Chapter Text
Katsui Films A Propaganda Piece
Katsui Bomb-Disarming Prana was having an okay day. With the disarmament of the bomb shipment to <name pending> Voidstation [sic], she could finally get on to filming that advertisement. She threw on an Assumption of Dreams and Passion, turning the specific emotion of "someone is trying to sell me something" into form. The form in question was a slick saleswoman physique, packaged in a dark suit and sunglasses. Just the right amount of sleazy to be commercial corporate rather than federal investigator. The dark hair and a few other details were a bit of a winning ticket reference, all the more to sell the winnings.
Well. Maybe she needed a bit more value. Assumption of Wood, for the performance vitality. Katsui conjured a fancy hat to go with it, something feathery not out of place on an ahistorical fencer. Her sword grace flicked into silvery rapier shape, to be focal. Cup, Staff, Ring, check but to be hidden. Way, Mask, a few other principles, eh.
Excellency flowed in the essence patterns that passed for veins. The breath that could convince explosives to dismantle themselves was minty fresh. Mercurial shape and elegant musings converged with a light touch. Her goal: to be subtly supernatural, just the right VFX rather than overwhelming might of manipulation. Entice, rather than obliterate. For now.
"Derby perfect." Katsui beamed, giving the script a last checkover on her way out of the dressing room.
-
The director was a vaguely cyclopaean blob (it/he), in that it had one large eye and was probably more gelatinous than its apparent surface texture indicated. Director Vaguely Cyclopaean Blob's dull green was perhaps intentionally generic, the better for the setpieces to shine on camera. The saccades of its attention shifted between the camera-slash-cameraperson, setpiece props, and as Katsui approached her as well.
The camera-headed lady stood up from her chair and began A-posing. Several other cameras and eyes manifested from demi-visible essences to get the right camera angles. The camerawoman herself moved for a moment erratically, as if clicked and dragged, before getting the hang of it and smoothing on to an appropriate levitation curve. It was kind of unnecessary to use ultra daodimensional total area particle-wave radiance flow divination and extra holography quantum calibrators for magisenses most of the audience wouldn't know existed. But hey, film snobbery made it easier in over-nine-thousand pixel 2D anyway. No kill like overkill.
"To a good show?" Katsui bemusedly asked, stepping into stage-perfect positioning.
"To a good show." the camera agreed.
Vaguely Cyclopaean Blob made the classic 'start filming' noise, and so people started filming. Several were blooper roll camcorders to put silly filters on, but that was just being thorough. On several nonverbal and nontextual channels he provided a continuous but welcome onslaught of tiny pointers, comparative intent readings, explanations for deviation from focus group tested predictions, and hypothetical worldline image protection mantras. It was direct directing, for direct-to-video. Couldn't credibly accuse it of not having a clear directorial vision when it was beamed right at you, really.
Text for Eclettica Sales popped into being in front of Katsui, abstractionmatter in templatist human-visible spectra. Union VFX communed with the structures of the world, and it was easier done than said.
What she said didn't really matter. Marketing drivel, buzzwords, supervillain bait. This was a targeted ad, and its target was the easily misdirected. Apparently, scamming old people applied to arms dealers too.
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What do you solve?
"Manufacturing is a hassle." Katsui complained smoothly. "We all know what happens when a contractor bails or uppity heroes burn down a factory. But you don't need to be stuck with last-minute monster brewing in the way of your home cooking. Front Makers' Eclettica is the latest and greatest in miniaturized industrial replicators. You too can put wonder and terror back in-house with the factory for all your warfare needs."
Katsui pointed her sword at the summit of grimoire technology, sitting boxlike on a decorative plinth. Cherubic abstractions held up a cloth banner, arched upward to enunciate THIS THING! for additional visual highlight.
Who's the target here, and how do they solve?
Giving a perfectly practiced OHOHOH pioneered by the ojou-sama engineers of the ancestral princess conflicts, Katsui bothered to look supervillainous rather than subservient.
"With the right tools, robot armies and magic superweapons are more forgeable than people want you to think."
Katsui yanked aside a red curtain, revealing a horrifying mass of synsects that unfolded geometrically to reveal a classic armory and vague humanoid soldierbots. As the soldiers bowed deferentially, Katsui flung open a storage locker to draw a full-length sniper rifle in glitzy, gratuitous orichalcum. Her sword grace returned Elsewhere that this probably-inferior artifact gain the spotlight.
"Wonders like this used to take a god-blessed monster years and a bunch of questing." Katsui downplayed her shiny new gun. "Leave that to the Narrative. This special-order baby was hot off the presses in a week, and it only took that long because it's a custom piece."
Katsui flung open a safehouse window and sniped a castle in the revealed background, which exploded. Building an entire full-size stone castle on set just to blow it up was one of the director's favorite flexes. Shoving the gun into the waiting arms of a soldierbot anyway, she pulled up a green jade shield from where it was leaning against the wall.
"They say a good offense is the best defense, but that's where you come in!" Katsui said, beckoning the soldierbot to have at her. She effortlessly parried the explosive shot, which otherwise detonated the armory and sent various explosionproof treasures flying every which way. "You've got your own talents to shine. If you gotta leave it to underlings, make 'em do the boring parts."
She winked, which was barely visible because of her sunglasses, as she caught the rapidly falling soldierbot with the gun only to pitch it like a baseball at some offscreen target. Walking out onto the blasted hillside, she returned to the Eclettica platform. The box produced a light blue hardlight holoscreen at her presence, showcasing the text input, speech input, psychic input, USB port, Voidic WiFi, and other such common accessibility features.
"You may think this is a scam," and they're right to think that but Katsui isn't showing it, "but we're BETTER than a scam! Everyone hates unwanted AI integration. With our It Just Works technology you too can earn the fear of the masses!"
The Eclettica held up a sign stating 'I lack the emotional processing to feel bad about this' as a cut-in panel showcased Katsui typing "Rebuild that base I just blew up."
The Eclettica began printing rapidly. Synsects emerged as blob-carriers for swarms of nebulous nano-goo. They dropped prefabricated blocks that resized into exaggeratedly flush structural components, picking up treasures and setting them back into replacement furniture. For their part, the various discarded-and-flung bots stood up and walked back into place, seemingly unscathed by the boom.
But what's the unique offer here?
"Competitors may have their own drexlers and genies." Katsui said, as a djinn actor uncorked a lamp to shake out an exaggeratedly villainous robot. "But our synthesis protocols beat several baselines in both speed and disaster avoidance. Let alone accuracy."
Flowcharts rose up in bar graphs and record-time trackers. The djinn spawned in a transporter-teleport-based 3D printer, and the villainous robot began magic materialization. Katsui affably glanced at her stage partner Eclettica and issued a vocal order. "Guess what they're doing, and do it first."
On nonvisible channels, the intent annotations for "Next three contests within planned parameters" and "Without collateral damage" were copied from her telepathy pattern into a series of summary speeches over longer technical definitions. Some of the fancier parts would be demographic-specific, or at least not in this one shot. Advert brochure for later, perhaps.
While the assemblers raced to print out object after object, a voiceover man extolled the virtues of the WishBetter prompt correction system to understand intent and avoid obvious failure conditions. Various risks like 'assassinate the user', 'destroy the assembler', 'command length ambiguity' appeared in text and were snipped away by robust solutions. He wrapped it with a plain "It doesn't do what you don't want it to do."
The race was a blowout. Fancy prepared meals? Faster. Advanced nanotech thicksuit for void shield protection? Faster. Baroquified password cracking key? You betcha, faster. Starting later and still finishing ahead was pure flex. The audience didn't need to know that the comparisons were essentially the predecessors this was built on anyway. They did say baselines, after all.
Action call. Showcase some specific buy-in points.
"Our arms dealers route to voidports near you." Katsui announced, pulling open a generic network map that would be replaced in post with zoom-in highlights. "Try before you buy, tailoring your new industrial capacity to your needs and preexisting techbase."
An example of one such arms operation: hulking Alchemical Exalted in red jade and moonsilver. Beautiful in a way that glossed as cyborg, stronger and smarter.
"Packing this much power into a portable takes time." Katsui commented. "As does self-replication. But you can skip the boring steps in exchange for reasonable deals. When this much making is under your thumb, money's more of an energy credit thing."
Easy payments in relevant currencies would be tailored per hit. The camerawoman zoomed in on the sky, off behind Katsui and the Exalts. In mobilized ship-form, a metropolis and a patropolis passed each other in the distant background. It was set up in a way that expressed 'ships passing in the night'. Mostly for the cheap FOMO hit, partly for the 'you can afford to impulse spend' so many villains did to get what they want. Katsui was pretty sure it was for the battleship kinds of supervillain, they seemd like they'd get that.
Director Vaguely Cyclopaean Blob signaled 'that's a wrap', with the attendant abstractionmatter clapper board flipped upside down.
"Good take." the camerawoman agreed, as editors already began proliferating microvariants. Post-processing orbited in signals around the director, leaving the actors to mingle.
-
"You getting a drink later?" the red jade one asked the moonsilver one.
"Yeah, I need it after all that oleander bomb business." the moonsilver one replied.
Katsui hovered excitedly around the pamphleteering process, as support staff routines compiled the best shots into brochure materials. Doing it right after the ad made all the image negotiations easier, anyways. Katsui's supervillainsona was getting refined into a bit of a brand role. Arms Dealer Eclectic, who stole fire from the heavens and handed it to the worst.
A whole set of cities was to hide off the public-facing books. Various medium-profile and low-profile randoms, going off the grid in misleading places and quiet cover-story lives. A fleet-leading Grailship to dwarf what they were offering, a panoply of mechanized heroes, and more than a few raksha nobles. A significant outlay from the Factory Moriarty government: Mycroft Council, Chaldeiot, the Up, signoffs alone had been ridiculous. Well, good thing Chad Buskin was currently the dominant national spirit.
The most terrible trick, to bring resources for life to those who would spend it all destroying each other. A fundamental disagreement with some of the earliest and least accurate federations that had presaged this movement. Plant the seeds of prosperity both into people who would use it well, and people who would go down. Trick them into not extracting the land for all it was worth. Study them from within, and leave bypasses in everything the latter made simply by not perfectly correcting certain vulnerabilities.
Not exactly sophontitarian of them. But when worlds of horror rose up from the gyre, it was all too often certain other chunks that kept fighting on after. Subvert. Overcome. Chip away at the market share of Foundation X and what-have-you time jackers. Play up the fears of Conflict in lieu of conflict, smooth out the civilian problems along the way.
Perhaps the best part of the scam was tailoring. It was often easy to kill, and hard to resurrect. It was easy to cause famine, hard to cause a bumper crop. You could build a profile from someone's preferences, and in the process of interpreting them guide their wishes. To prioritize some solutions over others, to repetitively suggest and mislead as to the exact nature of the answer offered. To build up a world capable of surviving the villain when one day they were snipped by a hero. Not even an accident or carefully engineered counterstrike was necessary. Pass an overgrown home appliance off as treasure.
Narrative struck at bad times. Distort the bad times, and it might have to get heavy-handed in ways that could be mined out. Apply subtle messaging to the right elements, and the mistakes can speak for themselves. "Lucky" dodges of perfectly calibrated blasts. "Coincidental" failures to kill or maim, concealed in "safety measures". Statistics magic was definitely more magic than statistics, after a point. Not every treasure curse had to be overt. Many people didn't even try to understand the windfall before them.
It was good to live in a post-scarcity society. It was probably evil, or at least unnecessarily risk-taking and callous, to use that as a highly unstable means to get quality of life into various evil empires by sabotaging the sabotage. No matter. Katsui Bomb-Disarming Prana had a career ahead of her, to disarm one of the most dreaded bombs of all. Shortfall. That was a Klingon logistics reference, she thought. Doing it in other people's collapsing empires was probably imperialist, right? They'd figure that out, probably. Villains to villains.