Maya Singh was a Thresholder who Peregrin Holzmann encountered on the Great Arc.
Powers & Equipment[]
Physical Abilities[]
Maya's physical abilities by the time she appears in the story are a mixture of a number of different abilities reinforcing each other.
She was faster than Perry was without his suit, and when their swords clashed, bracing against her strike took a full percentage of his batteries.[1] Her kick seemed superhumanly strong, though not strong enough to damage March.[2] She was agile enough to flip out of the way of some of his strikes,[3] using bounding leaps to avoid attacks she thought might hurt her,[4] though she wasn't fast enough to do them twice in quick succession.[5] She wasn't fast enough to hit Second Sphere warrior Zhang Lingxiu even with Perry fighting alongside her.[6]
With her armor on, she could take the full force of his machine-empowered strikes, although they knocked her back and hurt her a bit,[7][8] with particularly solid sword-blows leaving bruises.[9][10] The suit was also unable to crush her or break her bones when grappled.[11] Once she'd gotten a sense of his strength, she felt safe blocking his sword with her arm.[4] However, it's worth noting that March was only operating at about 10% normal capacity due to the damage from the previous world.[12] Perry's wolf form was able to bite through her armor and mangle her hand.[13]
Sunlight Avatar[]
She could leap forward in a flash of blindingly bright light.[7] She could use a burst of light to help push herself out out the way of particularly fast attacks before they connected.[14]
With some complicated gestures, she could produce a blast of light powerful and bright enough to knock aside Perry's thrown sword and blind Marchand,[15] permanently damaging several of his cameras and forcing him to close them or risk the rest.[16] A similar blast blinded the Second Sphere warrior Zhang Lingxiu and left him looking sunburnt.[17] These sunlight blasts also counteract Werewolf transformations, much like normal sunlight does.[18][13]
She wasn't immune to being dazzled by blindingly bright lights herself.[5]
Her sunlight powers run on stored sunlight.[19][20][21] She could increase her speed in combat beyond her normal, already impressive levels.[22][23] She could also fly 30 feet into the air, carrying the armored Perry, and slam Perry into the ground hard enough that the deceleration hurt him through the armor.[24] She could also spend some of her stored light to heal herself,[20][25] causing her wounds to leak light and instantly heal,[26] or touching her wounds with glowing fingertips to heal them.[27]
Needle[]
The edge was "cleverly", subtly sharpened.[28] It was more designed for stabbing than slashing, and she wielded it like a fencer,[29] as well as occasionally throwing it like a spear.[30] It was capable of doing some damage to Marchand,[31][11] and piercing straight through the most vulnerable part of the neck to reach flesh,[32] despite the high-tech alloy of March's construction being completely impervious to any normal steel blade.[33]
The sword was blessed to serve her faithfully and always strike true, and she found herself a subtly better fighter while using it.[34]
Telekinesis[]
Maya has telekinesis which is limited to a small number of objects, and takes a long time to change targets. It's pretty much always linked to her needle, with the other two items being changed out every so often depending on the situation.[35]
She could cause the sword to attack on it's own, levitating it telekinetically, but it wasn't strong enough to resist Perry and Marchand grabbing it.[36] It was, however, strong enough to throw off the accuracy of his attacks when holding the sword,[22] and strong enough to skewer the second the Second Sphere warrior Zhang Lingxiu.[37]
She could use the telekinesis on the sword while it was in her hand to exert some control in low gravity, but it was limited.[38]
Bracer[]
Maya had some carbon-black shapeshifting "nanostuff," which she took the form of a bracer when not in use. It was nearly impossible to remove by force.[39]
Formed into paper-thin armor, it was too tough for Perry's sword to make any mark on.[8][4]
When active, it emitted extremely high-frequency radio signals.[40] March was able to get it to retract by initiating a reset over the radio,[41] overloading it with intense radio interference.[42] The nanostuff sent him an error message in plain English explaining what had happened. [43] However, when March attempted this tactic a second time, it had no effect.[44] Eventually, after long negotiation with the nanites' simplistic AI, March was able to unlock some other capabilities, such as splitting off little nanite "spiders" under his control.[45]
It could react fast enough to protect her from injury if she fainted or suffered a seizure.[46]
In armor form, it "breathed like fine cotton".[47]
It could repair her clothes, slowly enough not to be obvious but fast enough for them to be completely fine a short time after being slashed up in a fight.[48] She was able to use it to "shrinkwrap" March, leaving it behind to guard him, primed to kill anyone who tried to interfere with the armor.[49] Even a small amount of nanites could be used to form underwear.[50][45]
Bouncing[]
She has the power to make the ground beneath her bouncy, gained by imbibing magic sand in her first world. She was capable of bouncing to the fifth floor of a building.[51] She can also bounce horizontally to leap around in combat.[52] She could use it to soften landings from a great height,[6] but this didn't necessarily mean she couldn't be injured in the process.[20][53] She can bounce off walls to soften the impact if thrown into them.[54]
Later Abilities[]
After ascending to the Second Sphere, she gained the usual benefits. Her skin was perfect, she could sense the meridians in her body, and she quickly mastered their ability to speak and understand other languages.[55] Her second sphere abilities didn't immediately give her extra control over or insight into her sunlight abilities, although she could feel the energy when she used them;[56] and she eventually did learn to sense and tap into the meridians that power her sunlight and telekinesis powers.[57] She eventually learned second sphere techniques such as the Moon Gate moonlight blasts (as long as she had stored moonlight),[58] recycling internal alchemy to go without food and water,[59][60] etc.
Perry gave her a werewolf tooth to help her escape Worm Gate, and with her mastery of Moon Gate moonlight blasts, she could easily transform at will immediately. Her wolf form was the size of a horse, with dagger-sized claws and teeth, and dark curly fur similar to her hair in her human form.[61] Like all werewolves, she has impressive regeneration and other physical abilities in this form.[62] For example, she was able to hurt the Grandmaster of Worm Gate, although not much.[63] She speculated that her bio-punk enhancements might have improved her wolf form. Her Second Sphere training and the ability to practice with moonlight allowed her to quickly master the rage of the wolf form with a bit of practice.[45]
Appearance[]
Maya was significantly shorter than Perry, with warm golden-brown skin, almond-shaped brown eyes, thick black wavy[64] or dark brown curly[61] hair, and a lean athletic frame.[64] She was of mixed Indian/Mexican descent.[65] She came across as young, but had a few smile lines on her face; Perry thought she could have been older than him.[66]
She wore black lycra athletic shorts, white sneakers with vibrant green laces, and a hooded sweatshirt with loud colors and flashy patterns, along with her signature needle-sword and nanotech bracer.[64][67] Her hoodie had slots to hold her sword.[68] The hoodie was bulky, and had a bright, abstract, punk-y design.[69] It was a size too big for her, and made her look smaller.[70] Perry thought the brightly-colored look was rather stylish, though not exactly stealthy.[71]
She has a tattoo on her back that's not normally visible.[72]
When her nanotech was in armor form, it was skintight and paper-thin, with the contours of her clothes visible beneath it. It was too tight to cover her sneakers and hoodie, forming underneath them or requiring her to discard them.[73] It formed a slightly larger helmet around her head, like a shiny bubble,[74] with a visor that could be opaque or transparent.
Other Senses[]
Smell[]
To the superhuman nose of Perry's wolf form, the synthetic fibers of her clothing had a chemical smell, and her body had a slightly inhuman scent to it that spoke of her biological modifications - though more human than the smell of Second Sphere adepts. It was an earthy, sandalwood and cinnamon scent.[75] Her nanostuff also gave off a smell to his nose when it made repairs.[76]
Taste[]
Her nanites taste of ozone and charcoal.[13]
History[]
Origins[]
Maya was born in Toledo, Ohio,[77] to immigrant parents from different backgrounds - an Indian father and Mexican mother. [65]
When she was 15, her father responded to a worsening political climate by training her to use a gun for self-defence.[51]
She spent the three years before becoming a Thresholder in the Bay Area.[77] She had a life she wasn't very satisfied with, including a boyfriend of four years and a cat, both of whom she left behind. She worked in marketing,[51] at a tech company, which left her with a poor opinion of tech companies.[78] Specifically, she worked for a large ride-share company.[79]
She stepped through her portal on March 23rd, 2020.[80] She took enough time to pack a suitcase and work her way up to it.[51] She left messages for her parents and boyfriend telling them that she was going to run away, but not to where, in the hope they would be less likely to spend fruitless effort searching for her.[81]
Adventures[]
On every world, Maya encountered and killed Thresholders who were "assholes"; she came to view this as the purpose of her travels.[82]
The first world Maya visited, she arrived in a vast desert, and came to think of it as a "desert world" (although she later learned there were other biomes.) She looked like the dominant local ethnicity. The buildings were deliberately phallic. There were a variety of odd, weak forms of magic; magic "drugs" were common, allowing people to live in fantasy for months or years at a time. Her opponent was a military-esque man named Gunther who had a pistol he used it to intimidate the local population, as well as secret mushroom powers. She killed several locals who tried to capture her for Gunther, before battling him several times. A woman who had taken her in gave her magic sand that granted her the power to make the ground bouncy.[51]
Her second world was one where she, and other people, were tiny, living in the house of some giants. Her opponent was a man named Ming, and they grew reasonably close, but he eventually tried to kill her for rejecting him romantically - and revealed this was a pattern he'd been through on many worlds before. She was trained in swordsmanship by a rat rider, and she obtained her needle sword, which was blessed by a craftswitch to strike true. She defeated him by playing to his misogynistic fantasies, employing all her marketing training, then stabbing him. This allowed her to save her best friend in this world, a rat rider woman, who walked through the portal ahead of her and vanished.[51]
Her third world was a high-tech dystopia near the end of time, who placed her in her nanotech armor to safeguard this valuable anomaly. Her sword skills improved further during their testing on her magic sword powers, sparring against a master fencer who had self-trained against robots. She was rescued by transhumanist rebels, joined them, got a tattoo on her back from them, and worked with them to try and jailbreak the nanotech armor for their use (although this only gave her some very limited control.) Her opponent was a scientist who had the power to create vines from nothing (which he could pass on to others). He brokered a peace between the rebels and the empire, with Maya's capture and execution as one of the conditions, but the rebels betrayed him and Maya won their resulting fight. His final move was to attempt using a metal-based power he'd had in reserve, which accidentally destroyed the space station they were on.[83]
Her fourth world was one where people took on powers from various gods. Her opponent, Spence, was much more physically powerful than she was, and became the powerful avatar of the God of Wine. She bargained with the God of Water for powers of her own, and the two of them largely avoided each other until Maya learned that Spence was "a little fuzzy on the concept of consent". She dueled him ... and lost, badly. Her status and divine powers were stripped from her and Spence strolled on to his next world.[83]
Her fifth world, she arrived in a jungle, and became a "native" guide for some colonialist explorers. To her surprise, she did actually speak the "native" language; it was the same language her father spoke. She killed them after they tried to violently rob a native village, killed some slavers, and gained the power of a sun god from a lost city. She then used her powers to exterminate slavery throughout the world. Her opponent was a pacifist, and had visited 27 worlds, mostly losing. Despite his interference in her slavery-ending efforts, she let him leave after he was defeated.[78]
Her sixth world was a cyberpunk biotech dystopia, where she got some physical enhancements. She fell in with some biohackers and tried to take down the corporations, but found them much more formidable than the institutions of her last world. Her opponent was an elf who sided with the corporations, who was brought down with the help of his own corporate rivals. She also bought a sniper rifle before leaving.[78]
Her seventh world was a world of electrical "lanterns" which protected cities from the monsters outside. She met a wizard named Michaelous who specialized in the multiverse, who was hoping to someday learn to travel it himself, and was able to give her some insight into Thresholders as a phenomenon. The people of this world gained unique powers by eating the hearts of monsters; Maya's was her telekinesis. Together they hunted her opponent, who turned out to be a bodysnatcher, among other powers.[78]
Great Arc[]
The Great Arc was the eighth world she visited.[78][84][85] She arrived about a week before Perry.[86]
References[]
- ↑ She was slow compared to the nameless bandit that Perry had fought in the woods, but she was still faster than Perry was, at least without the suit. He needed to use some of its power to move himself into place for the parry, and their swords clashed. The battery levels dipped by an entire percentage point. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ She ducked beneath him when he came at her, going under him. She gave a surprisingly spirited kick to the back of his knee, but it was nothing the suit couldn’t compensate for, and if she had super strength, it didn’t make her strong enough to take him down - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ Perry struck out at her with a haymaker swing and she dodged it, flipping through the air. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 She was being more fearless, attack after attack, with none of the bounding leaps backward, and when Perry slashed at her, she simply raised an arm to block it. It knocked her to the side, and whatever the hell her armor was made of, his sword — which could slice straight through bone and gouge hard metals — didn’t so much as leave a mark. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 The needle came in fast, aimed straight for Perry’s chest, but Marchand flashed the suit’s lights at full brightness, trying to blind her, and it seemed to work, as she abandoned the attack and dodged backward. Perry was ready to follow her, and he swung hard at her, twohanded. She wasn’t fast enough to do a double dodge, and she was off her footing when the attack came in. The sword slammed into the side of her head, cutting through the hoodie but not the paper-thin black armor underneath. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Maya came to the rescue, dropping behind Zhang Lingxiu from above, having bounced high into the air. He spun to meet her, parrying her needle to the side, and kicked backward at Perry, hitting him squarely in the chest with enough force that the feet of the armor lifted from the ground. When Perry found his feet, it was his turn to help out Maya, but the attempt at a pincer didn’t seem to faze Zhang Lingxiu at all. He dodged and parried with incredibly deftness, as though he had eyes in the back of his head, sometimes bringing his sword up backward to block a strike before moving to another position. If he was having any problems, he wasn’t showing them, though he hadn’t managed to get a good strike in on either of them. Maya had thrown off her hoodie before the fight began, leaving her in pure black aside from her sneakers, and every time the sword made contact with her, it glanced off. - Thresholder, Chapter 41 - The Fight and the Flower
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Maya attacked again, leaping forward with a flash of light that would have blinded Perry if he wasn’t looking at auto-adjusted video. He parried again, and this time, struck out with his fist, full power, punching her right in the solar plexus. She flew backward but was on her feet in an instant, rubbing her chest. “Saw through that one, huh?” asked Maya. She was still rubbing her chest. “Ow.” - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 The sword slammed into the side of her head, cutting through the hoodie but not the paper-thin black armor underneath. Instead, it sent her tumbling. She managed to land on her feet, hand going briefly to her head. [...] Perry was silent. That was it. He’d hit her nearly as hard as he could, and the sword hadn’t cut. Maybe if the armor dropped he’d be able to see a blooming bruise, but she was more than ready to keep fighting. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ She did have a red welt where he’d hit her, and she was sweating, facts that had been concealed by the armor. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ She was playing it cool, but the welt on the side of her head was going to develop into a horrible bruise. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 She slipped past him, slashing at him, another deep gouge in the armor, but he caught her with his foot as she went by, tripping her, and more or less fell on top of her. She was fast, but not fast enough to avoid him grabbing her by the arm, not when she was half-pinned beneath him. It was all done by feel more than sight, the blurry monochrome not really helping much. He tried to crush her, to kick against her, bear down on her, but she wasn’t just flesh and blood, she was something more, even unarmored. He was holding onto her needle-sword, which meant that he only had her by a single point, and the ability of the armor to squeeze somehow wasn’t enough to break her humerus.- Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ He’ll be back online soon enough, but he’s handicapped.” “And that’s why you lost, do you think?” asked Maya. She grinned at him. The bruise was worse than when the meeting started, and it was going to be ugly for days to come. “It’s a ridiculously sharp sword that was going a tenth the speed it should have been,” said Perry. He pointed at her face. “If I can do that with a tenth my normal power, then yeah, I think that single lucky hit might have been enough to end you.” - Thresholder, Chapter 29 - Tea Time
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 Her blast of light was just a moment too late, and he tasted blood in his human mouth. Maya was clutching her hand, letting out a restrained scream. He had bitten through the armor, teeth piercing the carbon black. He was tasting the nanites too, or something like them, ozone and charcoal. “Asshole!” shouted Maya. The skintight black peeled back, and Perry could see the extent of the wound, a mangling of her hand, part of it ripped open. - Thresholder, Chapter 40 - Distant Calamity
- ↑ Perry didn’t need to be told twice that this was his moment, so he pushed the full strength of the suit into a leap that broke a stone tile beneath him. He let himself be carried by the sword for half a tick, just long enough that the float would surprise her, and she was only barely able to dodge out of the way with a burst of light pushing her into a sideways tumble. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ He was dual-wielding, his magic sword in one hand, her needle in the other, but she was doing something with her fingers. He flung his sword at her, but her fingers opened, heels of her palms together, and a blast of brilliant white light knocked the sword to the side at the same time it struck him in the chest. “Recalibrating,” said Marchand, which wasn’t something that Perry wanted to hear in the middle of a fight. The screen had gone dark. [...] “Re-calibrating,” said Marchand again. “Audio only.” The scene bloomed out in front of Perry again, but it was totally different, not video at all, just video as reconstructed from audio, the same thing that March had done before but without any kind of color or backdrop, nothing painted in. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ “I had closed them during the battle, as the overload of light threatened to render them inoperable, especially with a second or third attack of that nature.” What March had thought it actually was interested Perry, since obviously the AI wouldn’t think that it was literally ‘a woman shooting light from her hands’. “As it stands, we sustained damage to a few of them, but I believe with a bit of elbow polish I can compensate. Would you like me to turn the display back on?” [...] If there was a fault with the cameras, he couldn’t easily detect it. The suit was studded with cameras all over, and a few of them were completely shot, but the primary cameras that fed the normal view seemed to be fine, more or less. He was thankful for that. That this was the work of ‘compensation’ worried him a bit, since if Marchand was in charge of inventing details, something like Photoshop’s autofill, it seemed like there were significant opportunities for Perry to be shown either hallucinations or to have magic and miracles disappear from sight.- Thresholder, Chapter 30 - No Master, No Credo
- ↑ “Flashing him,” said Maya. Before Perry could give a command to March, she’d done it, unleashing brilliant light intended to blind. But while Perry hadn’t given the command, March had done it on his own, narrowing the cameras down to pinholes and covering them where possible. The virtual view overlaid the scene, this time at higher resolution, with false colors and most of the background left black so only the vital details were shown, but it was replaced by the actual feed seconds later as the cameras opened back up. Zhang Lingxiu’s eyes were red, along with his face, almost sunburnt, but while his eyes were no longer focusing on what was in front of him, he was parrying their blows and dodging their swords all the same. [...] He was still fighting blind, but it didn’t seem to matter, some perk of the second sphere. - Thresholder, Chapter 41 - The Fight and the Flower
- ↑ The chase didn’t last long though, because as soon as he had caught up with her, she folded her hands together and blasted him with pure sunlight. Perry changed back in mid-air, a fast transformation that left his mind spinning, and he slammed into a thicket of bamboo, which only partly broke his fall. “Nice,” said Maya. “Good to know that works.” - Thresholder, Chapter 40 - Distant Calamity
- ↑ “I do not suspect that your vessel holds a limitless well of power,” said Luo Yanhua. “It is, at this point, possible, but like Miss Singh, you will almost certainly run dry. In fact, I’m surprised that this exercise hasn’t already done that.” Perry turned to Maya. “You run out of power?” “I’m solar-powered,” said Maya. “And yeah, the battery gets tapped. It’s almost tapped now, mostly because I had to heal up. Not sure I could have gone another round.” - Thresholder, Chapter 40 - Distant Calamity
- ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 “I’m all bruised up, thanks for asking,” said Maya. “Couldn’t control the fall right, smashed into a tree more than I bounced off it, and I’m all out of light for healing.” - Thresholder, Chapter 41 - The Fight and the Flower
- ↑ When he got to me, I was in the middle of a fight with some tar-skinned creatures. I was holding my own but running low on resources, stored sunlight in particular.
- ↑ 22.0 22.1 He went at her with the swords, both hers and his, and felt her sword leap around in his hand. It was a liability, and she seemed like she was faster, or putting on more speed. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ She’d sped up somehow, either because of the adrenaline pumping through her system or because she was burning through reserves of some kind. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ The sounds changed, the displayed reconstruction changed with them, positioning them up in the air, with the temple thirty feet below them. Perry had felt something happen, like she’d been pushed up into him, but he had no idea what was going on. Then, he was falling, falling while still holding onto her. They twisted around in the air, or March thought that’s what was happening, and he landed on his back with her on top of him. It was a hard hit that slammed him against the inside of the armor, though he kept her grip on her arm. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ The last bit of kit he had was some kind of crazy scifi gun, powerful enough to put a pinprick hole straight through a mile of city, bursting pipes and drilling through walls, with seven different modes. It worked just fine on flesh too, and on my armor, in case you were wondering. He hit me with it a few times, but I had the energy of the sun, and could heal back eventually. - Thresholder, Chapter 36 - The Seven Worlds of Maya Singh, pt 3
- ↑ The skintight black peeled back, and Perry could see the extent of the wound, a mangling of her hand, part of it ripped open. She seethed for a moment, then tried to hold the shaking hand steady. To Perry’s surprise, light formed around the wound, spilling out of her where the skin had been pierced. In only a moment, it was healed. - Thresholder, Chapter 40 - Distant Calamity
- ↑ “You can heal yourself,” said Perry. He gestured at the faded bruise on her face. “What’s with that then?” Maya gave him a guilty look. “Sympathy,” she said. “It was on my face, I thought people would cut me some slack if they saw that I had taken a hit. Plus if I smile through it, it makes me look tough.” She reached up and touched her face. A splash of light came from her fingertips, and the last of the bruise vanished. “You’re the big bad bully who beat up on the small wittle girl." - Thresholder, Chapter 40 - Distant Calamity
- ↑ His eyes were stuck on the tip of her sword. It really looked like a needle, and he couldn’t figure out what advantage that would give, if any. The edge was sharpened, but cleverly, so it was difficult to tell. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ Maya had taken up a fencer’s stance, with one arm behind her back, needle fully extended. That made sense, since it was more of a poking weapon than a slicing weapon, but it wasn’t something he was familiar fighting against. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ I threw my needle like a spear, as the villagers had taught me, and got him right in the chest. - Thresholder, Chapter 36 - The Seven Worlds of Maya Singh, pt 3
- ↑ Her sword was doing work against his armor, leaving marks, and a particularly hard thrust flashed up warnings. She’d gone for a place where the armor was damaged on the chest, a mark that his own sword had left there during a fight with Cosme. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ Perry felt the sword pierce the armor at his neck, pushing straight through the flexible metal sheathing there. He tried to scramble back, but he was blind and disoriented, and the sword stayed where it was, stabbing into his flesh. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ The right arm of the armor was dented, as was the chest piece, and in a few places he’d come up against swords that were sharp enough to gouge the metal. That included a few marks from his own sword. He frowned at that. It was a wonder metal, something beyond the material science of his Earth, nearly impervious to small-caliber weapons. Steel melee weapons, whether they were hammers or swords, could do sweet fuck-all against it. Yet it had been accumulating damage through the course of his adventures - Thresholder, Chapter 30 - No Master, No Credo
- ↑ The magic there was subtle, blink and you’d miss it, and they barely understood it. A craftswitch blessed the sword, telling me that it would be a faithful companion, striking true, and it didn’t really feel any different after that, except that every fight I was in went better for me. It was really easy to be ‘on’ when I fought with the sword, keyed up and with my head in the battle, and it wasn’t until way later that I actually got any confirmation that I wasn’t just imagining it. - Thresholder, Chapter 34 - The Seven Worlds of Maya Singh, pt 1
- ↑ My telekinesis is the unique one I got, linked to, at the moment, three objects, though I’m hopeful that it’ll be more once we get to be second sphere, because it seems like something that internal alchemy can help with. The needle is an obvious go-to link, but I rotate the others depending on what I need, weapons, defense, utility, whatever. It takes a bit to change. I think your suit is a bit too big for me to move, but I guess we could test it. Everything else was pretty minor, since I wasn’t in the world for long enough. - Thresholder, Chapter 36 - The Seven Worlds of Maya Singh, pt 3
- ↑ She moved away, but the sword stayed, still making attacks against him. She wasn’t holding it, wasn’t even touching it, it was just moving of its own accord. It took Perry some time to realize that, then more time to figure out what to do about it, but he reached out and grabbed the sword, getting more gouges on his gauntlet in the process, until at last it was firmly in his grip. He was dual-wielding, his magic sword in one hand, her needle in the other - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ The needle came in from nowhere, high above Perry’s head, and Zhang Lingxiu had either no energy left to dodge or simply didn’t see it in time. The needle caught him in the dome of his head and sliced through his body with enough speed to pin him to the ground. He moved only slightly after that, death throes but nothing more, but it had seemed as though he wanted to remove the needle from his own skull. It was pulled out on its own not long after though, and Maya landed beside him, bouncing to a stop, the pure black of her armor making her look like a nightmare. - Thresholder, Chapter 41 - The Fight and the Flower
- ↑ She flew higher and slower, under the gravity of the moon, up and away with no way of getting back. She pulled on her sword, trying to use telekinesis to arrest her momentum, but she was flailing and tumbling, out of the fight. - Thresholder, Chapter 41 - The Fight and the Flower
- ↑ They took my needle for ‘safekeeping’ and tried to take my armor, but it couldn’t be removed from my wrist no matter how they tried to grease me up, and eventually they decided that it wasn’t worth the effort. - Thresholder, Chapter 36 - The Seven Worlds of Maya Singh, pt 3
- ↑ “The bracer on her arm began moving, and when it did, there was an extremely high frequency radio signal.” - Thresholder, Chapter 30 - No Master, No Credo
- ↑ “Let me try something, sir,” said Marchand. The black catsuit almost immediately began peeling away in strips, and Maya dashed backward to almost the edge of the informal combat arena to stare it. The strips weren’t falling to the ground, but rather, retracting down to coalesce with other pieces of itself. “I seem to have initiated a reset of its functions, sir,” said Marchand. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that again.” - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ “You used that to turn her armor off,” said Perry. “You … overloaded it. You could do that again?” “I believe it might be possible, sir, though with any attack we must bear in mind that defenses tend to crop up in the wake of success,” said March. “In this case, the overwhelming interference I was able to generate appears to have made the device reset itself.” - Thresholder, Chapter 30 - No Master, No Credo
- ↑ “I would like to claim some ingenuity on my part,” said March. “But unfortunately, I was only reading a message sent out along a protocol in plain English with several markers to allow one such as me to read it.” “It broadcast that it was doing a reset?” asked Perry. “Apparently so, sir,” said March. “I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps I was identified as a friendly device who had overloaded their communication in error.” - Thresholder, Chapter 30 - No Master, No Credo
- ↑ “And you tried the attack again?” asked Perry. “Yes sir,” said March. “There didn’t appear to be a response.” - Thresholder, Chapter 30 - No Master, No Credo
- ↑ 45.0 45.1 45.2 Thresholder, Chapter 56 - Allies
- ↑ Maya collapsed to the ground, totally limp, hands not coming up to break her fall — but the nanostuff was fast enough to do it for her, making sure that she didn’t break or bruise. [...] I would characterize this as a high-grade seizure, though some of what she’s experiencing doesn’t match the symptoms. [...] She didn’t look like she was having a seizure, but he didn’t have any idea what a seizure actually looked like, and was going to have to trust Marchand. - Thresholder, Chapter 42 - Crossing Over to the Other Side
- ↑ I don’t think I can spend every single night in armor though.” “Why not?” asked Maya. “It’s uncomfortable,” said Perry. He had grown to feel like that was a sadly overlooked fact about armor, a detail that sailed straight by most modern depictions of what it was actually like to wear the stuff. “Huh,” said Maya. “Mine breathes like fine cotton.” - Thresholder, Chapter 29 - Tea Time
- ↑ Her stylish streetwear hoodie had been cut up, but had slowly healed itself through some mechanism that Perry couldn’t see.
- ↑ “Robot buddy is in the armory, relax,” said Maya. She held up her wrist, to show that it was bare. “I gave him a black shrink-wrap treatment, just so if anyone tried to mess with him, they’d die a swift death.” - Thresholder, Chapter 42 - Crossing Over to the Other Side
- ↑ Maya turned back into a human, collapsing down onto the ground, naked. He lowered himself until he was next to her, then took off his helmet and handed her the nanites that he’d taken the day before. She grabbed them without a word. They weren’t enough to armor her, only to give her a little bit of modesty. - Thresholder, Chapter 55 - Stories pt 3
- ↑ 51.0 51.1 51.2 51.3 51.4 51.5 Thresholder, Chapter 34 - The Seven Worlds of Maya Singh, pt 1
- ↑ When he put down his sword, I bounced off the ground, closed the distance, and stabbed him in the heart. - Thresholder, Chapter 34 - The Seven Worlds of Maya Singh, pt 1
- ↑ Then he pushed me off the fridge. I’ve gotta say, I appreciated that majesty of the height a lot more as I fell. Then I hit the ground and bounced, dislocating my shoulder in the process but otherwise unharmed. I hadn’t told him that I had that power, so one point to me, I guess. I had never done a bounce from that high before, and once I got over the adrenaline rush and fought through the pain, I was pretty damned pissed off. - Thresholder, Chapter 34 - The Seven Worlds of Maya Singh, pt 1
- ↑ His go-to move was trying to slam me against the walls, but I bounced off - Thresholder, Chapter 35 - The Seven Worlds of Maya Singh, pt 2
- ↑ She gestured at her face. “Perfect skin. And it took me a day, but I got the translation thing working, which feels so good. I can actually talk to my assistant. And you can probably feel the meridians that they were talking about, yeah?” - Thresholder, Chapter 42 - Crossing Over to the Other Side
- ↑ “You have your vessel?” asked Perry. “The sunlight one or whatever?” “It’s still missing in action,” said Maya. “But I can feel the energy when I fire off a blast of sunlight, or heal myself, so … it’s gotta be a vessel somewhere, which means that I should be about to balloon it out.” - Thresholder, Chapter 45 - The Fall of the Grouse Kingdom
- ↑ “I cheated,” said Maya. “I’ve got two extra vessels, the sunlight one, but also a small one, the one that I use for my telekinesis. It’s got a limited size, but it generates energy until it’s full. Then I just needed to learn the trick of sending that down into the necessary vessels to supplement.” - Thresholder, Chapter 57 - The Celestial Kingdom
- ↑ It was cool, right, blasting myself in the head with the last little scrap of stored moonlight? - Thresholder, Chapter 56 - Allies
- ↑ By all rights she should have been emaciated, but she hadn’t been idle while locked up, and energy recycling or internal alchemy or whatever it was had left her lean and muscular. - Thresholder, Chapter 56 - Allies
- ↑ Perry hadn’t eaten during their whole trip, and his stomach was rumbling. Maya had simply said ‘learn to not need food’, which she knew wasn’t helpful. - Thresholder, Chapter 56 - Allies
- ↑ 61.0 61.1 She landed on all fours, fully wolf, snarling before she even hit the ground, and she lunged at the grandmaster the moment she was steady, fangs wide. Perry had known that his wolf form was larger than a normal wolf, but he hadn’t quite realized the size difference until he saw it in her. She was the size of a horse, with razor sharp claws and teeth like daggers, pelt the same dark brown as her curly hair had been. - Thresholder, Chapter 55 - Stories pt 3
- ↑ A quick glance showed that Maya had been smashed against one wall and was bleeding from her head, but she was on her feet fast enough, and her missing paw was already mostly regrown. - Thresholder, Chapter 55 - Stories pt 3
- ↑ Maya was doing better than expected, in that she’d actually landed a hit on the grandmaster, who was bleeding from his forehead. She was barely standing, the regeneration and general toughness of the wolf form being pushed to its limits. She was all rage and snarls, but dripping blood onto the ground and favoring one side over the other. For his part, the grandmaster was mostly watching her instead of pressing the attack, knocking her away with his walking stick. It was daylight out, and the wolf form wasn’t at its full power, but even under the full moons, Perry didn’t think it would be enough. Even with both of them, he didn’t think it would be enough. [...] She was still fighting the grandmaster, snarling at him and being pushed to the side. She had been half-blinded by one of his counters, and the fur was matted down with blood. The grandmaster didn’t seem to be trying to kill her, for whatever reason, but with every passing second, he was getting more information about how a wolf fought.- Thresholder, Chapter 55 - Stories pt 3
- ↑ 64.0 64.1 64.2 She was different from the others, not dressed in the same style of clothes. Instead of the sweeping fabric of the second sphere or the dull, functional wraps of the first sphere, she had on black lycra shorts that showed off golden-brown legs and white sneakers with vibrant green laces. Her top was a hooded sweatshirt with loud colors and flashy patterns, and in her hand was a needle the size of a sword. Her right arm had a bracer on it, carbonfiber black. Striking, almond-shaped brown eyes sized Perry up. Her skin was a warm tone, but darker than anyone else around. She didn’t match the local ethnicity either. Thick, wavy black hair was bunched up behind her head, because the hood was up. She was shorter than Perry by a good margin, and she had a lean, athletic build, at least from what he could tell. Of everyone that Perry had seen, she was the only one with piercings. - Thresholder Chapter 27 - Digging Graves
- ↑ 65.0 65.1 “Dad was an engineer from India, came over on scholarship and managed to stay, loved America,” said Maya, as though she was already bored of the biography. “Mom came up from Mexico at sixteen, a paralegal, big into woo. I’ll be kind and count that as a single question.”- Thresholder, Chapter 42 - Crossing Over to the Other Side
- ↑ Perry’s mind was saying ‘girl’, but she had smile lines, and not much in the way of baby fat. It might have been the sneakers or the bright clothes that made her read young, but there was a chance she was older than him. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ Maya had her hoodie, athletic shorts, her sneakers, her oversized needle, and pretty much nothing else: no bag, pack, or bedroll. She had the carbon-black bracer as well, ready to spring into action. - Thresholder, Chapter 39 - Road Trip
- ↑ The girl shrugged, then put her sword away, which involved slipping it through a pair of grommets in her hoodie. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ Once he’d sized it up, he took in her hoodie, with its bright colors. The graphic design on it was wild, neo-punk, or maybe like the camouflage on a warship that was heading through garishly chemical oceans. It was also bulky enough to hide something under it, guns or worse. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ Perry’s eyes fell to Maya again. There was something about the hoodie, which was a size too large for her, that made her look small. - Thresholder, Chapter 42 - Crossing Over to the Other Side
- ↑ She looked at Maya, who was wearing the brightly-colored hoodie, which was admittedly stylish, but also stuck out like a sore thumb. - Thresholder, Chapter 41 - The Fight and the Flower
- ↑ I got a tattoo on my back, which I might show you some day — it caused a stir in the bathhouse a few days ago. - Thresholder, Chapter 35 - The Seven Worlds of Maya Singh, pt 2
- ↑ Maya had thrown off her hoodie before the fight began, leaving her in pure black aside from her sneakers, and every time the sword made contact with her, it glanced off. - Thresholder, Chapter 41 - The Fight and the Flower
- ↑ Her armor flowed over her, slipping over her skin beneath the hoodie, coating her in skintight black. The familiar shiny bubble formed around her face. - Thresholder, Chapter 48, Moths, pt. 2
- ↑ Maya Singh smelled chemical, which was almost certainly because her hoodie was made of synthetics. There was nothing else like it, aside from Perry’s own power armor, though the smells were very distinct from one another. It wasn’t a bad chemical smell, nothing that burned his nose, in part because she’d been wearing those clothes for so long. Beneath that, there was the smell of sweat and the oils of her skin, which grew stronger throughout the day. She smelled more human than Luo Yanhua, but at the same time, there was something different about her, a difference in a body that had been altered in the back-alley of a crumbling megacity. Still, the base of the smell was earthy, sandalwood and cinnamon. Perry didn’t say any of that out loud. It would have been too embarrassing, and that was coming from a man who was literally naked in front of them. - Thresholder, Chapter 40 - Distant Calamity
- ↑ He sniffed the air, and got mostly the campfire. Maya had repaired her hoodie again, and that had given off its own smell, faint but distinct. - Thresholder, Chapter 40 - Distant Calamity
- ↑ 77.0 77.1 “I was born in Toledo,” said Maya. “The last three years, before I left, I was living in the Bay Area.” Perry frowned. “You’re from Spain?” “What?” asked Maya. “Oh, no, Toledo, Ohio. You know, I was going to make fun of you for immediately thinking of Spain instead of Ohio, but yeah, it’s one of those cities that most people would stare at you in blank confusion about. Toledo, Spain at least has some history to it. I mean, I’ve never been, but from what I understand.” - Thresholder, Chapter 42 - Crossing Over to the Other Side
- ↑ 78.0 78.1 78.2 78.3 78.4 Thresholder, Chapter 36 - The Seven Worlds of Maya Singh, pt 3
- ↑ “A marketer working at a tech startup,” said Perry. “Yeah,” said Maya. “I mean, not technically a start up when I was there. But yeah. Putting on a smile in meetings, secretly hating everyone and myself for being a part of that pointlessness. I mean, ads work, but we wish they didn’t, right?” “What kind of company?” asked Perry. “Er,” said Maya. “A ride-sharing company.” Perry stared at her. “You worked for — wait, a big one or a little one?” “A big one,” said Maya. “And I would go to work and say stuff like ‘oh yeah, we’re offering a great product for people, it’s win-win-win, we’re disrupting the evil taxi companies who have this stranglehold on the market’, and yeah, okay, sure, but the real thing was that I wanted money and they were giving it to me, and nothing else mattered.” - Thresholder, Chapter 57 - The Celestial Kingdom
- ↑ “What was the date when you left?” asked Perry. He didn’t hesitate at all. “March 23rd, 2020,” said Maya. “Oh,” said Perry. “That’s … right at the start of the pandemic?” “Yup,” said Maya. She had a far-off look. “Turned out okay?” - Thresholder, Chapter 42 - Crossing Over to the Other Side
- ↑ “I didn’t hear anything about you leaving,” said Perry. “Did you, I don’t know, post it to social media? Because I think I would have seen it.” “Nah,” said Maya. “The portals look fake. I mean, they look like an effect that a 15-year-old could do with some LEDs and bargain-bin compositing. Right? Give me five seconds and I could find a more convincing portal on TikTok.” “Yeah,” said Perry. “Still, people would notice you missing, right?” “I left a message for my parents and my boyfriend,” said Maya. “But it was a ‘I’m running away’ message, not an ‘I went through a mysterious portal’ message. I figured that would be easier for them to swallow, so they didn’t spend ages looking for me, but who knows. And no way would you hear about me going missing.” - Thresholder, Chapter 42 - Crossing Over to the Other Side
- ↑ “You know why we’ve been put into this thing, the fights, the worlds?” “No,” said Perry. “Do you know?” “It’s the assholes,” said Maya. “Every single thresholder I’ve met has been some unique flavor of asshole, and I’m here to kill them, do my part to reduce the number of assholes across the million and a half universes. The more I kill, the stronger I get, the stronger I face, the stronger I get to eliminate.” - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ 83.0 83.1 Thresholder, Chapter 35 - The Seven Worlds of Maya Singh, pt 2
- ↑ Seven worlds, six wins for me, three worlds, how many wins for you?
- ↑ I’ve been to — I guess I’ll just tell you — seven worlds now, and I’ve had talks with the other thresholders, and I’ve talked to a wizard who seemed to know his stuff, and yeah, I think we can skip the whole thing where I find out that you’re secretly awful, or maybe even not-so-secretly awful. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart
- ↑ “How long have you been here?” asked Perry. [...] “Week or so,” she said. “You?” “Less than a day,” said Perry. - Thresholder - Chapter 28 - Counterpart