded lurch in her stomach that assured her that her task was clear.
At first, she back-traced the movements of the Maid through Time and Space, isolated the point where she came from through a few minutes of detective-work, and—most critically—discovered the location of the compound. She had been on the verge of marching on the mansion itself, catching everyone by surprise and emptying it before any of them had any idea that she was coming, but then she remembered.
The Knight falls last of all.
So instead, the Handmaid followed Aradia to the place she'd fled.
Here she stands, surprisingly unassuming in her bright green dress, having descended to the street, where nightlife roars. A subtle flare of temporal energy is all she needs to begin her manual search.
She doesn't know it when it happens, but the person who does matter knows. In the shattered ruins of the island, time slows to a crawl, and the bloody maw of the Lord appears. Trapped within time's interminable loll inside this bubble, Caliborn greets her with a snarled "uSELESS BITCH. YOu FAILED. THE ONE FuCKING TASK I GAVE YOu," before taking her by the neck with his huge, clawed hand, and driving her underwater.
She tries not to resist, not to give him the pleasure of watching her squirm and kick and thrash in an attempt to escape.
But she can't hold out. An hour turns into a day turns into a week turns into a month turns into a year turns into a decade where he is content to simply hold her there, choking her and drowning her as she writhes in excruciating agony for all of it. Not until a century has passed does he tire of keeping her there and return her to her duties.
Ever since waking on Earth, Terezi always felt like something was missing beyond her memory. She’d lost everything, obviously—no money, no job, considered infirm by the masses, an alien alone on a strange planet with no recollection of how. But it had been a deeper feeling, one of something that had been locked away.
As death faces her down, as it rears twin needles and strikes like a viper, she realizes that this isn’t the first time she’s been forced to confront her demise. The memory rushes back in an instant. Teal robes bloom from the air around her and she flits sideways, floating an inch or so above the sand, twin wings spreading from her back. She’s not quick enough, though, and her narrow escape leaves two deep slashes on her upper arm.
She gives herself a heave and gets upright, flying backward from the Handmaid. The robes of her office are bathed red by the sunset on one side and the now-flaming cabana on the other. She is the Seer of Mind, fully realized, and even she knows that it’s going to take a miracle to make it out of this in one piece.
The Handmaid does not go into kills expecting fights. Even those who have ascended, Gods in their own right, they do not fight. They present conundrums to solve, puzzles to take apart. And usually, within two or three moves, she has discovered all of the sophistication that they have to offer.
Such is not the case with Terezi.
In retrospect, the Handmaid's frustration at each level makes sense: she is, after all, a fully realised Seer of Mind, and her avoidance of all of the attacks becomes clearer to her.
But, of course, fight that it may be, the Demoness still has a job to do.
Readying an attack of proportions far greater than her prior attempts, she prepares to rend spacetime entire, using herself as a focus. As she begins to concentrate matter between her hands, little cracks in time and tears in space begin to manifest, arcing out from her an immensely powerful electromagnet. She counts down dispassionately to release.
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