[b]Orange![/b]

She had never liked Mr. Merkin, to be perfectly honest. She had kept her distance professional, but privately had alternated between contempt and pity. This was a bad person trapped in a hell of their own devising, someone who had put themselves before others past the point of pulling the trigger. What she had done for him was courtesy and not kindness, and now that she was done with him she fully intended to discard him to Earth and never think about him again.

But something stirred in her then. For the first time she saw something she understood in his eyes. Something she could relate to.

"It is... hard," she said. She was looking at her hands. "Being separated from your Purpose. It never goes away. I was made for construction. It makes me itch even being here when my every instinct is telling me to scrap and redo this building. It's..." she flexes her fingers. "Having skills you can't use hurts. Your thoughts become ingrown. It'll feel like a toxic weight in your brain. Curdling, heavy, occasionally manifesting in flashes of rage. You'll try substitutes. Nothing will work because it's not the real thing."

Her eyes flicked up. "But it does go away when you're talking to people," she said. "Like, [i]really [/i]talking to them. Not just making small talk or politely sitting through a conversation. Many people have... something like a Purpose. Most of them have never been asked what it is. Ask the right questions for long enough and it'll start to pour out of them. You'll probably not find another forensic accountant that is your peer in skill, not down there. But you will find people who are your peers in passion. Listen to them."

She holds the door open for him.

*

[b]Yellow![/b]

The Hermes mansion was the target. In some ways it was a harder target than the military base.

A cartel mansion was, after all, secured against infiltration. One person getting in and out unobserved was the whole threat profile it was meant to be secured against. A rival gang sending in an assassin, or a team of assassins, [i]was [/i]the threat profile. The foundation would include a steel ring to prevent people from tunneling in. Independent power generators and secured utilities, built like a bank vault. People everywhere. The kind of infiltration she'd used against Goat, involving stealth and explosions, was utterly unviable here.

Which meant that the approach needed to be social. People did come in and out constantly - there were too many of them, too wealthy and independent to hole up in their stronghold all day. Costa-Silva didn't go out to cafes or restaurants, which meant that when she conducted business people had to come to her. And it meant that when there was a party, celebration or other social event, [i]lots [/i]of people had to come to her.

Dignified people. People with names, identities, reputations and entourages. People who weren't what the threat profile of the building was designed to secure against. She just needed to tag along with one of them.

[Network: 3, 9 points remaining] And here at last was a use case for Bondi Magnusson, faildaughter ex-billionaire turned stage magician. A ludicrous figure who spent bankruptcy hearings practicing card tricks who had just gotten out of hospital for another failed act of escape artistry, she was a living monument to the power of sheer inherited wealth to overcome endless bad decisions. Naturally, she was a hit at parties - and with nine children, two parents, and various holidays and festivals there was almost a 50-50 chance that there was a party of some kind falling in her operational window. 

Bondi was one of Brittenette Everest's friends - she'd walked them to and from university numerous times. And for all her faults, Bondi was progressive in a way only mildly shaped by the brain damage of her first failed attempt to escape the water tank. That meant she'd insisted on both swapping contact details with November, chatting with her constantly afterwards and sleeping with Orange on several occasions. All she really had to do was place the idea of the party's presence in Bondi's mind and within the next three lines of dialogue she would have expressed both an intention to attend and an invitation to take November with her.

[b]White![/b]

"Fuck!" said White, immediately cracking her skull against the door frame.

There were evidently a few drawbacks to being over two hundred and twenty centimeters tall.

She had decided to transition in stages. Cost reasons were the main driver, but gradual adaptations would help with easing her into it. The first stage was structural - she needed a sufficiently large canvas to paint on - and that meant improving height, weight and strength. She felt a strange, aching stiffness in her powerful new muscle fiber bunches - stretches that had previously been easy now ached satisfyingly whenever she did them. She could not stop wondering if she could put her new fist through a plaster wall. She could not stop wondering if she could pick up Crystal. 

The new chassis was not beautiful, an industrial hauler model. But it could be. But more importantly it felt right. In absolute terms, she had not gotten much closer to her original form. But... but relatively, it was night and day. This was a body with agency. Previously she'd asserted herself with intensity and words, but now it felt like there was something backing all that. That she was not entirely relying on a bluff, that if challenged she could prove superiority on a baseline, physical level. Meaningless, operationally. It didn't tilt a balance built on systems and guns. But subjectively it meant everything. It meant that there wasn't the shadow of doubt over every word she said. It meant that confidence didn't feel like a lie. It meant that she didn't have to rely on others playing along in order to feel like she could protect them.

And she would. She would prove her strength by those she sheltered. Already she ached for her wings.