DEAD or ALIVE
C94,000,000,000 REWARD
Notify THE GRAND ADMIRAL of the TERRAN STAR NAVY
Magic exists in the depths of space and few people command such mastery over it as Anne the Void Witch, Terran spellweaver and resident cauldron bubbler of the Devil's Fang Pirates. Approaching her own half-century, Anne has seen and done much in her short time on this mortal coil- many among the Devil's Fang accept an early death to be their ultimate fate but for the Void Witch such an end is only the beginning of a new realm of arcana to explore. Once a plucky kid, Anne has aged into a reclusive and eccentric personality, possessive and secretive about the goings-on inside her room aboard the Coelacanth. The captain advises her crew against trying to sneak a peek inside the Void Witch's chambers. "Leave her be, just trust me. I can't help you if she catches you snooping around in there. Just leave her alone." Despite her odd habits and her reclusive tendencies, Anne is a cherished friend and a valued member of the Devil's Fang.
It's been said that magic is the shaping of a wellspring of arcane energy and an expression of the will of a spellcaster, and Anne has devoted decades of her life to studying not just the ars arcanum but the very wellspring of energy itself. While she has mastery over fundamental schools of magic, like levitation, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, parlor tricks and the like, her core discipline and the school of magic she's most known for is transmutation, or the ability to shape living essence the way a sculptor works in clay. The dream of old Terran alchemists, Anne can tap into the essence within one thing and transform it into another thing, be it living or otherwise- this is great when the pirates have a surplus of one supply but are low on another, and a nightmare if the Dread Hunter decides to spare a Star Commander long enough to feed them to the Void Witch's arcane curiosity. As an older and more powerful spellcaster Anne has begun exploring the complex and difficult school of conjuration, not merely shaping existing living essence but drawing from the great wellspring itself and shaping raw essence into new life- not merely pulling a rabbit from a hat but creating the real, warm living rabbit from the aether itself. It is a dangerous and hubristic discipline but if any spellcaster has the chops to tackle the arcanum it would be the Void Witch.
Transmutation and conjuration are both disciplines of magic which require tremendous amounts of arcane energy to practice, and on Terra Firma that's not an issue but in the depths of space batteries of burnable energy become a significant factor in a spellcaster expressing their will. Anne has taken an academic interest in the way this arcane essence works as a means to fuel her formidable sorceries. The short version is like this: magic draws from a potent source deep within Terra's iron core and when you venture out into space you're far away from that source so you got no juice to power your magic. People and objects of Terran origin contain residual motes of this arcane essence just by existing in its presence, soaked up like a sponge resting in dishwater. By adding a material component to one's spellcasting one can draw out this residual essence and use that as the medium to express one's will, making magic possible in space. This material component can take the form of trinkets or baubles- crystals and gemstones are popular batteries- but if a spellcaster is savvy enough they can use a few motes from a small trinket to telekinetically pull a belligerent Terran into their grasp and use the much richer battery of energy inside them to fuel much larger and more complex spells. This is one of the Void Witch's favorite tricks on a raid with the Devil's Fang. In her older years she has taken to carrying a Terran skull around with her, channeling resonant energy from mundane objects into the skull, which has a much greater bandwidth for resonance than most other objects and thus allows her to cast really big spells really quickly. No one is sure who the skull belonged to and plenty have asked, but after a short consultation with the skull Anne will inform them that she is not obliged to share that information at this time.
Due to their notoriety normal markets are off-limits to the Devil's Fang, so they'll often send an away team to frequent pop-up markets on any of Saturn's hundred moons. Anne loves joining these away teams and frequently asks the captain and first mate about when the next trip is happening, sometimes interrupting other conversations to sate her curiosity. Despite the inconvenience they'll often oblige her, as a cranky witch on board is generally bad for business. Anne loves to rummage through black market shops, scouring merchants' offerings for curios and relics rich in Terran essence. She's taken to carrying a satchel filled with odd little objects she can use as components in her spellcasting and the black markets are one of the main ways she keeps a fresh inventory. The captain has one rule for her away teams: do not leave Anne unattended, do not let her out of your sight. Do not let her wander off on her own. June is usually more permissive about it but when Anne shows up with a bagful of knick-knacks Anibelle will ask her directly how many of those were bandits or bounty hunters who recognized her in the market; Anne will often avoid eye contact and try to change the subject but Anibelle will insist she "put the bandits back where you found them". She'll let the Void Witch keep the bounty hunters, though. She is a handful but you gotta look out for your friends.
Relying on Terran relics is a stifling limitation, which is why a big part of Anne's research into fundamental magic essence has involved exploring alternatives to the great Terran Wellspring. Anne's thesis is that all worlds have a well of arcane energy within them, not just Terra, and she believes Mercurians are proof of this theory. She is fascinated by the Mercurian Gifts of Sol, these hyperspecific purviews of mastery that don't seem to require any study, using the Mercurians' own caloric energy as a battery power to express their will. As a member of the Devil's Fang Anne is surrounded by Mercurian crewmembers, and she has an unlimited capacity for asking them weird questions. Anibelle usually bears the brunt of these queries, as her purview is quantum mechanics and this ties directly into the other major part of Anne's thesis- what if you don't need to draw your arcane energy from any world? What if you could tap into subspace, the void between concurrent dimensional instances, as your arcane battery? What if proximity to a planet is no longer a limitation for spellcasting?? What could possibly go wrong???
So let's dial back a bit. Anne wasn't always known as the Void Witch and she wasn't always an outlaw. She was a plucky young kid once, bright-eyed and full of wonder about the world around her. She learned about the possibilities of magic at a young age and took to its study like a fish to water, quickly mastering simple tricks like levitating pencils and seeking greater challenges. She soon outgrew her home village of Tandiga and took to traveling Terra to expand her knowledge of the ars arcanum. She'd been told by her elders there wasn't much for a magician to find in the void of space and thought that was a challenge worthy of her young talents, so off she went to seek her own truths.
Her travels eventually brought her to a small Terran city, a hub for the curious and inordinary. There she would study with spellweavers from cultures across Terra, learning how they perceived the arcane wellspring and how they handle its ebb and flow, expanding her own understanding of her craft. More importantly, though, she made friends in the big city, other curious and inordinary folks. Among those friends were Anibelle and June, a pair of workers from the nearby United Robotics facility who liked to head into town after a long day's work. They met by chance in a small coffee shop, the barista confusing orders for "Ani" and "Annie". The three laughed a bit over it but they sat down to share their drinks and ended up becoming friends, meeting back up frequently to hang out and enjoy life together. Anne would share her magic knowledge with the pair, June would talk about her hometown crystals and the engineering wonders she could do with them and Anibelle would tell stories about busting her knuckles in a fight with an Android in some far-flung bar on another world. Those were the halcyon days for the trio, but they sadly were not to last.
Anibelle and June had both been offered jobs on a project that would have them leave Terra for Venus, so over coffee at the shop they met at they said their goodbyes and parted ways. Anne had hoped to share some new branch of magic she'd been studying with the pair but the craft wasn't ready for showtime yet. June said she'd have to show them when they get back, agreeing to keep in touch and meet up again. The next day they would board Res Ship One enroute to Venus and run afoul of their own fates. Anne, meanwhile, continued her own fateful studies. Imagine, if you would, an azure blue sky fading to a murky grey, light fading but for a scattering of candles in a dark brickwork attic. Anne had found magic without magic. Anne had discovered magic from outside of reality itself. She discovered magic, powered by subspace.
So anyways, Anne conjured a horror beyond human comprehension from beyond the dimensional veil. It was a being without anatomy, like a gob of three-dimensional TV static, pulling apart and bunching up like a ball of cotton. It was born of a place whose laws were not like our own dimension's, but it existed in our dimension and so it was forcibly made to conform with those laws, crunching and distorting it like a tracking error. The people and things it engulfed were likewise caught in this conflict of dimensional law and were rendered in impossible ways, their cries distorted like damaged playbacks. The young witch had to draw from the Terran wellspring in order to jam the horror back into subspace. Its time here was brief but the impact it had on the city around her was lasting. Anne realized what she'd done, but words escaped her. All she could manage was two quiet little sounds. "Oh fishsticks."
Years had passed since Anibelle and June left Terra. They learned about and objected to the terraforming of Venus, they put a manager in an airlock in self-defense and they began to sabotage the terraforming operation. Other workers joined in their cause but enough of their peers feared for their own jobs that cooperation with the Terran Star Navy was their safest option, and soon this band of malcontented workers met and were fired upon by Star Patrollers. Things escalated, the "gentle option" was off the table and the Devil's Fang emerged, born of the Terran Curse of Arrogance as an equal and opposite reaction to Terran expansion. Anibelle and June found themselves at the helm of this outfit, managing an operation that now consisted of multiple ships, backup hideouts and an economy of liberated material goods. It's been a long, strange journey from their little coffee shop.
What started as an insignificant spark had grown into a small fire and the Grand Admiral had begun to take notice. He'd heard reports of squabbles with labor from the United contract but dismissed it as just being the course of business- this was a big project and he had plenty of ships, what happened on Res Ship One was an isolated problem, he imagined at the time. He does not retain that belief today, as these malcontented workers now had a name and a body count, they were stifling production and what's worse, his men were spreading rumors about encountering them, about the sights they'd seen. It was hurting morale, which meant it was time to take the Devil's Fang seriously. In order to fight them he had to learn more about what they'd become, learn the truth behind the tall tales and the rumors circulating camps. They'd been stealing supplies which meant they had to be selling them somewhere, to someone. He contacted his spymaster- find out who is buying Terran contraband and bring their suppliers into custody, immediately.
In their trademark fashion, a small ship crashes through the hangar door of a large Terran space station. CS-6, known as Cold Storage, was an off-world penitentiary where Terra detained its most critical prisoners. One of the Devil's Fang economy teams got picked up selling steel beams to a fence who'd been compromised, intel was they were being held in CS-6 for questioning. The Dread Hunter would not allow herself a reputation for leaving her men to such fates, so the fool's task of breaking into a high-security prison fell on her shoulders. Fortunately their pirate economy had been good to them and the Devil's Fang had outfitted themselves with better gear than the salvage weapons they'd been wielding before. They say Cold Storage was the first time Terran ears had heard the hungering growl of the Dread Hunter's chainhalberd echo through the station's cellblock hallways. Combined with the Grim Shard's Songblade, its piezoelectric pings shorting out electronic security measures long enough for the Dread Hunter to chainsaw doors open, the team hit CS-6 with singular focus and without hesitation- they came to recover their friends and bring everyone home alive. It's been said to this day a number of entries on the Grand Admiral's bounty board were escapees of CS-6, freed in the Devil's Fang's raid on the prison.
The pirates made their way towards the inner depths of the prison, the isolation block. The Silent Flame, the Casket and the rest of the team covered an exit route from prison security while the Dread Hunter and the Grim Shard sought out their friends. They weren't in gen pop, they had to be held in solitary. The computer systems weren't helpful, the residents of solitary didn't have names assigned to their cells, just anonymous case numbers. That's fine. They'd just have to chainsaw the hinges off the doors one by one until they found their friends. Time was fleeting, though, as Terran reinforcement was enroute to CS-6 and if the team was boxed in that may well be the end of the Devil's Fang. One by one they pulled the doors off the isolated cells until the pair of outlaws found an unexpected surprise.
"Oh. Hi, Anne."
So, it turns out that the source of your magic energy has an effect on the way your will is expressed. Terran essence burned "clean", transmutations and conjurations produced the desired results, but the energy source was limited. Subspace energy burns "dirty", it's source is infinite but the same spells' results were distorted, suffering from conflicts in natural law. Anne had a few years to reflect on this discovery locked away in Cold Storage, having conjured up twisted subspace bits of chalk or rock to scratch notes on the walls inside her cell. It's not certain if it was the isolation or the exposure to subspace that had an effect on her but Anne emerged a bit less-hinged than she arrived. She was still Anibelle and June's friend, though, and she was a formidable sorcerer, so the anonymous inmate found a welcoming home among outlaws. The Void Witch joined the Devil's Fang, lending her talents to their cause.
It's been about twenty-four, twenty-three years since the old friends' strange reunion. Anibelle and June had brought a few cups of coffee to Anne's room on the Coelacanth, just like the old days back on Terra. She kept the lighting dark, although bright colors emanated from all manner of arcane relic or bubbling experiment. The talks with her old friends helped a lot with keeping Anne grounded, keeping her eccentricities from carrying her too far astray. She was telling her friends about a new theory she had- a way to distill pre-cast spells into a liquid format, infusing the spell itself into the physical component. Or was it the magic battery into the spell itself? Either way, she thought this might be a safer way to manage subspace energy and make those spells a bit less horrifying. Anibelle and June both double-check their coffee cups and looked to each other, making sure they're still holding the right containers of liquid. It's been a long, strange journey, but keeping close with old friends is a rare balm for a wearying world.
She still won't tell them who the skull was, though. That one's a real head-scratcher.