What it all really meant is that the ones with white hair were the wimpiest, and the ones with off-white hair could be dangerous. They passed around Psychic Weapons like candy, and no true drow would handle something less than QL20 Masterwork if at all possible, thanks to their Obsession.

As for hereditary matriarchal status, that wasn’t present, although there was relative equality between the genders considering how androgynous the males were. Women certainly weren’t any worse in finesse combat than men were, and with their similar builds, the males couldn’t get functionally higher strength than the women. It was all about Dex and Attack Bonus, and gender was a non-issue since strength and size were hallmarks of the stupid and easily dominated.

They simply didn’t believe that normal humans could get past them without using hefty science or psychic powers, which their better tech and psensitivity would alert them to. A Ten+ with all the bells and whistles coming in and getting past them while avoiding all their alternate senses with the Darkstalker Feat was simply too low a probability to even consider.

I slid past their few sentries without much effort, weaving between their Vat-born guards, waiting hovertanks and platform guns, past the holo-stalae masking the arriving forces from observation overhead, and closed in on the Portal.

The yawning gap in reality offended me as a Null, and it took some effort not to pop an Interdiction and just shut them down. No, no, we wanted this lesson to be expensive, we did.

I slid in along the hillside, hair keeping soft holds as I sidled away above the guards, watching the drow forces sliding and strolling through, unconcerned, arrogant, confident, and expectant of the fun to come.

Chalice slid out into my palm, and, still shielded by my hair, I stuck her point into the Portal.

-Resonance with the Underweb established,- she /told me after a few seconds. -Identifying planar coordinates. Extrapolating baseline... okay, let’s go!-

I headed back along the way I’d come, and as I did so, I looked for a few likely recruits, and those snobbish jet-skinned supermodels in bikinis, half-armor, too much skin, long crescent knives, and pink hair indicating artistic appreciation of bloodlust and slaughter looked like just the things.

-Blow them Crowns anytime,- I /informed them, taking up position on a section of rock above the stripper queens with knives.

---

Up on the plateau and in the badlands, about thirty-ish miles apart, Percy and Chauncy Briggs gave one another thumbs-up, and triggered the two Crowns they’d brought along and placed on the ground. With pops of incoming air, their Hammers took them out of there, back along their lived-lines, even as the two brawny lads sighed about blowing thirty crystalweight of high-psitech gear.

Still, it was going to be quite the show.

The time delays went by quickly, and the Crowns triggered in unison... in inverted mode.

Dimensional resonance of distortions in the Veil accrued instantly, reached out with one another, extended back along the new rip in the Veil from the Underweb Portal, touched it, and I heard it surge and hum as it did so.

Dimension-breaking power flashed backwards along the weak points of the Vulnerability to Chaos effect, and a single tiny thread touched the outskirts of the Warp Zone.

There were a lot of eyes watching as the edge of the Warp Zone flared, harmonized to the new Crown effect so similar to its own, and bulged out, ripping open a new and unregulated Rift to the Warp as it howled back along that weakness in the Veil.

---

The drow all felt the tremble, and turned to look in surprise. Of course, the side of the hill was in the way, so they couldn’t see the warposcopic panoply of illuminated clouds devouring the landscape as it came surging this way, it wasn’t quite visible yet... although the Portal starting to whine and emit some really unnerving lights in the thaumaspectrum had all their glowy eyes wider than usual, looking kind of funny, and then the panic hit.

There were shouts and screams, lunges for the Portal, calls to close the Portal... but it was way past that point now, as the weight of the Warp was coming down, flooding into it, forcing it open even if they cut the power –

The sky went all them unnatural shades of colors from three spectrums, and tough-as-nails dark elves screamed in horror at what was coming. I thought it pretty damn funny myself.

The sky came down, and reality with it.

Oh, and I jumped.

I landed right behind the four screaming strippers I’d picked out, my Tails wound around them and the stingers plunged into the back of their heads. Their screams of horror became gurgles of transcendent joy, and the daggers tickling the edges of my Tails in flashes of reflex fell limp as they looked at the wonders of the skies and began to drool.

My Null extended out around me, locking down reality, while everything around me literally Went to Hell.

Drow died in artistic styles. Eroded by the wind, spontaneous explosions, liquefying, petrifying and crumbling, instant combustion, implosions, reality-breaking spirals of flesh-popping proportions, sucked into point singularities, grabbed by invisible jaws and devoured whole, hurtling by at speeds which eroded them to nothing, fading away as their screams lingered on, swarms of various kinds of things gathered to them and ate them away, specters gathered and dispersed leaving nothing behind...

Really, I didn’t see any two die in quite the same way. Impressive!

The Warp flooded right into the Portal, which was no longer black, and as it did it sucked up all that military stuff and brought it right along. Things were already growing on the sleek war machines; faces and mushrooms and tentacles and flames and spikes and all the good, fun stuff, and if they were twisting around and breaking apart from the stress occasionally, I could understand that, too.

Reality around me was pretty fluid, only the ground I and my new collection of drooling black kitten-elvar were standing on was unaffected by what was going on, but I imagined whatever was on the other side of this Portal was having a very bad Last Day.

---

Two minutes, and the Crowns broadcasting their enhanced, reversed signal burned out, and crumbled to ash and dust.

Without the resonance, the Warp extension naturally lost strength as the Veil came back in with a sniff, affronted at the intrusion, and gradually squeezed the path through reality down and cut it off.

There was a new canyon about a half-mile wide and a hundred yards deep cutting across the plateau and the badlands beyond, making a beeline right for the location of the Portal. The patterns on the rocks weren’t something anyone with an attachment to sanity wanted to look over, and I noted for the field report that stopping sightseers from inspecting the walls here too closely was probably a good idea. Some Fleet Ships should make a note of using it for precision orbital bombardment target practice in the immediate future, just to get rid of the visible Signs left behind.

My four happy black kittens were on their knees, leaning back against me, having the time of their lives. Of the Portal, there was no indication it had ever been here, although reality had solidified a little bit more cleanly around me, as I’d blown an Interdiction to congeal things, and the cascade had made sure the canyon basically stopped right where the Portal had been, looking like most of the force had been sucked down and away into it... if you knew it had been there.

-Celestia, Jensa, Keva, come on in. I’ve got some presents for you.- I /said, as I gently put the more purple and better-geared of the four drow women against my Dex mark, and as she looked up at me blissfully, nailed her to it with Chalice.

The three duelists wouldn’t take too long to get here, as they’d been standing by in the distance. My little black kittens were only looking forward to becoming part of my daughters, drool, drool.

I was sometimes amused that while I was the best fencer of the Ranthas, I technically wasn’t Talented at it. The only thing that gave me an edge was the luck of being an Exemplar Lite... which wouldn’t work against anyone Beyond Law and Chaos, which any decent duelist among us (meaning everyone, since we were all decent duelists) took at first opportunity.

Celestia was Ice Cold, which meant naturally Intimidating and emotionless, able to demoralize an opponent rapidly even if they were immune to fear (like, oh, other Ranthas) and then spring the sneak attack damage in.

Jensa was Eagle-Eyed, bonus to Spot Checks... and incredibly good at sussing out weaknesses in an opponent’s fighting style thereby, also springing in the sneak attack damage at will.

Keva was a Natural Fencer, which gave her a bonus to Sense Motive and Feint checks while in combat. This meant it was hard to fool her, and it was remarkably easy for her to fool someone else with her maddeningly hard to follow and elusive sword style.

Technically, they were all better duelists than I was, and only my ExLite bonuses and higher Level meant I could stay equal with them while sparring.

Against others, of course, I still had the advantage, as just being an ExLite and having those Luck bonuses active against others was as good as a Talent, and far broader in application.

The drow had a hard-on for pitched melee combat, and especially savage, artistic, finesse-style pitched melee combat. They also had women all over in fighting roles.

The Briggs boys had no desire whatsoever to go prancing around as namby-pamby little jet-skinned pointy-eared gits. The Ranthas? Couldn’t wait to try it and Nail a drow of their own to their Marks, and maybe visit a certain City in the Gloom of the Underweb.

---------

Anatolia compiled the observation reports destined for the Dukes Twilight coolly.

There had been four other Warp Incursions of violent power during the whole two minutes the effect had happened.

One had been inside the Warp Zone. The scattered forces there reported that the landscape in the area had destabilized, looking as if it had reverted to a much different typography as the explosion blew out, and then a Warp Surge had come in and deposited a whole bunch of crap they’d now have to kill, including some dark elves among them who hadn’t looked happy when a bunch of their shooters and vehicles weren’t working. The demons popping up hadn’t sympathized much.

Another had been far to the north on Janus III, where a minor research station of the Mechanist Guild was engaged in production of high-end alloys off two special veins of ore found nearby. What was left of the station was screaming foul chants on the bandwaves, and two cruisers were moving into position to bombard it to magma from orbit.

Two other Mechanist stations on the far sides of the planet, overseeing other minor mining operations there that ostensibly dealt with programming and instrument calibration for some high-end sensory equipment, had respectively been blown apart by a purple and green fireball, and for the other the ground had come alive, formed a set of worm jaws miles across, sucked down the entire station, and left a big empty hole in the ground going down to who knew where.

Anatolia was sure there was at least one other Portal in the dead zone around the Celestial Tribute, but it was ruined at some point during or after the impact of the great starship.

Proof that the Mechanists had located the Portals and simply hidden them away to research themselves was now gone with those locations, and likely any records and research they had obtained was now being trash-canned as speedily as possible to eliminate all other traces.

Which didn’t mean the Dukes didn’t know that yet again some very, very important information had been withheld from them. The Portal near Abepb was probably never occupied simply because it was too near the kiloplex, and the planar activity would inevitably be detected at some point.

Elvar Portals on the planet were just not something you hid from the defense authorities...