Planning against Titan Fortuna

"I don't know if it is," I said. I thought about what Chris had said, twice. About the others and what they'd observed. That this wasn't a fight we could win. She'd already plotted her moves. "We speculated earlier that she chose how our powers would be altered. And she made them more aggressive. A little sloppier. Trying to capitalize on this weakness, using tools she arranged for us to have… it feels like the wrong answer."

The fighting was ongoing. Now that I knew to look for it, I could see that hesitancy, the lack of coordination.

"The last times it felt like we made any moves that mattered, it was with the opposite of this aggression she prompted in us, giving us aggressive powers," I said. "When we went to the shard world."

***

"This? This entire landscape? It's not about them, not really. It's about us."

"What do we do about them, then?" he asked.

"I don't know, Chicken Little," I told him. His birds had taken to the air, and his huge-as-fuck eagle was unnerving me with how close it was flying. I wasn't sure if it was an anxiety thing. He might have hoped it could catch him and slow his descent if he fell.

I secured my grip.

"All I know," I said, "is what we were doing before wasn't working."

What the hell had we even been doing, before?

No, that was a stupid question. I knew what we'd been doing, and why. Fighting, because we had to.

But this was a problem with a lot of moving pieces, and some of those pieces were so big they were hard to wrap my head around.

I thought back to lessons with Uncle Neil. Lessons I'd learned in handling my mom. I thought of Dean.

Tattletale had mentioned a thing, when I'd described scenes I'd seen, throwing out the word 'submission', and it had rankled, felt wrong. Imp had laughed.

That wasn't the word. That wasn't the idea. It was bigger than that.

"I think… I might have an idea," I told him.

***

"Maybe you should start by explaining your plan," Sveta said. "You want to communicate with the Titan?"

"No," I said. "I want to communicate with the person inside the Titan. We've been going about this entire thing all wrong."

"I could have told you that," Chris said.

"You did tell us that," I told him. "They're stronger than us, we can't win a fight like this, it's all stacked against us."

"Look at that," Chris said. "You went to go pick up Chicken Little, and you came back with Chicken Little and a brain."

"Shut up, Chris," Sveta told him. "Where is this line of thought going, Victoria?"

"In my old sparring matches with my uncle Neil, before I had powers, and even after, he taught me how to fight someone bigger and stronger than you. If you're fighting someone
like Ashley, like Swansong, you can't take what she's dishing out, so what do you do?"

"Pray," Rain said.

"You get out of the way," Chris said.

"Exactly. You get out of the way. These guys, they're precogs. They aren't dishing out punches or blasts that shred spacetime to disintegrate everything in their paths. They're dishing out destiny."

"You want to get out of the way of destiny?" Rain asked.

"One of my plans," Chris muttered. "I was ready to go, but that went to hell."
I shook my head. "Not getting out of the way, exactly, because there's another component to fighting enemies bigger and stronger than you are. I even used this against Titan Oberon. Use their strength against them. If they swing for you, help them move in the direction of the swing, and they stumble. It's a principle in Judo, and other grappling martial arts, to use your enemy's momentum against them."

"You want to seize destiny… and help it along?" Rain clarified his question.

"Yes."

***

The scenes played on the walls around us as we talked about them. By the time Byron was done talking, there was one scene on one wall, and another on the other. Cracks spreading, the entire world turned to crystal, and the entire world with their heads in their hands.

"It takes a short while to roll out when initiated," Number Five said, pointing. "Forty minutes."

"Then that's our goal and our window of opportunity," I said. "Titan Fortuna wins, she pushes the world to the brink."

"And we push it back?" Rain asked.

"Let's hope," I told him. "We need to talk to the person inside the Titan to figure out if there's room to negotiate. It's possible she might not need to eat or drink, but she has other stressors. That fuckery with the Simurgh- sorry, Chicken."

"Imp swears more than that."

"It's a stressor for the Titan," I said. "Which means maybe there's room to steer this, or maybe she's so focused on her end goal that she can't see what lies beyond it, but a lot of that depends on talking to the person, and that means we need to access Kenzie's tech."

- Various Chapters, 19-20