[b]Costa-Silva:[/b]

This is incredibly wholesome. Which is a bullseye on-target for the birthday girl. 

Luis puts his hand on Isabella’s shoulder as she breaks to run off to water the trees immediately, holding her in place not with force but with a reminder that the world still exists. Bondi kneels down in front of Isabella until she’s eye level, and smiles. “Hey, your ice hasn’t melted yet. We’ve got so much magic for you, do you want to stay here with us while you keep it warm?”

Isabella nods harder than she has ever nodded in her life. She tried to say yes but her mouth wouldn’t open. Pink’s display, the fact that Bondi was genuinely asking like she was an equal? She’d cut up her favourite dress with a pair of scissors, if you asked her to. I could say she’d hide a body for you but, let’s be honest, almost every seven year old on Earth would hide a body for a magician if they asked without prior reasons or loyalties. 

The problem is that Isabella is the second youngest of 9, and right now this is a fairytale performance. 

Orange can make the crowd:

Herman, 4: Inseparable pair with his sister Isabella, who dotes on her like only an 8th sibling can be grateful for [i]their[/i] turn to be the older one. Always has a thumb in his mouth and is watching everything with wide eyes, but especially his sister. 

Isabella, 7: The birthday girl. Mediterranean skin, dark brown twintails tied in faded pink ribbons, and a breezy green sundress that twirls with every movement. Adorable

Oscar, 9: What nine year old wears a corduroy vest, a cloth tie and wears circle-frame glasses? He has a book under his arm. It’s hard to get a read on him right now. Whether he’s a problem or not is if he takes after his father or his mother - whether the book under his arm is fiction or non-fiction. 

Juan, 12: [i]What twelve year old wears a navy blazer? [/i]It’s unbuttoned, there’s no tie, he’s deliberately dressing like a kid who goes to Eton, but doesn’t want to be there. Why? When they came in as a crowd, he gravitated to Barrera. And when the kids all sat down first and Barrera found himself a place, he sat down next to Juan. Quiet, mutual favourites. 

Gwen, 14: She’s here in sweatpants and a two-day worn white t-shirt. This [i]is[/i] her dressing up for a family event. Her tutors have told her they think she could win a Fields medal one day, and now the expectations on her basically mean one day she’ll either get a doctorate in mathematics and go insane, or go insane without a doctorate in maths. Her name even [i]looks[/i] like Green, but really it’s because her mother wanted ‘Greta’ and this is the best compromise Luis could make in 2080.

Luca, 14: Black band shirt, and sweats like his twin sister. He’s playing a handheld console with headphones, but even then the volume’s up loud enough you can tell it’s a shooter. He hasn’t looked up since the fireworks and it’s kind of a benign buzzkill. 

Jordan, 17: He has a foot-high flame-dyed mohawk in the shape of an industrial sawblade, a fishnet shirt under a scraped and shredded leather jacket, and is a seventeen year old guy at a children’s magic show. At least he’s definitely out of the ‘has to show he’s above childish things’ age bracket and has been vibing everything so far, dude is grinning like a doofus for now. 

Selena, 20: She’s here in a business pantsuit and the 1950s hide-from-the-paparazzi scarf and headware, the kind that fucks up cameras if you have autoexpose set when you look at it. She’s attending the Zeus equivalent of Harvard Law on a scholarship anonymously, and crushing it. She seems to take being a good big sister just as seriously, but she keeps checking the time and every muscle from her jaw to her neck clenches when she does. 

Pablo, 24: Pudgy, cheerful, joyous. Wearing a waistcoat with buttons popping off, his skin covered in glossy tattoos of owls and full moons and tarot cards and webbing and x-ray bones. Dangling from his ears are two quartz pendulums used for dowsing and scrying. Despite this… because of this? Inexplicably, he’s weirdly kind of hot in a way you’ll remember being unable to justify in the first place, after the breakup. A natural born disaster-ex.

Barrera stays for the moment, at least for the first trick. Right now he’s not seeing any risk, he’s just saying because he’s melting at how happy Isabella is right now. It’s genuinely kind of sweet. Like John Wick with his puppy. 

That was a lot of information, so let’s keep it simple. The fairytale vibe is perfect for Isabella, the birthday girl. It’s going to make the older siblings restless. The siblings do genuinely seem to love each other in the way that rich siblings whose tensions have been smoothed over with money can love each other, so seeing Isabella be happy about this will keep them quiet…

… until they get bored. At which point they’re going to be selfish and shitty about it in their own unique ways, because they’re still kids. 

Orange - Where is your vantage point, how are you staying hidden, and who are you identifying as your pick for most likely to kill the vibe? All can be made allies and enemies, but as Bondi is about to do her introduction, who’s already starting to heckle? 

[b]Sophie:[/b]

About the scent: Sophie was cuddling up to you for a while before, and you don’t produce much scent of your own, so Red smells like Sophie. This is a very good thing because Red has already been repaired from serious injury [i]once [/i]today, and those are a self-sharpening titanium alloy over those teeth. Knocked over like she is, Red’s landed next to a van tire that’s got gouges in it like a prop from a Jaws movie. 

Sophie closes the gate behind her with a puff. Apparently trying to run on one leg took it out of her. “Taylor! Ey!” She snaps her fingers. “Sit”. 

The doberman sits next to Red’s face, getting her face swatted by the wag-wag-wagging tail, vibrating with the intensity for the next command. Security breeds like this can be more chill, but no dog is immune to the mania of ‘family’s home’ and ‘new friend’. 

Sophie helps Red up to her feet and through the front door. The biometric lock doesn’t jive with the the traditional look, but, “I fished my keys out of a dumpster [i]once[/i]. Second time I left them in my pockets when I changed, I hit the hardware store and just replaced the lock instead. I was like, fuck doing that ever again.” She laughs. “Weirdest thing was, I was still in work mode? When I started trying to cut the old lock out, I got worried about [i]overpenetration[/i]. Then I was like, I’m not doing fucking surgery here, and figured out it was way easier to cut the whole door off [i]around[/i] the locks, then pull all that out when the door was gone, and then just buy a new door. So you had these two shredded chunks of door here, with an [i]inch[/i] of the neatest surgical cuts around the deadbolt.”

She scratches Taylor’s ears, and the tail keeps thumping. “For the like, two hours I spent door shopping, Taylor was my door. Weren’t you girl?” Taylor’s tongue flops out her mouth in a doggy grin. 

Her home phone is in a keybowl next to the door with some AR glasses. “It’s easier to run a local server than buy stuff Taylor could break, and I don’t really plan on guests. Ah, there’s a code on the fridge for you to access it if you want.” She closes the door after you, leaving Taylor outside for now. Taylor is unhappy about this, and lets out a mewl. She’s locked out for your sake, then, the dog hairs on the gray futon suggest it too. 

[i]Thanqol: She's not going to wifi but she would hook up her phone to the network and watch on that screen[/i]

Sophies printed anatomical scans around the walls like feature art, remastered for clarity and display. There’s a focus on brain scans, as expected, but the diversity is significant. There’s a full body scan hung in landscape like erotic portraiture, but the middle-aged woman is [i]radically[/i] symmetrical. Two mirrored hearts, two spleens, and two vaginal canals. The line of symmetry isn’t [i]exactly[/i] centered. Wait, does that mean she has two left-hemispheres in her brain?

A context emerges between the pictures: The subject matter is extreme, but aesthetic. This isn’t a display of the morbid, there are no scans of otocephaly (don’t google that), or holoprosencephalies (don’t google that either), even though they’re extreme and fascinating. There’s beautiful chimerisms and seizures like fluorescent thunderstorms, but no car accidents or Phineas Gages either. 

A flattering interpretation would be that Sophie likes to see that failure can be beautiful, and it’s also a correct interpretation; there are other interpretations that are just as correct, and less flattering. 

Sophie flops on the couch awkwardly and stares at at a wall of pictures that your phone tells you is also a TV. She doesn’t turn it on, and takes her glasses back off. “This was a mistake.” She says, “Not, not ‘cause of you Red. I thought if you helped me home, I could be okay with it. But I’m not.” 

She doesn’t tell you to go. Does she want you to? She shuffles away from you to put more space between you and hugs herself, so yeah. On the other hand, she won’t [i]say[/i] it either, and that’s not out of awkwardness or just being worried about hurting your feelings. So doesn’t want you to be here, but she doesn’t want you to leave either. 

[b]Crystal:[/b]

Crystal moves the conversation back out into the kitchen, where Fiona can hear. She makes herself coffee in the kitchen, and self-consciously eats a golden pear as if in dietary karmic penance for the caffeine shot. Fiona shrinks into the chair she’s sitting sideways cross, worried she must be in trouble to be included in this. Crystal just mixes mouthfuls of pear with too-strong coffee between words. 

“When you put it that way, you make the decision obvious.” Crystal looks exhausted saying this, but fixed on it. “Due to popular demand, the event shall be extended across three nights. Thursday night for the tastemakers, Friday night for fans, and Saturday for the crowds. One night for intimacy, family and society each. Three nights instead of one, it’s more work, more money, more everything. But the payoff would be commensurate.” Fiona’s head pops up, she can’t pretend she didn’t hear that. 

“It’s only obvious because of how you put it. That each night would be a choice championed by one facet of your diamond? Except that you are always at your best when you are at your most, and so I should refuse the false choice I have made for myself. I must refuse it. While I may have only allowed myself the resources for one night… I had not known how important that one night might be. We can be… proportionate.” 

“I need help.” She says. She winces when she bites into the core of her now-finished pear, and throws it in the garbage. “I had budget for a temporary venue, for one night’s wages, and I had the time to manage that. Economies of scale, a long term location, that all helps, but it’s still outside my… I can’t do this by myself, with what I have, I’m lacking in every single resource I need. And it doesn’t need to be your help, but I would like it to be.” 

Fiona puts down her e-reader and keeps ice on her wrists and pleads with a skeptical look, but she doesn’t know if she has permission to ask. Crystal has been careful not to give explicit details, here, and the move out to the living room is a way to force the question without daring to ask it; [i]She’s allowed to know too, right?[/i]

Both of them took Yellow’s walk in the park very, very seriously. They’re not used to the idea they might be supposed to keep things from each other, sometimes.