[b]Gaia:[/b] A bearded white cisguy in a suit keeps his pace to a powerwalk. He’s anxious about what his appearance signifies about him, but there’s only so much it’s safe to wear on his sleeve. Aevum might be better about those things than Earth was, but that says more about Earth. There’s a reason that English was the mandatory language, and those reasons carry forward and upward. So yeah. Maybe he’s a little self conscious about what people think that a guy like him’s working so hard on The Anthropozine. But there’s a reason he’s the one that took the job to run a stolen credit card this far up the station. He gets to wear his appearance of privilege like armour, and he gets to be mad that it keeps fucking working. Wear a suit and an apologetic smile and say you’re waiting on a train, and a bar will let you sleep in the back corner. The bouncer won’t just let you, they’ll make sure your shit doesn’t get stolen. Buy a single coffee and get four hours of free wifi without question. Show up to a protest and walk in front of the protestors, and watch the cops stop pepper spraying your friends because a citizen is body blocking them. Fit in with the establishment journalists. Get the interviews from people your colleagues would get bashed by. Keep the business cards and contacts and attend the academic conferences where people with doctorates show they care less about their fields than you do, but they had the real privilege where it mattered. Because universities see past the suit to the empty bank account and the wrong kind of neurodivergence. He wears his class signifiers like a stolen ID badge. After this he’s going back to churn through research backlog on his four year old laptop at the bottom of the elevator shaft he's holed up in and see what he can dig up about this. The name on the bank card isn’t much, but he’s done more with less. So Junta’s not surprised when he sees the two cops. He’s walking to a police station, that’s the point. No hesitation, either, with the polite smile and nod of the head. Just keep walking. It’s broad daylight and meadow out here. The real agriculture is done in the super-massive sheds and warehouses all around, but the space all around the vat-factories and bacterial silos is kept like English countryside, to make sure the look of the place is right. And sure, they’re walking right at him, but it’s just a glorified bike path. Not much space to walk around. The rail infrastructure is too comprehensive to bother building the narrow streets of other districts. This is a place for freight, not for people. The cops don’t smile back, and it’s the first time Junta realizes his armor might not work [i]here[/i]. But he knows they’re like dogs. Running will just cause the chase. Walk and don’t sweat. It’s fine if he thinks it’s fine. Don’t change course and don’t show doubt and worst they’ll do is tell him he’s going along for questions. His heart falls when the first cop grabs him and does that pull-you-over-their-leg shit that he’d learned how to deal with from highschool, but he goes limp and lets it work to let them show their dominance. Just fucking eats it. Junta’s still not surprised when he’s pinned to the ground with his arm twisted up against the small of his back. It’s more than he expected, but he just feels stupid for expecting less than this. He can’t say anything until he gets the air back into his lungs, but he’s thinking what won’t make the situation worse. His mind goes black, rippling with constellations of searing white, as the steel reinforced boot grinds his right collarbone into powder. It hurts too much to scream. He’s set the fingerprint lock on his phone to be activated by pure nonsense, but it’s still set up. The two cops keep trying fingers until the hard lock kicks in. In a few hours, he might feel enough to be proud of that. [b]White:[/b] Pink has, of course, been let in by Fiona, who has taken the pineapple fritters off her, and is munching one with a big grin in the kitchen. They would have just gotten soggy in the shower. Of the two, Fiona was the one that went in having a clear idea of what to expect. Crystal, meanwhile, is a little overwhelmed. “I knew there would be more of you,” she says to White, pressed back bit against her side of the shower. “But heavens, there certainly is [i]more [/i]of you.” There’s obvious conflict there, some discomfort. She’s trying to work out what to say, but with soft eyes and a nervous smile that makes it clear she feels she should be sorry about this, not you. “I understand that you are her, but you also aren’t?” For that, she hesitates. “And I’m afraid I haven’t gotten to know you, yet.” For that, she is steady and sure. She doesn’t ask for White to be let back up. Instead she kneels down to White’s level, and cups her cheek. “I know that she’s important, and you need her help. But just for the moment, I’m infatuated with [i]this [/i]part of you. I would rather sharing intimacy not be taken for granted as, shall we say, a package deal.” And again, looking back up to Pink, “I hope no offense has been given, if none has been taken?” [GM Note: The intent here isn’t Pink getting told off, and she’s still welcome in the scene. It’s White being reaffirmed as an individual and a new kind of relationship.] [b]Blue:[/b] Wendy takes her card like it is something live and dangerous, but she takes it anyway. Perez takes his card like it’s a Christmas present. Starlight doesn’t touch her plate at all. “Did you put my daughter in danger, by coming here tonight?” She is not angry, yet. But she needs reassurance. [b]Brown:[/b] Boring in the Megaverse sticks out like a pistol in a waistband with a hoodie over it. You see the attempt to hide something, you see the attitude behind it. The client’s setup isn’t boring. It’s a failed attempt at being interesting. It’s the digital equivalent of a “Live, Laugh, Love” embroidery and a photograph of Paris printed on canvas. The client’s presence here looks like the office of a mobile games app that specializes in cheap clones of what’s trending, advertising clickables littering the path up to its copy-pasted medieval-inn style facade. Aggressive shit, too, the kind of signs set to magnetize to the closest person to try and get accidental clicks. The zweihander can close them without needing to find the red X, and you can hack your way up the front path like that. The pieces you’ve got would fit right in, if that was the clients’ motives. A sophisticated enough content algorithm can find a popular game, rip assets from shareware pages like a 3D right-click thesaurus, and roughly match the gameplay loop. The storage bricks and gamer branded graphics cards you’ve been sent to install seem right with that. But that doesn’t feel right enough. Visualize the traffic, and this place is a black hole. Just setting your view to net traffic, and this place has activity that’d match a fly-by-night adware operation. Actually filter the in/outs though, and all sorts of stuff comes in without coming back out. It [i]should [/i]be the other way around. You can’t get a good idea of what it’s eating either - the only thing the input has in common is it’s all encrypted. Whatever this place is, it thinks being a shady clone factory is a lesser evil. That’s as far as you can go without leaving footprints here, but it’s a start. Going further might have consequences for your easy ten. [b]3V:[/b] How personal do you take this piece, how intimate? The ‘zine likes its content raw, gonzo, sincere to a fault. What’s the point, otherwise? Mentioning the hookup would be a hell of a statement. A public statement at that. York isn’t going to let you hide behind an anonymous byline for this one; It legitimizes the awareness someone would want to distance themselves from the experiences you’re talking about. It acknowledges shame at a meta level. That doesn’t mean you have to keep everything in. There’s plenty to talk about, if you talk around the wolf in the room. But you’d be doing a lot of good for a lot of people if you were open about how far things went: Conditional acceptance is temporary acceptance. It’s up to you to ask if it’s enough good to be worth the consequences. And there’s always Black to talk to, about whatever decision you make. Who at Gensoukyo reads your articles? Does that factor in your decision? Because that’s going to be a [i]conversation[/i].