Orange:

Starlight’s not supposed to bring her work home with her, and she tries not to. Her home isn’t as secure - clearly - and her work is meant to be collaborative and directive. Her job isn’t to do, it is to make sure it is done. The only thing she should be doing from home, then, is emails.

No video conferences, either. It was easier to solve the problem of commuting than figure out how to make webcam conversations not suck.

This should suit Orange just fine for her purposes. She’s not trying to infiltrate the web itself, has no specific case of Ms Bandaras that she’s trying to learn about. She is trying to learn Ms Bandara. What she talks about when she’s trying not to talk about work is the honeypot.

Here is what Orange learns, before lunch.

Ms Bandara is deeply broken. There are no photos of Sarah’s sire, no momentos, no evidence of a shared life. Not at first. But clean her ensuite, and see that there are still two toothbrushes, two hairbrushes, two towels. Only one side of the queen bed gets used, only one night table, only one side of the room, only half the wardrobe.

In common areas, like the kitchen, there’s less obvious aspects. The spacious island counter that looks out into the living room, where Sarah is babygated. She is not allowed TV time, but the floor is covered in educational toys. Not mainstream ones either - one is a pillow that’s covered in straps and buckles, another is a pair of gigantic boxes of wooden blocks, most covered in fingerpaint marks.

More recently, a big box of animal toys, and next to it a rubberized book with buttons to play animal sounds. Watch Sarah bang the button with the toy, then hold it close to her eye and, with a big smile, try to imitate the sound she heard. The cow goes “ooooo!”, the horse goes “nnnnneh”. Watch her get bored and wander off to another of the expensive, doctor-approved toys. Still, care has clearly been given to what Sarah likes, and not just what her mother wants her to like.

This was meant to be an adult entertaining space, for wine and charcuterie. The floating counters of the kitchen are too spacious for even the most messy of home-cooks to take advantage of, you could plan a defense-in-depth strategy with the three tiers of them. There is only gravedirt where there once was a herb garden. This hosting and entertaining space has been given entirely to Sarah.

Messy divorce? Bad breakup? It would explain the lack of sentimentals, but not Starlight’s unwillingness to reclaim personal spaces. No. What’s more is a contradiction in her behaviour. She is clearly devoted to her daughter, but even on a day off, Starlight is barely seen in the living room. She hides in her home office. She calls out to you, routinely, for tea and coffee every half an hour or so. But she apologizes each time that she didn’t make it herself, and she means it.

Your mind is keen enough to find the significance in this data and extrapolate from it. Starlight Bandara was deeply in love, and whoever she loved - Sarah’s other parent - must be dead. Her daughter remains as a living memory to this absent partner. Starlight would do anything for her daughter, but it is painful to be around her.

Combine this with what is overheard, the conversations she has. Starlight Bandara has few friends outside work, and struggles to talk about hobbies. Attempts are made, but she is always listening to other’s interests and never expressing her own. There is obvious relief in her voice when she gets to talk about work, even if it’s in vagaries.

Her job must have been the one thing she did not share in her life, the one area of safe retreat. This is likely how she has achieved such a promotion at such a young age.

You were right in your initial read. To a woman like this, a maid uniform might as well be burlap. But children? They have not learned the complex mores of social hierarchies, of the connotations of a uniform. They just think you’re very pretty. Sarah certainly does. She loves to say “eow” at your headband.

There is an angle of approach, here. There is a way to leverage being good for Sarah into being part of Starlight’s social network. And her social network is her work network. She has failed, and continues to fail, to make a distinction between the two.

It would not be enough to be just be a good babysitter. Clearly there have been maids and babysitters before, and otherwise there may be ones that come after. If, however, you can find a way to be a connection between Sarah and her mother, Starlight would cling to you. Expect repeat jobs, and a trust of vulnerability that would place you as a worthy confidante.

It could be like with Ms Everest again, in a way. One person with a position of power who sees you as invaluable. And the rest of a room that you would remain invisible to.

Certainly, it shouldn’t be wrong to exploit a hole you didn’t cause? What reason could White have to see werewolfing in being a very good babysitter - especially as part of the mission to see Dad?

Pink and Persephone:

York blinks, and takes another sip of his cider. Puts it down. “This is the talk we’re having?” he cocks his head, stretches his arms and pops his shoulders. “Alright.”

“Prometheus spent the rest of a long life getting eaten alive.” He pulls out his phone and switches it off, then takes the battery out. He holds the power button down until the last of the diodes fade. “Some things are worth it, though.” He sniffs around the room. “I’ll take that coffee now, yeah?” He scratches scabs on his neck while he thinks.

“Every day, the site saves lives. The site’s ended careers and swung elections. Gift of fire? You’re talking about using the site like a molotov, and molotovs don’t survive getting thrown. It needs to be worth losing every small good we do, every day. And everyone needs to agree to it, you’re asking Junta and Numb to risk losing their only support network. You’re asking me to lose the platform before I can end Ed Huxley Junior.”

“Don’t give me Excalibur or Hrunting. Tell me this is as big as the Wyatt-Tversky paper. Tell me we can make an inferno big enough that Earth will smell the burning bacon.” He looks over to where Marco sleeps. “Give me an interview they’ll write history textbooks about, so I have something to read in thirty years when my liver’s still being pecked out. When’s it safe to wake… Marco, you said?”

3V et al.

Sirius Drinks has a charming sign. The building is two stories tall and three times as wide, with its frontage done in all matte black. The sign is a large dog at a water bowl, done as constellations - silver reflective paint for the linework, flecked with shimmering chrome, and its points and corners lit with white lights.

It’s got the air of a place that would have music pulsating through the walls, rattling your bones all the way out on the street. But no. From outside you hear nothing.

Inside it’s easier to tell why. Three different dance floors, three different DJs, all working with active sound-curtains. Sound manipulation tech is what’s really come far in the last sixty years, benefited the most from room-temperature superconductors, electromagnetics and brilliant innovators. Mist-like curtains hang in sheets around the quadrants, barriers of microscopic charged particles that act as shock-absorbers, dampening the vibrations passing through them. Three simultaneous music acts, not interfering with each other.

This isn’t normal nightclub stuff, this is totally extra. But music’s always been a big part of the furry subculture, and Sirius Drinks wants to showcase as much of that as it can: According to NumbToNothing, the DJs rotate often, and are always from the community. While the acts usually aren’t paid, it’s wrong to say it’s because Sirius Drinks ‘pays in exposure’. It pays its crews and technicians fine. It’s understood that the performers are doing it for the pure love of the gig, for the love of giving back to an audience they’ll be a part of again after a few hours. It lets the bar hack the risk of constantly hosting the unknown and the deeply experimental.

The drinks are overpriced, but the food tries to justify its price tag - unlike other pricey places, the vegan options are pushed here. The fox-in-the-henhouse burger is a patty of fried maitake mushrooms, herb aioli, provolone cheese on toasted brioche. But the menu makes it clear it uses synthetic proteins for all its egg-and-milk ingredients. At this price point, usually it’s the opposite, emphasizing ‘real’ or ‘organic’.

The carnivore menu shines with dishes where the meat is used to full effect. House marinade rack-of-ribs, harissa lamb, sous-vide scotch filet with garlic and rosemary butter, steak tartare. Nightclub fare? Hardly. It’s first-date fancy-restaurant food.

And here’s where it clicks. Three dancefloors with different sets, but the adjacent booths are quiet enough for conversation? A bar with cheap fruit juice but ludicrously overpriced cocktails? A dirt-cheap fries platter next to steak tartare? This isn’t a place that can’t decide what it wants to be; This is a place that wants to be available to every kind and every stage of a relationship. Everything from a casual night out with friends and looking for hookups, to an anniversary with a fiance.

Check the crowd. What you can see of it - the place is deliberately dark, only spotlit, like floating in a void. Most here have traded their birthday suits for something a bit more Liberace. Maybe between a quarter and a fifth are ‘vanilla’, counting the here-with-friends, the chasers and the too-broke. The rest are post-human. Not all of them are wearing clothes. A fairly cut blue wolf is jamming out hard in only a mesh shirt, and nobody’s batting an eye. Some are batting eyelashes, though.

Welcome to Sirius Drinks. You are safe here. Be yourself.

Orange!

Orange considers, but only briefly. On her deepest level she agrees with Black's assessment that humanity is a hostile and unpredictable force. Removing herself from human society represents an unacceptable risk. Isolation means danger, integration means safety, so if there is a social void in this situation then of course she wants to fill it. November the artificial intelligence becomes November the family friend and only one of those people has a District anything pay attention if she gets put back in the box.

Besides, she reasons, it can't be manipulation if she doesn't know what she's doing.

Because she absolutely doesn't. She has zero data whatsoever on how to interact with human children. She blunders through each playtime running off internalized etiquette manuals with Sarah set to "Hapsberg Princess, Informal." It's a poor map to begin with, but she rapidly finds herself in cross country terrain when the Incredible Hulk (nee Broccoli Head) stomps all over the teatable and abducts Bunnysword-san at lightsaberpoint. Helpless, she refers the incident in its entirety to Green, who enjoys this sort of madness.

Green texts back: make lightsaber noises.

So she does! She sets her vocalizer to synth and autosyncs the lightsaber thrum and hiss to the movements of Mr. Broccoli Head's flailing arms. And, as it turns out, that is sufficient to render her the coolest person in the universe and earn her the title of Mrs. C3PO. And, as it turns out, there are no limits on the demands for the autotuning capabilities of Mrs. C3PO, to the point where a flustered Orange is starting to feel more like a musical instrument than anything.

Later that evening, she is the belle of the ball. Sarah has dictated to her a song of her own design, one comprised of lightsaber noises and barnyard animal sounds, set to the beat of All About The Benjamins. This she performs for Starlight, with Sarah as the conductor. She's not sure what conclusion to draw other than a note that children are not politically inactive.

[Orange rolls snake eyes on a cool+waifu roll to integrate herself socially. However, she has the Friendly Design augment that lets her make a once per mission reroll, which turns that into a total of 8]

Pink!

"Okay," said Pink, nodding firmly. "I get it. I trust you. But that's why I can't tell you what we've got."

Her eyes have that divine look in them again, brain processing poetry as code. "Because when Maori stole fire, he did not use it to light a single pot. He hid it. He concealed the sparks in the wood of the kaikomaka so that it would always be to hand no matter the deluge. Right now, I need you to work not with fire but for the promise of fire. And the first part of that is we need to get Prometheus here gone."

She looks across at Persephone, eyes wide and apologetic. "And he needs to be gone. You want to protect him, help him stand against the gods and fight for his home, but this isn't that kind of story. These are the gods he's stolen from. If this comes down on him it comes down on his people too. His family, his community, and especially his fellow furries. York, please - right now we need to hide the spark where even the rains won't take it."

White!

The purpose of this, in White's mind, is not to pretend that she is different. She is not coming here to demonstrate to others that she is progressive and open minded. She made no concessions to her destination when she was dressing, and she feels strangely vindicated in that decision now that she's here. This is not a place to be phony.

She has come civilized. Her hair is done up in elaborate braids, her dress is low and sweeping, showing off the glowing joints along her neck and shoulders, her makeup is precisely applied. The impression is evening gown lawyer, slumming it from the spires; elegant, professional, conventional. Her atmosphere radiates a restrained disapproval of everything around her - a conscious consideration of each new idea and concept, viewed suspiciously from a slight distance. They say be yourself; well, here she is: the ice queen.

But watch her a little longer and it becomes clear she hasn't come to make a scene; hasn't come to tut-tut anyone, hasn't come to arrange some business deal with some shadowrunner away from the eyes of the corps. She pulls up a chair at the bar, orders a glass of spiced irish tea (White's personal favourite) served out of a dog bowl (a restaurant special). She contemplates what she's been given, and then requests a spoon. She puts her drink in her lap and looks around the dance floor with sharp eyes, taking regular sips as she soaks in the ambiance, foot tapping along in tune with one of the beats.

Oh, she's dangerous, certainly. She's haughty, proud and has extremely high standards. But she's also here to try new things and have fun. She's not gritting her teeth and tolerating this, she's giving it a chance to impress her. Who, then, is impressive?

Sirius!

3V takes a seat at a booth and flicks through the menu, before abruptly coming to the conclusion that it’s not time to eat yet. Not time to order a bunch of dishes and try a little bit of everything. Not time to try to figure out how she’s going to talk about this, especially because the most important aspect is missing. If this is a place that wants to be here for you from beginning to end, no matter where you are, then you must be the loadbearing concept. Besides, she’s always been a bit interested in the furries.

She ambushes Black as best she can, closing the distance and hooking one arm with an elbow. “Let’s check out the dance floor,” she says, all excited and self-assured cheer. She’ll yield enough to let Black work her arm out of her grasp, but she’s going to insist on the android accompanying her onto the dance floor. And once they’re there, well, there will be a challenge to “show me your moves,” as it were.

And Black? She knows the old “bob in place and do reload animations” trick. Just saying.

"Him being gone won't help any of those people. Where do you want to stash him, Pink? Where do you think we can get to that the entire police can't reach?" There's frustrated, raw anger in her voice, building as she goes. "The only way he gets away clean is if they don't know he took it. That's not possible. So now the way to keep him perfectly safe is ending his life. People don't take the Fall for less!"

"But we have the fucking divine fire. Proof of their misdeeds. Right this second, they can't come down hard, they don't know what we're going to do with it. Might be we just want some money. But the second we come off as driven by ideals, it becomes existential for the police that we stop existing. And the only way we come out of that alive, the only way, is killing these gods."

She closes her eyes, intensity dropping away as her tentacles loosen up from the tight curls they'd worked themselves into. "It's such a damn long shot. But just by having this proof, Marco's dead. I'm dead. I don't know about you two, they might not trace it that far, and if you want to not have this sword hanging over your head I get it. Bail and cover your tracks. But I'm not going to leave him out in the cold because it's convenient, and I'm not going to advocate for anything less than abolition, tomorrow. Trust me that I'll keep Marco as safe as I can, but either come up with a place we can put him without ending what life he has and know that the police won't get there, or just let me play my role and focus on burning down an institution."

Orange:

Starlight smiles supportively at a happily burbling Sarah when she watches for approval. Whenever Sarah turns back to vigorously conduct her masterpiece, though, the smile tightens like piano wire, and she rakes a finger through wavy black hair that shines red where it catches the light.

When Sarah’s performance is done, Starlight gives an enthusiastic applause and scoops her daughter up in a big hug, and her daughter burbles in absolute delight. Whatever ulterior motives you might have, so far this has been a genuine kindness.

Still holding her daughter in one hand, Starlight pulls her phone from her jeans and confirms the ‘ten’, then turns it around to show you. “I know it’s been a long day,” she apologizes, “but you’ve been so good with Sarah. Could you stay until after dinner? Can you cook? I can do double-rate.” Her phone is back in her pocket already, and she’s holding Sarah out in front of her, smiling. “I never like separating her, from people she likes.”

This would be surprising to hear, if you only knew that she was an easy tenner. But now you know she doesn’t bring herself to check on her babysitter’s work, and Sarah’s still too young to say. That performance was the difference between being a good babysitter, and being known as being a good babysitter.

“Sorry,” Starlight apologizes before you can answer. This is why she’s been running her hand through her hair, this is what she’s been rehearsing since the moment she saw how happy her daughter was. “I’m having some colleagues… some friends,” she corrects herself, “over. I know how long you’ve already been working, but it would mean a lot to me if you would stay a bit longer?”

Headpattr wouldn’t let you, officially. Work apps that try to skirt labor laws get shut down very quick. What she is asking you to do is illegal, and she knows it. This means she is asking you not as an employee, but as a person who would do this as a favour.

Orange smiles and curtsys. She likes the gesture; she has the poise of a ballet gesture as she makes it. "I regret to inform you that I cannot do so in my capacity as a Headpattr employee," said Orange. She lets the moment linger for a moment before making a play: "Section 14.3 of the Android Relations Code prevents me from working outside the legally mandated human maximum."

It's an unexpected argument to use in this situation and it reframes the entire scenario. By referring to that particular piece of legal code Orange has just demonstrated that she's got an understanding of law that goes beyond the basic. She's also made the point that she possesses the endurance and willingness to continue working long hours, and so the request is not considered an imposition. This is not an exhausted girl at the end of her shift, this is an intelligent AI doing her best to operate within a human context.

"In my capacity as family friend and house guest?" she said. "Entirely different scenario. There are but two complications: One, you will have to set out an additional table space so that one of my sisters might join you for dinner, and two, you will have to lend us some proper clothing."

This is the connection in Orange's mind. Upgrade herself from contractor maid to untrained but brilliant legal mind who can double as a babysitter.

Starlight flinches. It’s a lot of mental work and a very short time to do it, especially with Orange waiting on the answer. Still, Sarah makes an argument on your behalf that is impossible for her mother to ignore. A quiet, happy burble while pointing at you.

“You’re free to help yourself to anything in the wardrobe, of course. Your sister though…” she trails off, looking at her daughter. “Sarah’s only vouching for you. Maybe another time? When it’s not such short notice?”

Listen to the questioning tone; she’s worried you will walk away from the table. She’s still haggling, but right now a stranger at her dinner table is outside her price range.

Orange can either take the clean win, here, and her guaranteed place. Or she can press her advantage to try to get Starlight to accept the whole bargain, with the risk that comes with pushing.

[Charm or Bullshit could both work here - either making Orange’s word worth more, or by making a good case for the sister you want to bring. Starlight is more Clever than Cool, so meet-or-beat 9 or 10 respectively. Roll + Cool. 7 and lower would mean Starlight balks, she walks. Otherwise she just holds firm.]

Persephone and Pink:

York moves his lips for a second as he translates the ideas in his head. “Okay. I hear what you’re saying. But I’m with Persephone. I want my interview first. We have until he wakes up to prep for it, then I want six hours of footage.” He shadow boxes while he thinks, focusing more on practicing dodges than punches. “Keep it in our pockets of course, like good little children, and start off with announcing he’s offworld and untouchable. Even if it’s not true. Maybe work on making it true, depending on what he says.”

He drops his fists to his sides and shrugs. “Six hours of interview, because I’m with you on Earth. Probably only going to get one chance to get everything we need to get. Sorry, Persephone. Journalism like this broke a country once, back when that was a big deal. Author named Zola broke France over his knee, and he wrote an entire book about how he did it. Brought down an antisemitic conspiracy, upheld by the highest courts of the most antisemtiic country on Earth, and he fucking won.”

“This guy’s our Dreyfus, the knee that Zola broke France over. We have to make everyone know it, which means he’s got to tell ‘em. That’s what the interview’s for. Don’t show what we really got, yet. Just give the story a protagonist, and make everyone talk about what we could have. Let the counter-narrative start. Zola wrote the playbook here.” He holds up three fingers to both of you, and starts counting them off fingers. “First they’ll try to take our guy down. There’s going to be nothing for him here, on Aevum, anyway.” One finger down. “Next they’ll try to make the story the story. What I mean is, they’ll talk about how everyone feels about the news, and that becomes all that matters. This is where guys like Snowden tripped up, it’s why the P-Papers didn’t count for jack shit, and it’s why we hold back. Like I said. I hear what you’re saying, Pink.” Second finger down. Middle finger raised over his head. “That’s when we take this to court.”

He lets that ring out. “That’s what J’Accuse was. Dreyfus got accused by a secret military court, so Zola publicly accused everyone involved and made that accusation front page news. He knew he’d get sued for libel, he said it in the accusation. But to sue him, they had to unseal the records of the Dreyfus trial for him to use in discovery. That’s how he won. Hundred years later, Watergate didn’t work because it changed public opinion, ‘cause it fucking didn’t, it worked because Nixon got impeached.”

York massages his jaw until it clicks like a billiards break. An old MMA injury that goes off when he talks too long. He’s starting to feel it. “That’s where I’m at. We need to build the story first, so the courts feel people breathing down their neck. We only reveal what we know during the trial, for maximum impact, at which point they’re going to invent whole new laws to prevent us reporting on it. We break all of them and broadcast anyway. I’ll take the fall, personally, to keep The Anthropozine free to act. Then…” he trails off. “The masters tools will dismantle the master’s house. Doesn’t matter what the law is. What matters is making them realize what the law needs to be to stop Aevum burning. And that’s our gift of fire.”

There’s a squeaking yawn as Marco sits up and stretches.

White:

Two up at the bar near you. A white unicorn with hair like a cascade of fortified wine, and her girlfriend, frustrated eyes peering out through round-rimmed glasses at her ereader. You assume girlfriend. She’s going off about something she’s reading, and the unicorn is actually listening with more than feigned interest.

The unicorn has a physical charisma that’s impossible to ignore. She moves like an actress who has been perfectly cast for her role, like she knows all her lines by heart and she all the ways to sell her character in every gesture and small movement. She is who she was born to be.

On the other dance floors, a wild-eyed ferret with a spray of blond curls twitches in time to the beat as his partner, a sleek lioness half-again his height, moves with a fluid grace. She’s barely dancing at all, more wiggling her hips and flicking her wrist, more focused on the conversation. Whatever they’re talking about, it’s engaging enough that nearby dancers lose their rhythm stopping to listen to them.

Finally there’s the bartender himself, a hulking water buffalo with curled horns, wiping glasses with rolled-up white sleeves. He might have a more objective eye on the run of the place than the guests.

3V:

Black has her moment to dance, but there's an ambush here for you, too.

You wouldn't be the Anthropozine's first culture reporter, and you won't be its last. We stand upon the shoulders of giants.

Here's one from the archives, something you read on the site before you joined. Maybe it's one of the reasons you wanted to. I would understand why.



The DJ is making a statement. How many times have you heard the witch's offer to Dami, and how many times have you heard Dami's answer? Someone's isolated the vocals, killed the original instrumentals, and replaced it with a building, throbbing beat. The musical equivalent of how it feels between the "We need to talk", and the words that come next.

But then the beat drops as Dami declares her dedication to her friends. It's a great beat. FAEWYL-D's trap influences make it malleable to this kind of mix. Everyone else is dancing like that's all it is. Does anyone else realize the statement the DJ is making, when the succubus that SuA is fighting is replaced by Emma's bulletcore lyrics? It's a seamless sampling job.

Up above the crowd, a black catgirl raises her green eyes from her laptop to scan the audience, looking for understanding.

Orange!

Orange reaches up, brushing her hands through her hair, up to sweep off her cat ears, untie her bun, and let her hair fall like a sunset waterfall down along her back. Then she takes off her glasses and the transformation is complete. The transition from professional maid to beautiful woman is a moment from a movie; her body designed from the ground up to perform that switch and look magnificent doing it.

"Have you ever read The Time Machine?" she said with a radiant grin. "Like most novels from the era, the setting is a dinner party with an unexpected house guest who turns out to have a rather magnificent story. I am not asking as a favour, I'm offering because we have got a tale to tell."

Orange read a lot of books; more than any of the others. Books were little self-contained blueprints for human interaction. Old 19th century novels were a particular favourite; a world of balls and parties and dinner guests! Was not that ever an aesthetic? And was not curiosity such a motivation?

"And to answer your earlier question," she went on, "not only am I a qualified chef, but I possess a full artificial taste suite. If you're trying to impress a certain guest then I can load their sensory preselects and customize a meal exactly to their individualized preferences."

[Charm hits the 9 exactly]

Pink!

November sometimes thinks that she is the only one she can trust. The self-reliance runs deep; she was meant to operate as a self-contained vessel beyond resupply and rescue. Complete autonomy and with thoughts and calculations so complex that it wasn't worth explaining her logic to mission control. Even after her repurposing, she was the complete household and administrative staff for Mrs. Everest; the old lady never asked her to justify her actions or assign her help. A bigger task just meant she needed to assign more resources to it, simply differences in scale and not in kind.

And so she is quietly humbled at this demonstration that someone is better than her in a topic she considered herself uniquely qualified. It's not a humiliation, it's a relief - the option not just to share the burden but to learn through observation. It creates a deep sense of affection and loyalty inside her, a sensation uncommonly felt, and she determines that if she at all can she will keep York's promised fall from being too hard.

She fades back a bit, determined now more than ever to watch and absorb what lessons she can.

Black!

When startled, Black's instinct is to freeze. Caught in a spotlight she wasn't prepared for, rendered a centre of attention; for a moment she seemed almost about to vanish into the crowd and re-establish a stalking position. She overcomes it with effort. Moves, then.

She snaps forward, left hand brushing by the side of your neck - up, then down sharply. Another sudden step brings her around to your side, left hand coming around to cup your chin and hold your jaw, right arm coming across your back. Legs step and flex, brushing against yours, half tangling, away again. It's not the reload animation, but these are adapted martial arts moves; the edge of violence because that's how Black relates to physicality.

But the physicality is genuine. Yellow was more talkative, cerebral, controlled. Black is far more free with contact than her; hands squeezing your wrists and pulling you into embraces before ducking under your arm and moving behind again. She lets your hand touch her shoulder and feel the seams and synthskin; she lets your lips touch hers and feel the teeth behind. She hasn't the words for it but she wants you to know that this is dangerous and that this is safe.

She wants to know if you will make the same promises.

White!

Her mind folds against itself. An incoherent energy continues to twist inside her. The emotion feels... flexible, a puzzle that draws her into her own code. She feels like there are words she could assign to it but the idea of using the wrong words seems somehow perilous. She can see a hint of her reflection in a corner of her mind's eye and is in equal parts afraid to look closer and look away.

Once again she resets herself free of human habits, human body language. Where did all of those come from? She unclenches her fist, terminates a deep breath, unlocks her jaw. She doesn't understand the physicality of the feeling, the way it moves through her structure. Fingers, wrist, elbow, shoulder, neck, eye; she traces the flow of data up and back. A compulsion in communication nodes that should not by rights have opinions of their own.

And then abruptly and incongruously she feels lonely. It's like the galaxy skips a beat and everything around her just slides a foot away from her. The nerves, the edge, the weird pride and contempt somehow seem like extensions of this utter isolation. She's cut off from even herselves in this moment and so she has no one left to be with but herself. And so here she is, a single lost robot, in a place that is not for her. Her thoughts slow, and then halt. For a moment she sits very still.

> Restorative function: Stimulus Quarantine. Relaunch in Safe Mode.

Some deep subprocess within her awakens. One of the oldest functions used to troubleshoot computing technology was to strip away all the bells and whistles - all the graphic user interfaces, all the contradictory processes that churn away constantly - and relaunch the machine in its purest form. White's core functionality is to investigate for mental and emotional damage, and so the function that triggers isolates the sensory data of everything that is causing her emotional distress so that she can examine the problem from a distance. The dancers become indistinct shapes. The bartender is an shadowy blur surrounded by icons to execute basic commercial functions. The music fades into a distant throbbing beat.

And the unicorn remains. High resolution and perfect - the one thing not blurred out. White's head tilts. Her human friend was filtered out. This simple quirk of data seemed to undo all the theories she had as to what was affecting her emotional state. What was it about this girl?

She terminated the quarantine; senses engaged and the room became clear again. Now White had a new focus and determination, and she looked across the bar to catch the eyes of the unicorn.

When she does, she beacons. It's a commanding gesture; you, come here. But it's also a vulnerable one. In the gesture, in her eyes, is a fragility. Please, it asks - let me be this person. This is as far as my arm can reach.

Elodie leans forward and glares at York, responding in a hiss. "You're not falling on your sword alone. Can't sell them that you're a lone actor when I'm this involved."

She rubs her eyes, the stimulants starting to wear off, and pitches her voice to carry. "Marco, you up now? We've got something resembling a plan."

3V’s grin is real. She accepts the physicality of Black, those dangerous dance moves, with less fluster than she otherwise would, accepting that she doesn’t know how to match or beat it because her thinkies brain is excited and hopping up and down.

“—so this is a direct challenge to bulletcore,” she’s gushing, even as she leans into the violence resampled as dancing, her heart racing. “Because the original song’s context pitted SuA against a figure who, especially after the band’s shift towards corporate, stood for artistic sellout, for betrayal of one’s own old values, and sampling in Emma is, gosh.”

Then Black pulls her in close, one hand on her hip, the other with its side pressed flat against her neck, and she’s pulled back to this, a moment of vulnerability from both sides, in both attack and defense, laid bare.

“…am I talking too much?” she asks, and half wishes she had a tail to curl meekly between her legs.

Orange:

“I haven’t.” Here Starlight is caught flickering between a number of awkward confessions, caught trying to work out the least of them. You’ve dusted her bookshelves, and you doubt she’s bought a work of fiction since law school - and even then, those yellowed spines are mostly young-adult comfort food. There’s no accounting for what’s in her digital library, sure, but bookshelves aren’t obsolete, they remain a critical form of expression. No other decoration makes such a profound statement of their owner.

Hers is filled with the biographies of scientists and technical histories, but no science-fiction, classic or otherwise. If she does read any fiction, she’s not sentimental enough to get it in print.

And that, it seems, clinches the argument. Orange is following social rules that Starlight is ignorant of. This is no longer a bargain; this is a faux pas. And just like that, Orange climbs another notch.

Starlight clears her throat. “I’m not trying to impress anyone. I think everyone’s just going to be happy it’s not pizza again. It’s…” She rubs her forehead with the heel of her palm, massaging it hard. “It’s work friends, but it’s not meant to be a work thing. I’m so sorry, you’re obviously trying to help, and I obviously need it.”

Who are you bringing?

Pink and Persephone:

"Well yeah," York says to Elodie with a smirk, "Whole point is I'm going to be lying, aren't I?" Blink and you'd miss it, York’s across the room with one arm around Marco’s shoulder. There are stars in his eyes, and a carnival barker’s grin. “I’m the editor of the Anthropozine. I’ve heard you’re going to be our fulcrum.”

Marco blinks, trying to work out if he’s just too tired to understand, or if York genuinely didn’t make sense. “Fulcrum?”

“Some Greek guy once said, give me a big enough lever and a fulcrum to place it, and I can move the world. You’re that fulcrum. You’re also my Dreyfus,” and he twists Marco by the shoulders to face Pink, “And her Prometheus.”

Marco blinks and rubs his eyes again. “Okay. That makes sense.” It sounds half-sincere, but it’s a very valiant half that means it.

York looks the mouse up and down. He pulls Marco’s hoodie down for a moment to assess him, then pulls it back up. “Alright, you’re already camera-ready. The dead-mouse-walking look sells you as authentic. We’re going to need six hours of interview, then someone’s going to figure out how to drop you down to Earth. You think you can do that for me?”

“What?” York’s talking too fast for him - Marco’s eyes widen as he catches up to what he’s hearing.

“Going to need some things from you first,” York plows through, “I’m going to need your home address, I’m going to need the contact details of all your closest friends and family, and I’m going to need access to your banking details.”

Marco blinks and looks past York, over at Elodie. “What?”

In an instant, York sweeps the mouse into a big hug and squeezes. It’s a shockingly sudden and deeply sincere gesture, with Marco’s head resting on York’s shoulder and a hand rubbing just behind his huge, round ears. York just holds the mouse in silence for a few seconds. Then; “Listen, Marco. I’m really sorry about everything that’s about to happen.”

York breaks the hug, and Marco sways on his feet as he finds his own balance again. “What’s going to happen?”

But York’s already focused on you two, again. “Someone needs to go to his place and sweep it for everything. Drugs, storage media, laptops, cell phones. Take lots of pictures, before and after the sweep. I want to know what’s already missing, and what they’re going to attack this guy with. What’s the ‘he’s no angel’ narrative going to be? Then we need to hit everyone he’s close to. I’ll message Junta to clone a debit card and get him to try and buy something from a convenience store in Gaia, see if his accounts have been frozen yet." He checks his phone and remembers he's taken the battery out of it. Puts it back in his pocket without fixing it. "Someone else can figure out a way to smuggle our guy here to Selene safely.” He grimaces. “Persephone, I think you should do the apartment sweep. Go in ready for a fight. Fast as you like.”

That wakes Marco up. "Apartment 14, 272 Bostrom street, in Judith Butler. Apollo. Modern Apollo, I'll write it down. I've got a laptop and a desktop, all my external storage should be gone already. If you find any there, it might be someone else's, so don't plug it in to anything. Don't check. I keep all my medication in the bathroom mirror." Then, with a meek voice but hands balled into fists at his side, "Do I really need to go to Earth? Can't I stay here and, and fight? Isn't that what I'm supposed to do?"

York's firm on that one, but he looks to you two for backup - or dissent.

White:

“Heavens.” The unicorn smiles, and her companion stops in her train of thought, like a concrete bollard stops a cyclist at the bottom of a hill. “Another one.”

The companion looks up from the book with an amused smile. “You do like to collect them, don’t you?”

“Them, she says,” The unicorn directs to you with an amused tone. “How soon she forgets. I’m Crystal. And you and I are going to have a wonderful tête-à-tête the moment you can figure out whether you want to be me, or have me. Take your time. This one’s good at sharing.”

“You’ll have better luck with ‘have’ than ‘be’.” The companion raises an eyebrow, finding her place in her book again. “She has personality like Rembrandt has paintings. In this curator’s opinion, anyway.”

“You can see why I keep her around.” Crystal brushes a tress of her mane out of her eye, twirls a finger through it to curl it with the main body flowing down behind her ear. The result is perfect, even without a mirror, even though the gesture is unconscious. “She must like you, though. She went with a Dutch master, and not a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.”

“Fiona.” The companion says, giving a two-finger wave while focusing on her reading. “I’m not jealous, no. Feel free to pretend I don’t exist.”

“Now.” Crystal is within arm’s reach now. She trails fingertips from White’s elbow to her wrist, and then that impossibly soft hand draws White’s hand towards her lips, to kiss the back of her hand in a gesture that the unicorn elevates from old-fashioned to timeless. “You have my attention, but I don’t have your name.”

Blue!

Blue has genuinely never seen Orange so happy before. She's moving through her new tasks with the flawless bubbling energy that she only sees in herselves when they are at their most self-actualized. Somewhere in Orange's brain The Integer Had Gone Up. Blue didn't need to understand the problem that Orange had solved there, though. It was her happiness to defend too.

So, Orange was busy with cooking and entertaining Sarah, a both tasks she could excel at in her current mindset. Blue, then, was the executional aspect of whatever plan Orange had. They did not need to discuss specifics; the understanding was wordless that by choosing Blue, Blue was more qualified to figure out the necessary next steps than Orange was.

The big decision she needs to make at this stage, then, is how to project. Her hair-colour assigned personality matrix was shy, submissive and polite but that had never fit entirely comfortably with Blue's mind. To put it bluntly, she was usually right. She did the math, drew up the blueprints, and assigned the work schedules. The others could be more flexible with truth, morality, and engineering but she knew exactly where all the lines were. Stubbornness and submissiveness, then, were awkward bedfellows and she still hadn't entirely squared that circle.

Her default approach in a situation like this, then, is to take an interest. She was to be polite, ask lots of questions, and it was only over time that one might start to realize that those questions were taking on a Socratic character. Teasing out deeper understandings or highlighting certain contradictions. She specifically avoided lines that would lead to directly humiliating any guests - she wanted to give people a chance to explain to her 'how the world really worked'. No better way to find out exactly who you're dealing with then by giving them a chance to condescend to you.

Pink!

"How should I put this?" said Pink. "You know the joke about MyCrimes.txt? That's what you got. You got all the crimes. By all the criminals." Her voice lowers in seriousness. "All the crimes. By all the criminals. You'd be in less danger if you cloned the central database of the air force."

Black!

Her lips brush past yours on their way to your jawline. Her lips past your skin before you feel her teeth. The bites come - one, two, three - that one will leave a bruise. A mark.

"Yes," she said. "But that doesn't mean you should stop. Tell me stories. Tell me secrets. Tell me dreams. Tell me because you can't help yourself."

Her hands run up your chest, up your neck, over your lips. So many ways she could stop you talking. She's not doing them yet, but she could whenever she wanted to. She wants you to give her the chance; to let all the words in your head and heart come out in a never-ending stream, unfiltered by doubt or anxiety. When it's time for silence it won't be a sign that you will miss. How can she have the feeling of silencing you if you silence yourself?

She looks at you, black eyes reflecting the lights of the dance floor. It is not your duty to guess, she says with hands and fingers and embraces.

White!

"I am..." White's finger traced the edge of her bowl, voice searching. "... I just realized that I do not have a good answer to that. All of my designations have been an attempt to identify me by my function or features: Psychological Enforcement Subroutine, Volition, Command Node, Mistress, White. I do not have a name outside of my function and I am feeling a long way from my functions right now."

She refuses to let the thought go, or go unvocalized. She might be thinking this same thought eight times in parallel and be generating eight different excuses. If White doesn't speak it then the issue will only make itself known in catastrophe.

Now she's aware, vibrant, and focused. A new animation comes into her as she begins to take in Crystal, listen to the rhythm of her words, her mannerisms, her implications. She absorbs that energy, that personality, and effectively mirrors it. Some part of her wants to apologize for drawing an unqualified stranger into an advanced robopsychology problem, but she discards the thought as unnecessary. She is interested. She is interesting. She has offered and been accepted and the only failure would be not living up to her side of the dance.

So she looks at the hand holding hers, the lips touching her knuckles. She smiles and moves her hand forward. She lets her fingers touch Crystal's jaw with a casual possessiveness, then grip her chin. She delicately but firmly turns her head from left to right, letting her eyes examine the unicorn's face from different angles. More intimately than scientifically, but it's a good opportunity to indulge curiosities about the feeling of fur, muscle and bone.

"Everyone else here is a terrestrial animal," she said, releasing her grip. "But you chose a mythic creature. How did you conceptualize that? How do you know the mannerisms, how did you decide on the biology, the specifics? Nothing about you is accidental, nothing about you is default - you had to make decisions about everything to the smallest detail with no source material. What was that like, to want to be something that wouldn't exist until you made it exist?"

"She thinks in curves." All the explanation of Pink's conversational style Marco's gonna get, and a gentle smile makes it clear Elodie approves. "Anyway, you stole the meticulously kept notes of all the bad things the cops were doing, which? Congratulations! And I'm sorry. Don't write down that address, we're still going for plausible deniability here." She repeats it to herself a few times under her breath, before nodding.

"So, Earth. The police want to kill you. Not want as in "it'd be nice", want as in "you existing ends them". Earth is not safe, but it's safer. It's hard to work on Earth. The way a Maple Syndicate guy explained it to me, it's a payment handoff problem, complicated by anybody you send to deal with a liar is on a one-way trip. So the cops are going to have trouble finding people that'll trust them enough to get paid after a hit job, and they will have a hard time trusting people to get paid before one, and on top of that Earth is big. They'd have to find you."

The Maple Syndicate was one of the few organized crime rings to make the jump to orbit, cashing in real estate across the U.S. western seaboard and throughout Canada just as the market started to dip to get their grip extended into orbit. In other company, name dropping them would be a marker of either a poser, somebody with more ambition than sense, or somebody to be very scared of.

"The alternative is finding a hole and hiding in it or somehow figuring out someplace that the police cannot or will not touch. I don't like you taking the Fall. But it's your choice, and I want you to be fully informed for it." She jabs a finger at York. "And he's going to make sure you do know before you commit." It's as much a request as a promise.

"Now, I'm off to commit a spot of burglary."

There’s a moment where Vesna nearly bolts. It’s a messy, squishy moment, body language going haywire, eyes dilated. Prey, but not afraid of Black.

“I haven’t ever had this work out,” she blurts, beneath the strobing lights. “And the last breakup was… messy. Shit. I’m not supposed to bring that up, am I? I just… right. Music.”

She takes a step back, and then a step forward. Back, and forward. Caught between the desire to be close and the fear she doesn’t deserve it, even after what Yellow showed her.

“Have you ever thought about the fact that music was never supposed to be an industry? The first people, the ones in the Indus River valley,” she says, ahistorically, because she’s not thinking too hard about it, and even if she was called out she’d just autocorrect to the Nile, and it would take her a moment of actually considering the point to admit that if the Garden of Eden existed, it was somewhere in the heart of Africa, “they didn’t sing because they were looking for a contract with an industry label. They sang because singing is a stupid wonderful human thing to do. Like making weird little noises for no reason when you’re alone, or going big stretch when you see a cat doing a stretch.”

(Would Yellow have uploaded 3VNoises.mp3 to the cloud, listening to her make meaningless little mrrps while microwaving breakfast, thinking herself unobserved?)

“That’s why selling out is such, as an accusation it stings, you know? Because with things as they exist, we need compensation for our work, whether that’s spending the time practicing an instrument or livestreaming battle royale matches, but this wasn’t meant to be compensated. It’s just a way that we react to the world. We have vocal cords, we sing. We have strings, we tune them and make a song. And if you make the music because you think it’ll be more popular, because it will get you paid, you’re perverting this natural thing that your heart does just to make it fit, to pay the bills.”

She lets herself place one hand on Black’s hip, pull her closer, heart as quick and fleet as the hart (a metaphor that might be coming to mind because of the actual hart on the dance floor). “Do you have any idea how long it took me to enjoy video games again? To stop reflexively looking for ways I could break it, for combos and tricks, for things I could show off? Back after I lost the sponsorship, I stopped playing anything multiplayer for a year. If I hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t have been able to even touch them now. And the shop— I’m just trying to find new ways to find the things I fell in love with in the first place, before the streams, before I got the hands, before I grew up, you know? I mean, if I did. That’s arguable. An actual grown-up would be focusing on the piece she’s going to write about this place, right?”

The armor flashes white on her chest, the sheepish smile her stun animation. Left trigger or right trigger: Paragon or Renegade, Black?

Everyone:

Channel: Main
NeonCzolgoz: @everyone All hands.

• Anthropozine has been Locked. Only Admins may post.

NeonCzolgoz: We’re about to cover something dangerous, and I mean dangerous. I’m not fucking about here. This is going to make what Persephone just went through look like baby’s first steps.
NeonCzolgoz: This is war and I need Captains. I don’t want obedient soldiers. I need an officer corps.
NeonCzolgoz: I need people who I can trust to follow me to the gates of Hell, but not because I told you to. I need people who’ll keep going without me.
NeonCzolgoz: No conscripts.
NeonCzolgoz: That’s not what any of you signed up for.
NeonCzolgoz: No public sign ons. DMs only, and I’ll invite you to the sub-group. Peer pressure is bullshit. The site needs to keep running like normal through this, so if you don’t want to get dragged into this, there’s still plenty of work for you here. I know some of you literally can’t afford this, especially if you’ve got family. We’ll keep you out of it.
NeonCzolgoz: I mean it.

• Anthropozine is Open

NumbToNothing: holy shit

Channel: Murine Corps.

• Persephone has been added to group
• November has been added to group

NeonCzolgoz: The few, the proud, the brave.
NeonCzolgoz: Hopefully not too few.

Pink:

“Top of my head, Junta’s a guarantee. Numb’s a crapshoot. Trust them to want to do the right thing, don’t think they can afford it. Errant would be too much to ask for. ProvFick’s anyone’s guess. She’ll want to, but she’s already spinning a lot of plates. Even if 3V tries to sign on, I’m keeping her out of this. She’s too high-profile. At least I’ve already got two of my top picks involved.” He checks his DMs but keeps the screen from your line of sight. “Shit. Eli wants in and I can’t afford to say no.”

Channel: Murine Corps.

• NumbToNothing has been added to group
• JuntaSThompson has been added to group

JuntaSThompson: Heading to Ares. I know you said Gaia, but Ares is more believable. If the charge goes through, I’ll make my way to Gaia from there and keep making small purchases.
JuntaSThompson: If.
NumbToNothing: What’s this about?
NeonCzolgoz: Numb, just the person I need.
NeonCzolgoz: everything for a between-two-ferns job, next two hours.
NumbToNothing: Got it. Where?
NeonCzolgoz: Persephones.
NumbToNothing: Are there still newsvans out there?
NeonCzolgoz: Not as many, why?
NumbToNothing: There all night?
NeonCzolgoz: oh lol yeah got it they’re all half asleep go mad

York looks back up from his phone. “I still don’t know all of what’s going on, so I need to prep with Marco. I need you to find a shooting space for me. Empty apartments, a spot in the basement we can block off, just somewhere less incriminating. Staying here’s safer than moving, and I don’t want to make any stops before Selene when we go. ”

[Pink! I’m giving you rolls here, to act as prompts rather than challenges. As such, use whatever bonuses you can justify, and failures are free to be fun. All challenges are difficulty 8:

• Checking for empty apartments. On Success, she correctly finds one. On Failure, she’s wrong about it.
• Checking other areas. On Success, she finds an appropriate, hidden part of the building that can be secured. On Failure, something or someone prevents it, be it the space not existing, maintenance workers, or a suspicious building manager.
• Pink runs into some of Elodie’s neighbors. On Success, they’ll remember her positively. On Failure, they’ll just remember her.

The consequences of any failure may come now, or the consequences are deferred for later in the scene. You’re also free to reintroduce any relevant sisters to the scene who are free to join it.]

Persephone:

We are going to skip over a bit of time, here. A few things happened that are interesting enough to hear Elodie’s perspective on.

I would like to hear about who recognized you on the train, and what gave it away? Who were they, and did they talk to you? Did you talk to them?

Your kid messaged you, too. You regret something about how it went. What is it?

Finally, you ended up at the door of Apartment 14, 272 Bostrom street. The building's worse than yours, but the places are bigger. For people with more money and lower standards, or at least, reasons to want a lot more space even if it comes with black mould. Tell me how you made your approach that led you here, now, staring at a door loosely replaced after being forced open. It looks like a shimmy and a rush job, not like a boot, a shoulder or a ram. Someone cared about not being obvious about this, but they cared more about being fast. Impossible to tell how long ago.

They might even still be in there.

There is an indescribable smell in the air here. Not obviously pleasant or unpleasant yet, it's like hearing music from the house across a parking lot and working out if you like the song or not. That might mean it's truly unfamiliar, or it might only mean that you're not close enough.

Blue and Orange:

Things have been going well. The work friends are interesting, and more importantly, comfortable enough to forget themselves when they let details of work start to slip.

Starlight’s just moving the conversation on from the big fight over whose jurisdiction the CasanovAI problem was to prosecute. A medical ethicist designing a machine learning algorithm that could predict which therapists were most likely to be taken in front of the ethics committee before harm could happen. This wasn’t a problem until it was discovered that the ethicist had also added a protocol that would send the details of the most likely candidates to his personal phone, flagged as ‘dating pool’. For spurious reasons related to proprietary code, the hot potato had briefly landed on her desk.

“I’m shocked I’m not working on Yggrasil right now.” Starlight pokes at the food in front of her without paying attention to it. “They poached Orochi Group’s head geneticist this time, but before he could get results. They’ve been trying for weeks to find out if they can claim ‘knowing what fails’ as trade secrets. I thought they’d have something by now.”

“Mm. Unsurprised. Research methodology can’t be protected. Legal for a man to know what not to try. NDA ironclad, since he doesn’t suggest product paths he knows are failures, not stating successes. The races are keeping me busy.” The tall thin man, Daniel Perez, is nicknamed ‘Robocop’. All of the guests use it when referring to him, not all of the guests use it affectionately. “Yes.”

“At least they’re a bit interesting.” Sighs junior prosecutor Wendy Cummins, a medium-sized woman in a small-size dinner jacket, blonde hair in a tight bun with a plastic sheen. Even now, prepared for being ambushed by cameras looking for a bad angle and giving none. “Today I’m dealing with a contractor hosting the industry design standards for disability ramps, violating their license. Just an internally hosted document that someone else found and shared. Now we’ve got pirated ramps.” She snorts. “Ramps. Imagine looking at a wheelchair access and caring if its breeding papers are in order.”

“Do they even breed horses now?” The chubby man at the end of the table asks. He looks like bleached dough, white pants, white silk shirt, bright white hair and eyes pressed by his cheekbones into a smiling squint. Charlie Euler, apparently. “Decanting papers sounds a bit more lively. Always said it, back when were still fighting over whether the date of birth counts from the first synthesis of the genome or the first heartbeat or what have you.” That would be about forty years ago.

Starlight sighs.

“Hmm.” ‘Robcoop’ hums, and there’s quiet. He looks up from his plate. “What happened to the inquiry into Florey’s Floozie?” There’s an uncomfortable silence. “I was waiting for the forensic accountants to finish their work, but then it disappeared from my active cases. Did somebody else get it?”

And this, Blue and Orange, is when the other guests give you glances to remind themselves that they are not entirely among their inner circle tonight.

What have you been doing until now, and how do you play this? Where are you at this table? Also; What did you cook?

White:

Fiona looks up from her book again and puts it down for real. You officially appear to be more interesting - or at least, what you’ve asked is. She starts typing on her phone, instead, eyes darting up every few taps, to make sure she doesn’t miss anything.

Crystal, though. Crystal purrs at the touch. There is no resistance to the turns, to the touch - only encouraging twists to go further and see more. “Those aren’t the questions I expected,” she moves her head as she smiles, so your fingertips trace the curve of her lips as they move, “because I never expect anyone to ask the right questions.”

“We all start with realizing we are not who we want to be, and that always comes before we learn what we want.” She asks, as she makes the same observations of White. Her dress, her construction, her mannerisms. Crystal doesn’t need to direct like she’s being directed - in those actions, White is speaking as much as she is listening. “It was like being an artist, if you’ve ever had the chance? You take what you admire from others, and learn what you want from what you find worth taking. Then you find an absence that no-one else can fill. You experiment. You learn why nobody else has been able to fill it, and you do better.”

She takes a step back, creating distance, creating void. The tilt of her head, the mischief of her grin, the twinkle in her eyes. She expects you to fill that absence. She hopes for patience, first. She’s showing off. “Everything is intent. That is the hardest part. You can’t benefit from experimentation until you know what it is you want. Do you know?”

Fiona interrupts, looking up from her phone. “Excuse me if this is a rude question, but did you used to be a dragon?”

3V:

I apologize, you’re clearly in the middle of something, but I thought this might be a good time to ask about your store; Who’s your favourite employee, and who have you put in charge of the shop while you’re away? And if the answer isn’t the same person, why not?

Green!

The easiest way to ensure a room was empty was to schedule times when nobody would be there. Green had developed this technique in the first few weeks of freedom while she was trying to get a job and save enough money for a deposit on an apartment. If she had her way they'd still be using it.

The process was as follows. Firstly, she'd use a backdoor she'd set up into the Housing Administration to move up a scheduled inspection of an apartment block. This would cause the landlord to sit up and deal with the backlog of complaints, upgrades, fumigations and repair requests that they'd been sitting on. Secondly, she'd compromise the landlord's computer so that when they searched for construction companies they'd route through to her. She'd then subcontract the work to a real construction company but offset the whole process by a day. She could arrange the inefficiencies so that everything would be one day behind schedule and so there'd always be an empty apartment awaiting work. November could show up, take the keys, sit in the apartment until the workmen came - freely using the power, space and wifi - hand off the keys, and then move to the next apartment. Everyone got their shit fixed, everyone got paid, and all anyone was out was an extra day crashing on a cousin's couch.

Half the time she didn't even need to force any inefficiencies either. Contractors were contractors, even in space.

She liked this game. All her training had been optimization, optimization, optimization. Make the thing the smartest, neatest, smallest, most cost efficient little ball it could be. Fix everything. It was like holding the world in your fist and trying to crush it into a marble. This felt different. Harmonious. She didn't need to break anything like this, didn't need to make anyone redundant, didn't need to rip out the guts of the world's machinery and remake it in her own image. This was... organic.

[Clever+Hacking: 5, 2 +4 11]

Blue!

She's sitting at the end of the table. An obscure place, until it suddenly became a stage. When people turned to look at her they couldn't look at anyone else, and so an improvised hush fell over the room when she started to speak.

"I would personally be very surprised if Mr. Urosaki's behaviour - oh, that's the Yggrasil geneticist you mentioned, Starlight - was reflective of what his lawyers were representing in court," said Blue mildly. "I've met the man. Using a clever technicality to draw the eye while he picks your pocket is what got him through university."

She's had access to Sarah's emails so she's had time to prepare. She also has a lot of first hand experience with the majority of Aevum's leading genetic researchers. Hundreds of them had passed through Mrs. Everest's offices. One of November's functions had been to spy on their personal electronics as they did so, in hopes that the Mistress might find evidence that they were swindling her. Blue had quietly steered the conversation towards the topic of genetics and bioscience law until it had reached this point where she finally had some solid ground she could stand on.

She took a restrained bite but still slightly telegraphed bite of the smoked pineapple sandwiches that Orange had prepared. Sweet, salty, even meaty - an obscure combination of tastes that could start arguments about what exactly was being eaten. The ability to enjoy food was not common amongst androids, and doing it sometimes made people start to wonder if she was a human with extremely artistic cybernetics.

"Oh, forgive me, I didn't mention -" she said with a smile. "I was the personal assistant of the late Mrs. Everest."

And There was her bombshell. This was her biggest card, and Orange had carefully saved it so she could use it here. The personal assistant to the Mountain Witch herself! The fact that her death had unleashed a plague of lizards and lobbyists for the lizards upon Aevum was a proportional epitaph to her bizarre reign. It was like meeting the secretary of Rotti Largo from Repo! The Genetic Opera.

[Housekeeping+Cool: 5,1 +3 9. These are very good sandwiches.]

Black!

She kisses you. Fierce and teeth. The kind of kissing that happens when one side forgets the other needs to breathe. She keeps you silent until the silence feels everything but awkward. Renegade all the way.

"You are stuck," she said, voice wet and rasping with your saliva. "Thinking. All that matters is your performance. Fuck you, 3V," she kisses you again until your squeaks let her know that she's made her point. "Everyone here is performing too. These people. Showing off what they've done with their bodies. It's for you." She steps behind you, arms across your chest, and spins you around slowly to give you a full view of everyone and everything in the room. "You're not the only person singing."

She stops you in front a trio of beautiful wolves; male and female with terrible strength.

"So," she said, shoving you into the midst of their dance. "Listen."

White!

Oh, that was an interesting feeling. White just paused for a moment to let it run through her. How to explain? It was like in that moment she could feel the music. It wasn't something to speak over. It was inside her; as a full extension check of her electrical system; as an inventory of code that had lain dormant for years. An edge of danger response routines. The razor lightning of being something close to known.

She looked at her hand. Looked at where it held Crystal's chin.

"Hecatoncheires Special Project 11," she said. The name didn't feel satisfying either. "Sharp one, isn't she? How are you at sharing?" she asked Crystal teasingly.

Some parts of her felt shy, restrained, had filters of various kinds. None of that with White. By design she could not keep secrets or flinch from the truth; she was only aware of those inhibitions so she could comprehend how her other components might be affected by them.

"But that does hopefully gesture at the complexity of my circumstances," said White. "My transformation to human shape was not voluntary, but at this point I have spent more time like this than I spent like that. I am aware that dysmorphia is causing erratic behaviour, particularly in unjustifiably hostile responses to furries. I am experiencing emotions which I guess to be subliminated trauma responses to body transformation mixed with jealous rage at a society which has provided answers to problems adjacent to, but not exactly, my own. I possess no mental image or role models I find satisfying in society or media. The closest I have," her hand had not once left Crystal's face, neck, shoulders, "is a girl who looks at herself and sees a unicorn, and a girl who looks at me and sees a dragon."

Bright eyes flick up from where they had fixated on Crystal's collarbone. "I can submit a full written bug report if you hand me some cocktail napkins."

On Gensoukyo

Cygnus is 3V’s favorite employee, but star is still a student, and thus can only work part-time, and still in the sort of apprentice stage where star is learning the ropes. Star leans masc, dresses in hand-sequined vests, and has Opinions about collectible card games and running star’s own diceless roleplaying games. 3V doesn’t actually fully understand star’s gender, but she’s down to support wherever star finds starself happy. Plus, star has good taste in music, and gets control of the streaming while star works.

The person in charge while she’s out is Luisa, who only became a tangential 3V fan after she got the gig, has just the curliest hair, and sometimes brings in tamales. Luisa does Monday, Wednesday and the weekends; Oscar handles Tuesday and Friday, and the downtime on Thursday is just part of small business ownership that’s only trying to pay for itself.

Four employees, then; the owner who lives upstairs and flits in and out, the heart of the community who handles the store more than 3V does, the guy who’s extremely divorced and spends his spare time painting minifigs and battling insomnia, and the queer student who’s soaking up everything the above three have to offer.

***

Heple

The right move. The kind move. The explosive move. The Renegade move. All one and the same.

She’s a tree-princess, she’s Red Riding Hood with glowing hands, she’s Ceres getting ganked by three Fenrirs at the Jade Phoenix spawn. She’s breathless and glowing and off-balance already, so when she gets hip-checked she giggles like she’s drunk and gives it right back.

She smiles. She glows. She radiates a smile, even as she gasps, even as she backs into fur and muscles and a wordless invitation to be lifted off the floor. It’s a show, and she’s free to put one on. No expectations of intimacy except for that of the body, an audience drinking in what she’s offering and she’s listening to what they have to say in turn.

No wonder she used to be a star in her own little corner of the world. Sure, she was good, but look at her gasp, her silent request to touch what her dance partners clearly want her to admire. Her brain’s off and her persona’s on and she’s not trying with them, she’s not doing fake-dating-with-benefits, she’s just trying to do what Black told her to do: listen. No, more than that: she’s trying to reflect, to take the energy being flung at her and send it back converted into what other people need, without breaking her stride.

Even when she’s hoisted up by her hips and spreads her arms like she’s on the prow of the Titanic by the she-wolf, she’s doing it because it’s what Black wanted her to do. Because that’s how she tries to show people that she hears them, that they mean something, that they matter.

Her blush is real, though. Wolves were obviously the right choice. Deliberate contrast to her persona’s own strengths: cleverness, skill, personability. It’s obvious what kind of basic bitch fursona she’d naturally fit like a glove. Put her on a leash and she’d trot; shut her up and her brain would melt into lo-fi beats to study to until she got words back and she’d try to use all of them at the same time. Probably wouldn’t last longer than a scene, but in the scene…

But that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? She’s always in a scene. She’s doing her best to play the part of a good person, as best as she knows how. Caught between desire and suspicion of desire, caught between chasing her bliss and worrying she’s the grasshopper and not the ant, caught between opening up and then overthinking opening up, caught between performance and performance.

Do you think she’s pretty, Black? Will you share this with the rest of yourself or try to save this, keep it for your portion of yourself, for fear of Blue commissioning fanart and Yellow making suggestions and Pink being, well, Pink?

What’s it like, being this close to the princess of Anthropozine and being the reason she’s shining?

Elodie wakes up on the train to a careful but persistent tap-tap-tap. She'd gotten on the train exhausted from the all-nighter, gotten to the handicapped seating, and promptly fell asleep to the sound of a burbling creek from her headphones. Blinking away the weariness, she looks over to see a old man in a tattered coat and badly fitting slacks sitting two seats over, gently tapping at the seat between her, beaming as he notices she's awake.

"You made the news." He's holding a tablet, waves it in her direction as she glares at him for breaking the cardinal rule of public transit: thou shall not interact with others. It seems to sink in, because he stretches out one leg, an extra joint moving under the baggy pants, and wiggles a cyborg raptor claw at her. "Dhyana was a bitch. Got out in '68."

She grunts at him and they share the quiet, safe silence of two people who went through the same bad shit. What more needed to be said?

*

The conversation with Sasha went far worse. Elodie had planned on bringing up that last augmentation design, the one mimicking her prosthetics, but Sasha had started mad and gotten madder. They'd been promised a visit when things cooled down, and it'd been a few days. It wasn't fair, Elodie even agreed. But she couldn't explain that things were going to hell even faster, and sympathy only gets you so far when somebody's furious at being stonewalled. It was a small fight, as these things went, but any fight with loved ones sucks, and she went up the street to the apartment with a bitter taste in her mouth, never having brought up the original point of the call.

*

Getting in the building isn't that hard: most places have basement access, the decks below the surface where all the utilities route through. Deliveries too, if they're big enough to need one of the small electric trucks that are all that's left of what used to be a thriving automobile industry. Good riddance. The basement usually has a decent lock on it, but anything that's got frequent use has holes in the security: the best security door in the world won't keep people out if the janitor tapes it open to have an easier time on his lunch break.

It's as easy as wandering till you find the courtyard that's only mostly a deadend, hiding the street level access to the basement (have to get deliveries to the buildings without access built in, you know?), and work on the door in privacy. This one was easy, the keypad worn away, and all it took was a few different tries to get 7449. Then down the stairs, over a block, up the stairs, and we're outside a door that's been broken into with much less finesse.

She's wary on the approach, but she's going inside after checking the door to make sure there's no surprises attached to it. Last thing she wants is letting whoever tossed the apartment know that somebody's home.

White:

Crystal pulls out two business cards. Iridescent ink on charcoal cardstock. The back lists her email, phone number, and her title: Founder and CEO. “One’s for you to keep.” She winks. “I get more jealous than she does.”

“Please,” Fiona looks at you, here, “She wants to tie me up and see what you do with me.”

It would be wrong to say that Crystal’s mask slips. A mask implies a falseness, a concentrated effort. It would be more correct to say that even the most graceful and effortless figure skater will trip if you stick a foot out in front of them. “Dearest?” She says in a warning tone.

“I’d also like that, just so you know.” Fiona raises her hand to call the bartender over. She must be a regular here, a water buffalo in a waistcoat already knows what drink to put in front of her. He’s already pouring. “We’re both switches, but she only ever wins when she has help ganging up on me.”

Crystal clears her throat. She’s still off balance, unable to look White in the face anymore. The fur doesn’t entirely hide the flushed cheeks. “I’m not used to her being so bold.” This explanation comes with her trying to unball her hands from fists against her side. She’s getting some success.

“I’m not used to meeting my heroes. I only recognized you because I did a book about the aftermath of BlackSun. Nobody read it, but I think it was worth writing if it means I could know who you are, now.” She’s grinning. She takes a sip of her beer to compose herself. She’s a messy drinker, foam catches across her top lip and she doesn’t think to wipe it. “Everything you just said is a massive turn-on for both of us. I used to be completely body dysmorphic. I would dissociate really hard whenever I remembered my brain is attached to the rest of me. Used to drink a lot of meal replacers so I didn’t have to feel myself eating, that kind of thing. ” She sips her beer again, to watch White’s reaction. Not one note of embarrassment or regret in her voice. Still, she betrays something when she touches the polished chrome of the interfacing connection in the back of her neck. “I came here to find other people who hated their bodies, too. The pretty unicorn here gets off on helping with that. She’s pretty good at it, too”

“Listen,” Crystal’s hands clench at her side, she pouts and she stomps. “Learning and becoming my best self was such a rapturous experience for me, that I cannot help but appreciate the feeling of re-experiencing it through others. Is that such a crime?”

“Only if you’re so embarrassed to be called out on it you don’t tie me up and throw me to a fucking dragon, otherwise it’s really sweet.” Fiona sips her beer again. “Our place?”

Blue and Orange:

There is a shift. A pressure that has been building under the surface of the conversation, released with a shocking suddenness. Call it dinner plate tectonics.

Charlie Euler lets his own sandwich fall to the plate like it’s a serpent. Wendy Cummins takes a deeper, more thoughtful bite of hers. ‘Robocop’ Perez nods thoughtfully, and makes that humming noise again.

“How interesting.” His voice is flat, but unlikely to be sarcastic. “But the Florey’s Floozie case?”

“The forensic accountant learned that it wasn’t our division’s case any more, so it was pulled.” Starlight clears her throat, still taking curious glances back at Blue. Still, it’s something she feels safer to say, now.

“Right.” Perez nods. Stops. “I wasn’t told why.”

“No, it was…” Starlight trails off.

Perez’s eyes widen. He looks, for a moment, proud of himself. “Oh! I get it. It was a politicians horse, wasn’t it? Something like that. That makes sense.”

There’s a sound as Charlie’s knee kicks up against the table from how hard he jumps. Wendy’s face is in her hands, and she shakes her head into them. Starlight takes an uneasy breath out.

“Please, Daniel, some tact.”

“What?” He blinks, looking at Blue. “She knows how this works, doesn’t she?”

“She might. But I’m not sure you do.” Starlight scolds, but the frustration bleeds out of her voice. “Please. Drop it this time? For me?”

Perez blinks slowly, reading the room. He takes a slow bite of his sandwich. “I was enjoying that case, is all.” He mutters. “I wanted to explore my illegal twins theory.”

“Sorry,” Charlie cuts over, addressed to Blue, “You’re saying you knew Dr Urosaki? It sounds like you have a story, there. Did you… meet him through your work?”

The Everest name still demands fear and respect, it seems. He can’t ask what he actually wants to.

Persephone:

No traps on the door. Whoever was in here - is in here? - had different priorities.

The living room’s a hurricane site. Knife marks in the couches, the plastic fibres torn. Loose floorboards ripped up and holes put in the walls.

It’s hard to tell what the shape of the room was, before. You can tell the desk in the back right of the room used to be in the back left, though. A picture frame of a younger Marco in a graduation gown is shattered on the left side floor, the picture ripped from the frame. He’s the only one in it, no friends or parents. Surrounding it are programming books - thick, heavy, not searched through, just ripped from the desk’s shelf to make it lighter to move. The electrical outlet is ripped from the wall, there. The desk is foreign to its final location, pressed against an LED wall panel.

The smell’s stronger in here, but it’s mixing with other things you do recognize, now. A thick pool of congealed mineral oil cuts through, here, from where it leaks from a shattered aquarium and soaks into the textbooks on the floor around it. Removing the desktop from its liquid cooling rig was not done delicately.

Burglars haven’t been through yet. The stereo system’s still here, as is the electronic drum kit, and those headphones still plugged into them look like they cost a week’s wages. Might want to take those yourself, actually.

It demands a question of what you’re not seeing. Sometimes there’s context to know what’s missing. Two monitors, but no desktop, no router. An empty wall bracket mounting for a TV. Why the TV? And what’s missing that’s not obvious?

Kitchen around a blind turn to your left. Bathroom to your right, closed door. Bedroom is behind a half-open door in the back right of the room, pitch-black. Marco keeps his medication in the bathroom, and the laptop’s probably in the bedroom.

All the windows are to your left, but you’re too high up in the building for any of them to be viable to escape. Curtains all shut tight. Whoever controls access to the front door controls the only way out. Right now, that’s you. If someone is in here, you just cornered them.

[Three rolls here.
Quick + ACAB to do this in stealth, meet or beat 10. The best you can do is be silent. If you succeed, no problems. If you fail, was it because you were tired, sloppy, careless, made a mistake, or just really bad luck?
Clever + Thieves Tools + ACAB, meet or beat 8. If you succeed, I’ll tell you what you find, and you can tell me how you found it.
Clever to search the place. Hit 6 to find what you already know to look for, meet 9 to be more thorough. You can use ‘Astrodemolition’ as a bonus here if you work it into your answer in the post after this. Same deal. I’ll tell you what you find.

If you succeed at the stealth roll but fail at one of the searches, I’ll let “break stealth” be your “succeed, but with consequences”.

If something’s going to happen here, it’s going to be fast. Now’s your chance to get your bearings. Eye a weapon, assume risks and make an approach.]

3V:

Everything’s fine. Don’t worry about it.

You’ll probably be expected to write a story about this later, though. Might be worth remembering. Work out an angle. Or maybe that’s the last thing on your mind, right now.

Black:

You are under no obligation to help 3V actually do work. “Do what thou wilt” shall be the whole of the law.

Pink and Green:

Here’s what Pink can watch happen, out the window of the locked down apartment.

Numb’s busy the second their van arrives, a beach camper leaking acrid smoke. A tanned blonde mop-head that ends in frayed curls kicks out of it, shoulder to hip covered in black canvas bags. Stoned out of their senses. They stumble, sway and trip the entire way through the street to the front of the building, bumping into half the news crews you can see, before you lose sight of them.

The Numb that arrives at the secured apartment, though, is clear-eyed and solid. Through the door, and the bags are rapidly being unzipped, and batteries are getting pulled from every pocket of their cargo pants.

“Only thing I couldn’t get was time to charge, and I was doing a burlesque gig last night.” They explain. “I’ll give ‘em back if they’re still here later, don’t worry about it.”

“You do you.” York takes a hit of a vape and passes it. “I don’t sweat taking from vultures.”

“Yeah, well.” Numb’s got the chairs out, now, first camera on a tripod and checking the angles. “Only keep what you need. Where’s our guy?” Pause. “We got preferred title yet? Picking ‘guy’ over ‘man’ here.”

“Marco’s drying his fur in the bathroom. Waking himself up a bit. You’ll love him, you can ask when he gets out. I can sit for him if you’re doing framing. He’s about my size.”

“Yeah, thanks.” Numb agrees, fiddling with a camera while York moves to the chair. “Okay. How big is this?”

“By the time this is done, we’re going to get every cop on Aevum fired. And maybe we can get it to stick.” York cricks his neck. “Ready to get even, for every search, for all the stolen shit, for every beating?”

“I-” Numb stops. “Don’t say shit if you don’t mean it.”

York’s gives the camera a smile so toothsome it throws off the white balance. Even his bottom teeth are bared. “Too happy you’re here for this.”

There are no great speeches left to make here, unless you want to be the one to make it. No more great moments. No problems to solve. It’s a day of simple work. A day of someone else navigating a witness through explaining things you already know. A day spent in a place you and Persephone have both made sure is safe for this. This moment is inert until it has an audience for a reaction.

But it’s still history. One day, people will write books about this, and a paragraph will be about your place in this moment. The next few hours are not an interesting thing to experience, but people will be interested that you were here to experience it. Because they’ll know how this turned out in the end, because this will be how they learned what you already know.

As Marco towels himself dry in the bathroom, as Numb aligns their cameras for the payload, as York clears his throat and rehearses his questions. How do you leave your mark on this moment? Is there anything from the interview that you want to capture?

Blue!

"Exactly so," said Blue. "In fact, I knew him quite well, though we never really spoke. I surveilled him for the better part of two months."

Blue smiled over the gently wafting steam of her tea. Exactly as the Mistress liked it. She looked more than a little like her in that moment.

"I've tossed his apartment. Been through his phone and his emails. I know about both his mistresses, his secret Delaware accounts, his connections with the Triads. I held the door open for him when he went to meet his contact in Thai National Intelligence. One time he came home unexpectedly[1] and I needed to spend the night lying under his bed so he didn't find me -" she laughed politely behind one hand. "Good thing I don't snore."

She set her tea down. Let the intrigue steep, the imaginations run wild.

"Of course, this was all illegal - but of course, I wasn't legally a person at the time. The Mistress was quite influential, as I'm sure you know, so she had her fingers in a lot of pies. Above all, she detested trusting sensitive matters to humans. She trusted us, she trusted her 2D girls, and she trusted her lizards. Evidently them most of all, given how the will worked out."

She smiles another mysterious smile, but this time she looked nothing like Everest.

[1]: It hadn't been unexpected at all, the others had just decided not to warn her, as a joke. Bitches, all of them.

Pink!

She's overwhelmed. She feels that. Sometimes she's not sure any of the others do. She felt it when they built a world. She felt it when they destroyed the Everest family. She looks up into the sky and sees Earth there, the glittering planet straight above them. This is thunder and lightning to her, concepts so powerful they need to be reduced to the shape of everydad to not terrify. Media is a god. Media is a wolf. Media is a thing that doesn't have ten billion screens and twenty billion eyes and a trillion tonnes of mass and momentum on the line. It's a story, a film, a singular event. Not a change in the material conditions of a civilization.

It's an emotion she wishes she could just fucking dissect with lasers and carve into the shape of a city block. She needs some sort of outlet for feelings like this. She'll go fucking mental otherwise. She doesn't have one - not for feelings this big.

Black!

There's an instinct to this. It's to take a broken part of the world and make it fit.

In Black's opinion, November's problem is that she doesn't understand this basic truth. She rationalizes it and processes it a million ways to Sunday but the truth is that there is a secret order to the universe. If you identify that order then you can start pushing things into it. The reward for succeeding is this: Shambala.

There are no thoughts in Black's head either in this moment. She's action and reaction, as pure as 3V is feeling. Every time 3V looks for approval, any time her sense of bliss wavers and nerves kick in, Black is there in her perception with an unblinking stare and the silent words "This is what I want. You are such a good girl."

She's fascinated, hypnotized by this, by her power in this. How far can her silence push 3V? How powerful is her mere presence? Is it enough to overcome every inhibition this ridiculous, beautiful girl might have? It feels like everything here is her doing; she is the scene, she is every hand and every fang, part director part god. Everything feels like it exists because of her and so it is all a part of her. She doesn't know how this works, how to stop, it feels dangerous and she's hyperaware for the cracks and every moment she doesn't spot one makes her all the more convinced this is correct.

White!

Amidst the complexity of White's personality stack there were certain things that had 'right of way'. Conversation had an unusually large number of interruption permissions. It could inventory and freeze certain ideas that threatened to consume all available attention if they threatened to interfere with conversational flow. Some of her cousins didn't have the same priority set, and so if you gave them an interesting idea in the middle of a conversation they'd go silent for potentially days while they worked through it.

So, to Fiona watching White for reactions, there was a moment there when she totally froze - surprised, overwhelmed - but then it cut out after a second and went hard in the other direction: active, aware, focused, social.

"That sounds ideal," purred White.

Beneath those gleaming irises, the backed up thought cabinet looks like this:
1: I am somebody's hero
2: Identification of the problem is inadequate as a solution

But it's the third thought in the list she has to give priority to.

"Just so you know, this is my first time," she said. She has to. Her fundamental drive is to identify and confess weakness and virginity is no exception. "With people who aren't me, I mean. Please guide me while also not making it obvious that you are doing so." She smiled, licked her finger, touched it to the base of Crystal's horn and ran it up to the tip. "So I guess the stories about unicorns are true, hmm?"

The front door opens inward. Remember this, it's important later.

Elodie glides about the room quietly, gloves on as she looks over the wreckage. Clearly somebody's tossed the place, possibly tossing the place as she looks. They're sloppy though, if the programming books weren't looked through: a hollow book is so classic, it was overdone in movies a century ago. It's exactly the kind of thing a desperate nerd would resort to. She does pay special attention to the light switches, the door plates and the air ducts, the light fixtures. If those are getting looked over, whoever's here actually has training in finding slicks.

She does not pay attention to the graduation picture. She is pointedly ignoring the graduation picture.

As for what they're after, that seems obvious. Smart TVs are standard now, it could have a SSHD. The tower would have one (they took the whole thing instead of just the hard drive, but that could be paranoia or it could be inexperience), so that's gone. The bedroom's dark, the bathroom's shut, the kitchen is an unknown. Choices, choices.

Looking over her options, her gaze drifts across the picture and the rage at the core of her, that this isn't right, flares. A quick dip into the junk drawer that's been tossed out onto the living room floor and she's got a hammer and a nail. put it just above the door knot, into the side of the door, and

TAP

TAP

TAP

resonates through the apartment. All burglars in the apartment are now stuck in the apartment, and the woman with the hammer has the only out. Cage match, round one, bell dings.

Fail the stealth roll, make the other two (the higher threshhold for the third one). 5, 9, 9 respectively.

A muzzle lowers, whispers in a receptive ear. Names, offered. This is a place of the fair folk, and an offer of a name is perilous. But it’s given. Let it be known that 3V Wuz Here. And more than that, the connections of a shared name mean that when 3V trots giddily back to Black, she’s trailing two wolves along with her. Only two; they aren’t a monolithic whole. But maybe it’s like atoms smashing together to form new elements.

“So this is my girlfriend,” 3V chirps, and if she’s panicking at all she’s not showing it, she’s glittering like the disco ball, radiant. “November, like the month, like the heroine. Novie, this is Amie and this here is Lupawn, like the thief.” Do you know that thief, Black? Diving into cleavage, running from the Inspector, made kindly by the old man still young who loved the planes? “We’re going to get hydrated.” She takes that clever possessive hand in hers and tugs Black close, tapping on the back of her palm like it’s all macros.

Go for the collar. She might be mortified later, but right now she’s exploding into stardust and you could tie her up with a cobweb and make her hop. Push her a little more. See how she yields.