[b]Pink:[/b]

Luis Costa-Silva shakes yours and Bondi’s left hands, with one more admiring glance at Bondi’s right as he does. “If you mean the names? My wife and I managed to name Atticus first, for a very old book we loved in school, before the children told us we were doing it wrong. The rest were theirs.” With pride and amusement he adds; “They were probably right. I’ve only ever been asked ‘which one is Atticus’. Bitey, Smelly and Stomp, they always seem to know.”

It’s true. Somehow Smelly [i]looks[/i] like a smelly goat. It’s not clear how this is true, but it clearly is. 

“If you mean why? Well, they do a good job, don’t they?” This is clearly not the whole explanation. He adjusts his sweater vest uncomfortably. “We, my wife and I, we don’t believe in domestic servants. That might not be what the name de jeur is, but, a shovel is just another word for a spade, and we call a spade a spade.”

“That’s so enlightened of you!” Bondi says cheerfully. “So why’s it different?”

“Why is what different?” 

“There’s no waaay you bought this place with just your own money.” Bondi does a sweeping gesture of the grounds. “So why is it different when people are working for you or paying you rent, to asking them to mow lawns?” 

The worst part is that she is truly, absolutely and utterly sincere. She’s a weirdly liberal trust fund kid with a little bit of brain damage - Luis stares her up and down, trying desperately to find the ounce of malice or irony or sarcasm there, and finds only innocent interest. 

“I don’t know.” Luis lies. 

“I feel like you’d have a really good answer, if you figure it out. Don’t you think, Madame Pink?” 


[b]Red:[/b]

There is a lot Sophie won’t say here, but you know a lot of what she’s talking around. 

“I didn’t decide to quit. It was more like, I decided I loved the stuff I wasn’t allowed to do more. Decided to keep doing it until I got caught, and then I got caught.” That is a mild way to talk around the fact that her take on ‘safe, sane’ consensual’ is; she sees ‘safe’ as cowardice, sane as a difference of opinion, and consensual as an engineering challenge. Weak evidence but strong rumours of her brain surgery fetish wasn’t enough to get her fired, or convicted, but it has been enough to get her blacklisted. 

“I don’t want to make this [i]work[/i], is the thing, I want this to just be a passion for me but it’s too expensive. Going legit is way better, but I can’t go back to living without a mushroom drawer, babe. Hateful thing is if the job’s to fund the passion, and the job doesn’t let me have the passion, then what the fuck’s the point, right?” The mushroom drawer is just for patients, one of the tools she wouldn’t be allowed to use in a conventional setting. Her personal stash is a suite of tailored, targeted and personalized designer drugs she makes for herself in her off-hours, like that neoscopolamine free-will obliterator she mentioned when November caught up with her. Both are reasons she’s blacklisted, just one’s her on-the-clock methods and the other is her off-the-clock preferences. 

“I don’t think you’re headed for the same place.” She says, and she’s too confused about needing to say it for it to be anything but the truth. “But like, I figure if you’re not chasing what you love, you’re just waiting to die anyway, right?” 


[b]Black and White:[/b]

“Just told her now. Normally I’d have said first but I don’t think you’re supposed to ask permission to do interventions. She says ‘see you soon’.”

[...]

Fiona’s naked when she answers the door for you, and seems to have forgotten that. It can be surprising how toned she is - the definition of her abs are clear even through the padding from way too much sugar. “Holy shit, I am loving the new big. Can I try and climb you like a boulder, later? I so want to ride around on your shoulders and-” 

[quote=@Thanqol] white just kabedons her [/quote]

This is a terrible way to realize you are naked, in a magical sense - in the way that a wizard is great and terrible. Being forcefully backed against a wall by your newly Amazonian girlfriend is one way to suddenly [i]feel[/i] naked. Realizing you actually already are on top of that?

Fiona holds up an ‘excuse me one moment’ finger, dips, slides underneath White’s arm, disappears around the corner wall, and takes a shuddering breath to compose herself before she can speak again - or maybe that’s just the shaking she was already doing. Back again, she’s bright red. She has clearly had to rehearse what she’s saying next to be able to say it, now.

She holds up her wrists which are wrapped in two gold bracelets. The skin around them is stained with green bruises the colour of tropical stormclouds just beneath the surface of the skin. “I got new hardware too, I just made a deal that if I got these I’d be naked around the apartment until the bruises healed.” 

They’re not bracelets, they’re augments. Very, very niche ones. What looks like bracelets are plates that run all through - essentially her hands were cut off below the wrist, the plates were joined to the cut, and the hands healed through the plates for a rejection-resistant wetware-hardware interface. Usually you’d see these as a treatment for carpal tunnel syndrome - when they’re active, nerve impulses go through the bracelet instead of into the hands, bypassing painful muscle contractions. The hands go limp, basically.

Something Black might appreciate - the toggle is physical hardware. Like, it’s a switch you flick on the bracelets. Unlike more comprehensive cybernetics, there’s no way to hack her hands or shut them off with an EMP. They’re niche because if you’re getting invasive aug surgery anyway then almost everyone takes a more significant enhancement with it. The only other people who’d use them are incredibly security-paranoid hackers. 

“Crystal is paranoid I’m going to fall off the wagon and go back to the old me, even though half the point of getting these is so I don’t have to.” She turns her head and taps the chrome of the interfacing connection there, the direct link into her brain. “So, no clothes until I’m done with body affirmation and she’s finished keeping an eye on if I start hiding from mirrors, stuff like that. She’s in her study, [i]please [/i]talk to her?” That’s the end of the rehearsed bits. She’s still flushed. Her voice drops half an octave. “I think that’s going to get me through at least tomorrow on its own though, Jesus Christ, White. What the fuck.” 

This is not ‘what the fuck’ as in ‘why did you do that’. This is ‘what the fuck’ as in ‘I have learned a powerful and inconvenient truth about myself’ and it turns out the truth is that Fiona reacts to Big White like a snowflake under a blowtorch. The fact that she’s gone so hard on ‘please don’t misinterpret my nudity as an invitation and talk to Crystal first’ says a lot about her love and her fear, because it is taking unprecedented willpower for her to not climb you and wrap her legs around your shoulders. Or get thrown into a bed like a half-court line shot. 

White will notice that the apartment has less artwork than usual, which means Crystal is already at the point of the project where she’s needing to sell things. Flipping works once they’ve matured is usual, it’s part of the way to make space for newer works. It’s less usual for her to sell things before she has something to replace them with, though. Empty spots on the wall, and a sculpture corner that just has a standing lamp in its place? That’s different. 

Both can notice a physical flier in a stack on the table for advertising. No announced venue, no address, just a website, the social media pages for updates, some extravagant shots of locked-in models for the event (A mermaid. Why isn’t becoming a mermaid more popular? Right, duh. And the minotaur is a basic concept, but his execution of the concept is transcendent.) There’s a date already on them. 

The day after the announcement, by coincidence. Hahaha. Hahaha. Ha. Probably part of why Fiona’s really worried about this - that’s soon, she’s likely only been planning this since that day in the park, and that was more than a few days ago but not [i]much[/i] more. It means she’s trying to get this done in under a month. 

Plans? Questions? Preparations? Debates? Actions? Anything to check out first? Otherwise go on through.