Oct 30, 2023
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1.
The cats were fighting, and Maggie was singing to them. It was Tater's birthday, apparently. How wonderful.
Shiv cracked her eyes open. The ceiling looked like shit: the paint was peeling, and there was some sort of stain spreading from one corner. The harsh morning light of the street lamps streamed into the room through the busted shade, casting crooked bars of shadow across the room.
The rest of the house looked worse than the ceiling. The cats had left scratches on everything they could reach, and time and neglect had left their marks on anything the cats couldn't. The furniture all looked out of place, collected over decades and haphazardly repaired.
From somewhere in the mismatched house, Maggie was babbling to her cats. "Come on, Candy. Share the fish with your brother. It's his birthday. Share the fish with the birthday baby!" Potato Chip's mournful wail filled the air, accompanied by the sound of chewing and a wary hiss.
Shiv sat up, wincing. She wrenched her head from side to side experimentally, to no avail. Rubbing her neck, she awkwardly swung her legs off the couch and stood up. Shiv picked her way over to the kitchen, for once managing not to stub her toe on the cabinet that protruded into the door frame.
"Morning, Mags."
Maggie jumped as Shiv spoke. "Oh, good morning! I made coffee." Maggie was fucking old. Her eyes were older than Shiv: they were some vintage shit, with protruding lenses that stopped her eyelids from properly closing. An awful little part of Shiv figured their value was somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 grand from an avid collector.
"Where'd you get the fish?" Shiv took a mug off its hook and poured herself some lukewarm coffee. The slogan on the side of the mug demanded silence, at least until the bearer had finished their name-brand coffee. The winking face of a defunct coffee logo grinned up at her as she took a sip.
"A trader's in town, just for the day. Some sort of pilgrim."
"Anything else good?"
"Protein bars, holy symbols, ID chips, and..." she looked around, as if Shiv hadn't swept the place for bugs last week, and dropped her voice. "...ammunition. No guns."
"What did you give him?"
"Some of the kitchen knives."
"You gave him knives for a fish?"
Maggie wrung her leathery hands nervously. "It's Potato Chip's birthday! Besides, they were getting dull."
"You have a whetstone!"
"I don't know how to use it right, and you..." she trailed off, but couldn't stop the glassy lenses of her eyes from flickering to Shiv's shoulder. Or rather, to where her shoulder used to be. Maggie swallowed, her gaudily-dyed hair bobbing in distress.
"I could have taught you! And Tater didn't even get to eat his fish." A contented Candy Bar wound her way about Maggie's legs, purring. Maggie opened and closed her mouth a few times, but said nothing.
Shiv wordlessly grabbed her bag off the couch. It still smelled like the factory that made it, even after a month. Much as it irked her to waste money–she’d already owned a perfectly serviceable bag–this one had velcro. Zippers were too much trouble these days.
She tore it open to behold the extent of her worldly possessions. A change of clothes. Her knife, the one Raz had given her. Rope. A pack of bandages. Disinfectant. Four days of nutrient bars. A wallet, empty save for a credit card and a few coins. A well-worn prayer tablet. A needle and a spool of thread. A ballpoint pen. Content that everything was where it should be, she closed the bag.
Shiv swung her bag over her good shoulder, then fumbled with the doorknob for a moment, nearly dropping her mug. Maggie took half a step forward as if to help, but whatever she saw in Shiv's eyes kept her rooted in place. Shiv pulled the hood of her coat up over her head, and turned to leave. "I… Sorry. I'm going out. Be back by midnight unless I get shot."
Where to?
Find the trader.
Meet with Ornarch.
Wander aimlessly.
Next Page
worldbuilding for Neon Blessing is so fun because i get to say shit like "he cursed his genome" and "skyscraper necropolis" and "astral project into the internet"
2.
⚠️ SPOILER ALERT! ⚠️ Click here to read Neon Blessing from the beginning!
LAYER 22 - THE DILUVIAN DISTRICT
EST. POPULATION: 100M HUMANS, 12 GODS
POINTS OF INTEREST: CHURCH OF MANIFOLD SORROWS, THE SACROLITH, A DISUSED DRAINAGE PIPE
Maggie’s house wasn’t the nicest place Shiv had ever crashed. That honor went to the hotel room the Floodkin had broken into for the night of her eighteenth birthday. Maggie’s wasn’t her favorite, either–that hideout was long gone, torn down and turned into a casino years ago. That said, she’d definitely slept in worse places: Mags didn’t expect anything from her besides chipping in on rent where she could; and the house was soundproofed, an essential in the Diluvian District.
Shiv stepped outside and slipped in a pair of cheap earplugs to drown out the roar of water. They deadened the sound but couldn't outright eliminate it. Distant waterfalls thundered at a trillion gallons a minute, kicking up the famous Diluvian Mists that could be felt anywhere in the district. The water cascaded down from the layers above and went coursing through a thousand canals and rivers on its way further down and deeper into the city. In the late morning glow of the street lamps, brilliant rainbows played about the skyscrapers. The ceiling of the layer was invisible under a blanket of fog.
Thankfully, most of the filtration happened on Diluvian 20, so the water here was clear and more or less safe to drink. The fountains were fed by the channels, and people huddled around them, holding cups out to the metal mouths of the godly statuary.
The streets of Diluvian 22 were full of people no matter the time of day. A train swept by overhead on suspended tracks, while cars careened through the narrow, twisting streets, and on every sidewalk and bridge and platform people of all sorts went about their business. An ear-splittingly loud torrentpunk song filled the morning air, courtesy of some band of street performers a block or two over.
Everything in the Diluvian was loud: the music, the people, and the fashion choices. It was always easy to tell when someone was new to the district: they tended to speak too quietly to be heard above the waterfalls, and wore shapeless and utilitarian raincoats. The dark fabric of formal suits and ties stood out against the riot of color, islands of corporate pretension amidst a sea of high-vis vests and neon street clothes.
Maggie’s house was located along Grief St., a little closer to the Church than Shiv would have liked. She was always careful to give it a wide berth, staying at least three blocks away from its stony facade where possible. By Shiv’s reckoning, there were twelve gods who called Diluvian 22 home, and Aluel was the worst of them.
The Church of Manifold Sorrows policed much of the district, from way down in layer 24 and up to 19, but the 22nd layer was where their goddess had built her cathedral. Aluel and her Sorrows (or Crybabies, as the Diluvian public called them) didn’t have that much weight to throw around, and mostly busied themselves protecting VIPs, confiscating firearms, and breaking up rowdy parties. Every few weeks they killed someone.
Nine of Diluvian 22’s gods were inconsequential: homeless, powerless, without domain or altar, too weak even to be conscripted as labor or as batteries. Even the Diluvian's mightiest were frequently ignored in prayers, with people choosing to throw their lots in with more influential gods.
As for the two remaining major gods, Ebrelurge’s name was cursed more often than it was praised, and no one of repute would be caught dead consorting with Ornarch. Shiv had gotten Ornarch’s black wings tattooed onto her shoulder blades when she was fourteen years old, and she figured she owed the old man a house call.
As she passed by a corner cafe wafting the smell of fresh-baked bread out into the foggy air, her stomach growled in appreciation. She hadn’t had anything to eat since yesterday’s lunch.
What's for breakfast?
Cheap nutrient bar (obtained legally)
Fancy pastry (stolen)
Cheap nutrient bar (stolen)
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10.
⚠️ SPOILER ALERT! ⚠️ Click here to read Neon Blessing from the beginning!
Club RED was a labor of love. A cyclopean eye of neon tubes stared down at the street from the facade of a beautiful temple to excess, bathing the darkening street in bloodred light which played through the mist kicked up by a nearby waterfall. The building was dark glass and darker stone, three stories tall and culminating in a domed roof. It wasn’t even 5 pm, but the line was pouring out the door and onto the sidewalk, foreign raincoats and umbrellas standing side by side with wet-haired Diluvian partygoers.
Shiv had never entered a nightclub through the front before. There’d been one club, the Magpie, that she’d frequented with her friends, but the owner was one of Ornarch’s devout and always let them skip the lines. Huh. She hadn’t been to the Magpie in years. She wasn’t even sure if it was still in business.
The line moved quickly, and before long, she was at the door. “Let’s see some ID.” There were two bouncers, identically dour and militaristic-looking men who loomed over her like a pair of sunglasses-clad statues, their suits custom-made to fit over the bulky structure of a mil-spec exocloak. Thin seams in the skin of their faces suggested the presence of subdermal armor plating to protect what the mechanized armor didn’t. One of them handled a scanner with the practiced care of a guy whose grip could crush a human skull.
Shiv showed them the card. “Kooler sent me.” The one with the scanner stared her down while the other barked a few quick words into a headset. If shit went south, the only viable exit was ducking the rope to the left, but Headset would make a grab for her and if those huge hands got a grip it was over. She’d need to distract him first, maybe blind him. Throw her coat in his face? She started to shrug it off her shoulder, just in case. Scanner continued to glower at her in a prolific display of disdain. He should be too far away to do anything, but just in case-
Headset spoke, snapping her out of her planning.
“Hm?” She’d missed what he’d actually said.
“Go on in. The boss is on the second floor.” Shiv pulled her coat back over her shoulder and brushed past the bouncers and into the club. She pushed her way past a heavy curtain of soundproof fabric and replaced the endless roar of the streets with the endless roar of Club RED’s speakers.
Water poured down gilded fountain walls and colored lights arced and scattered through thick smoke, produced by a mix of sweet-scented cigarettes and industrial fog machines. Waiters and waitresses wearing practically nothing served a very peculiar clientele: half of the patrons were exactly what she’d expected, the sort of wealthy-looking folks willing to spend fifteen credits on a can of beer; and the other half were all grizzled paramilitary types. The burning coal glow of their cybernetic eyes stared out at her through the fog, automatically seeking out her vital organs before flicking back to their drinks.
Shiv scaled the stairs to the second floor, taking a moment to look out on the dance floor from the balcony. The band’s frontwoman was more work of art than human, her limbs all formed from sweeping lines of carbon fiber and steel. Her guitar plugged into a port on the back of her neck, her quicksilver fingers dancing over the strings with surreal grace. She had a voice like an angel with a smoking habit.
“She’s quite something, ain’t she?” A woman’s voice came from behind Shiv. She turned to see Kurtz, for who else could it be? The owner of Club RED was maybe forty years old, a little shorter than Shiv, and built like a brick. Her head was clean-shaven, revealing dozens of tally mark tattoos, in sets of five, spreading from near her temple and across half of her head. Unlike everyone else, she was dressed simply and practically, in sturdy black pants and a tank top, and unlike everyone else, she had a gun at her hip, an antique revolver. Both of her eyes were red: one eye was flesh, with an iris that had either been dyed or transplanted. The other eye was metal, the iris glowing the exact same shade as the vast eye on the front of the building. She carried herself with an easy confidence, bordering on arrogance. “Are you the one Kooler mentioned?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Joan Kurtz, owner of Club RED and REDEYE PMSC. What brings you to my door?”
Talk.
"I'm looking for revenge."
"I need to find someone."
"I want to talk to Odie."
"I'm here on Ornarch's orders."
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9.
⚠️ SPOILER ALERT! ⚠️ Click here to read Neon Blessing from the beginning!
“Look, you don’t have to give me a map. Just point me in the right direction.”
“Shiv, kid, I get it. You want revenge. But-”
“I don’t want revenge,” she said. She wasn’t certain if it was a lie.
“Then what do you want?”
“Answers.” Hell, she didn’t even know the finer points of what the two of them had stolen. The house had been full of valuable art, they’d passed a poorly-hidden wall safe on the way to the owner’s office, and they ignored it all in favor of the data drive that had sat atop a messy stack of papers. Ornarch hadn’t told them what was on there, just that it would go for a hundred thousand credits at a minimum, or a million from the right buyer. Most drives its size were just something convenient to hold, with the data itself stored on a chip a few nanometers thick. Whatever was on that drive had been complex enough that the whole damn drive was dedicated to memory. A sphinx glinted darkly on its surface, mirror finish set into matte black. There was something captivating about its sheer scale and the precision of its construction. Something a little sinister, too. Then he had shown up, and the rest of the night was a blurry nightmare of burning, screaming, and blood.
Kooler pursed his lips. “And once you have those answers, what are you going to do?”
“My job. Ornarch wants me to-”
Kooler’s eyes narrowed, and he tilted his head. “Isn’t your job breaking and entering? At least, I think that’s what you told me the first time we met. Forgive an old man’s memory for its failings, but I think I would have remembered hearing a teenager call themself an executioner.” He suddenly sounded very old, and very tired.
“Maybe I’ve changed. Why do you care?” It came out a little colder than she’d intended it to.
“Sorry, sorry. You’re right. None of my business.”
“So you won’t help me?”
“Staying neutral is how I stay alive. Everyone knows old Kooler keeps his mouth shut.”
“That’s a no?” Her heart sank. She’d known it was a long shot, but even still, Kooler was the closest thing she had to a lead.
Whatever he saw in her face gave him pause. “I… offered them ten thousand for the drive. I don’t even have half the hardware it would take to decrypt that… monster. I told them I wasn’t paying a credit more than that for a piece of software I couldn’t validate, no matter what rumors I’d heard. They took their business elsewhere. I don’t know where.”
“Rumors?”
“Have you been online since you stole it?” She hadn’t. “Half of the criminals in the Diluvian District are hunting after that sphinx drive. It’s anyone’s guess what’s on there, but Ebrelurge put a bounty out on it and then a few gang bosses joined the bidding war. As of this morning, the best offer is 1.6 million.”
Lord of birds. One point six fucking million?
He went on. “I don’t know where they went, but I know someone who might. Don’t go telling everyone I lent you a hand, but you’re- you’re a good kid. Just- hear them out when you see them. Don’t rush headlong into being a killer.”
“Yeah.”
Kooler pushed off the counter, sending his chair on a practiced arc towards a shelf of folders in one corner of the shop. He returned bearing a business card, a thin sheet of crisp white plastic stock with “Club RED – 1191-3962” embossed on it in brilliant crimson. The back side of the card was decorated with a staring eye in the same shade. “Kurtz–the owner of Club RED–knows me, and she’s got a panopt. Ask to see Odie. If it can’t help you, no one can.”
Shiv grinned. “Thanks, Kooler.”
“I’d say ‘any time,’ but really I’d rather not stick my neck out again.”
“With any luck, you won’t have to!”
The door squealed as she left.
Perhaps the most important question yet: which of Maggie's (Shiv's landlady's) cats likes Shiv more?
Potato Chip
Candy Bar
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7.
⚠️ SPOILER ALERT! ⚠️ Click here to read Neon Blessing from the beginning!
She wandered the streets in a mindless daze, eventually settling into a familiar path, the steps hewn into her body’s memory like an image seared onto the screen of an ancient television.
There was a parking garage by the interdistrict freeway, where autonomous levcars flew past in vacuum-silent tunnels at a thousand miles an hour. You could skirt around the security cameras and duck the barricade if you were short enough, though Shiv had needed to hunch ever since she hit her growth spurt at fourteen. From there, it was a quick climb up the stairs to the roof, where no one could see them and no one cared and they would never grow up and never kill each other.
Hauling herself up onto the concrete wall at the edge of the lot one-handed was an undignified affair that had left her arm aching and face red. As she slipped for the second time, she could have sworn she heard Raz’s voice asking if she needed a hand. It was the exact joke they would have made if they’d been there, and she would have punched them for it and they would have laughed and she would have laughed. Swearing, she finally got herself up onto the wall and lay there, panting and embarrassed. She was glad to be alone and had never wished so badly that she wasn’t.
It was a hot summer day. Whoever had built the City, all those centuries ago, had left the seasons in, their influence felt through the artificial heating and the glow of the lights than through the glare of the sun. It was the same time all around the world, and it was summer everywhere.
On hot days sometimes someone would bring popsicles.
That was the thought that did her in, that one simple fact. On hot days sometimes someone would bring popsicles. One of her friends–now long stripped from her by time, by petty disputes, by death, or by treason–would get their hands on a box of popsicles, and they’d pack them into a beat up old cooler and share them here, up above the world and its problems. On hot days, sometimes, someone would bring popsicles.
Shiv made a choked little noise as tears made their unwanted presence known. They’d all deserved better. Gin, shot in the head by one of the Weeping Lady’s cop-cultists. Ogre was serving twenty years with GGC. Noro was–well, Noro was fine. He just hated her and the feeling was mutual. The same went for Johnny and Fish. Keene went missing, and Ben had still been waiting for her to come back when his cough took a turn for the worse. And Raz, oh Raz, oh fuck.
What were you thinking, Raz? Why did you leave? I needed you here. Did I really matter that little to you?
She thought she’d known them. If it were any other question, she could have given their answer for them, word for word, but when she dug for their answer in the little part of her soul where her best friend had lived, she found nothing but grief for a person she hadn’t killed yet.
“FUCK YOU! FUCK ALL OF YOU!” She screamed at Raz, at the Sorrows, at the gods, at everyone and everything. The cascades of the Diluvian swallowed all sound within their eternal churning, and though she yelled until her throat was hoarse and her eyes ran dry, no one heard her.
Alright, now what?
Get supplies.
Ask around about Raz.
Recruit backup.
Blow off some steam.
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4.
⚠️ SPOILER ALERT! ⚠️ Click here to read Neon Blessing from the beginning!
A rickety access stair off the side of the road led below street level, a rusted railing the only thing between her and a ten thousand foot drop into the churning sea of waste at the bottom of the Diluvian. Everywhere, banners hung from the grates and pipes, extolling the virtues of the god at the bottom of the stairs.
Shiv couldn’t read the Eldest Tongue, but Raz used to tell her what all the banners said: Prince of Birds, Father of Thieves, Bright-Eyed, Swift-Tongued, Dark-Winged, Clever-Handed, Purse-Cutting, Theft-Fed, Ever-Hungry, Ever-Proud, Ornarch. The same symbols on every banner, repeated a thousand times, more and more frequently, as candles began to crop up along the railings and the heady scent of incense suffused the misty air.
A magpie sat on a pipe that snaked out of the wall, looking down at Shiv. “Hail, brother. I bring an offering for our lord,” she said, waving the uneaten half of the tart. The magpie chattered at her mockingly, then flew off. Fifteen years she’d known Ornarch, and she still didn’t know if the birds could understand her.
A few hundred feet down the path, under one waterfall and over another, lay the entrance to Ornarch’s home. It was once a drainage pipe, but it had long since fallen into disrepair, now the domain of rats, birds, and the god of the gutter. She hesitated a moment outside the pipe.
“Come in, Shiv.” His voice sounded frail, but was clearly audible over the roar of the water. She stepped inside, and laid eyes on her god.
Ornarch looked like shit. He’d aged twenty years in the month since Shiv had last seen him. His once-ageless face was carved through with lines, his raven-black hair faded to a dull grey. His threadbare black suit couldn’t have gotten any more dilapidated, but the wings that swept from his back looked tattered and mangy. Even his gilded earrings had tarnished. Only his eyes were completely unchanged: hollow voids that expanded as Shiv met his gaze, wider and wider, deeper and deeper, until points of light shone through an infinite expanse of nothing, and nothing else was real. Shiv had never seen the night sky anywhere but those eyes.
In contrast to his wretched appearance, his home was more or less unchanged since last she’d seen it. The pipe in which Ornarch held court was easily thirty feet in diameter, its curved floor dotted with the melted-down corpses of innumerable tallow candles. Censers dangled from the ceiling at regular intervals, smoke transmuting the industrial lighting into something soft and warm. A thousand black birds stared down at her with beady eyes.
God clung to a wheeled IV drip like a drowning man to a board. How he’d gotten it down here, she had no idea, and as far as she knew mortal medical technology did nothing for gods. The bag glistened red in the dim light of the drainage pipe, a line of crimson curving down and disappearing under a shirtsleeve.
“I brought breakfast.” She once again pulled the pastry from her pocket.
“Put it on the altar with the rest.” Ornarch’s altar was a flat stone carved with circling birds, piled high with worthless trinkets and stolen treasures in equal measure. Every god was fed by sacrifice, and Ornarch demanded a cut of his congregation's pilfered goods. She gingerly placed the tart atop a wallet and a jeweled locket.
“It’s been a while.” His lips didn’t really move as he talked. Shiv had seen him open his mouth all the way, had seen that cruel beak that jutted from the back of his throat.
“Yeah.” Unspoken, the fact that she’d lost her arm on a job he’d sent her on. The job she’d failed. A month of recovery, the burning pain of the blade parting her flesh, all for nothing.
“You haven’t been answering your phone.”
“I lost it.” Some time in the panicked escape from the botched job, it had slipped from her pocket.
Ornarch’s thin lips curved into a frown. “Well that simply won’t do.” He patted his pockets before procuring a thin box from nowhere. “The newest Obol model. Top of the line. Trackers removed.” He offered it to Shiv.
She hesitated.
Ornarch never gives something for nothing.
"Thank you." [take the phone]
"What do you want?"
"I have to go."
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