[b]Orange![/b]

Ariel was a joy and a delight, a figure of pure celestial light descended from the solar wind.

Caliban emerged from the depths stinking of earth and soil.

The trick was simple if you knew how it was done. When setting up the outdoor stage they'd dug a shallow grave and buried Orange in it. They'd hidden it beneath the stage so nobody saw the disturbed dirt. But then during the fireworks and comet show, they'd shifted the stage back a meter - so that when Orange's pale, grasping hand shot up out of the dirt it seemed like she was digging her way up from Hell itself.

She sat up in the dirt, aesthetically filthy, glowing joints burning like hellfire. Two fingers sparked and blazed and a small fire lit, and Orange leaned forwards, opened her mouth, and took the fire - and the fingers into her mouth. She sucked like the fire was sweet and sighed, then flicked her eyes across and up at the older of the guests. Made eye contact with them and gave a wink that felt as filthy as she was.

Then she was up, lurching out of the pit like a zombie, holding a mysterious brown glass bottle. "Master?" she rasped, staggering amidst the guests, looming, sniffing, scowling, smirking. "Which one of you is my Master?" An animal, a beast from hell - a temptress as she alights on her target. She approaches Selena like oil; "Are [i]you [/i]my Master?" - until she reaches out to grab Selena's face and is pulled back at the last second. Bondi has raised her right hand and a second set of golden puppet strings extend from that, and those strings pull Caliban back from her devilry. She grins and makes a 'call me' gesture even as she's dragged back - a mime performance, but her gait is so liquid and seductive it's compelling. 

"Can't blame a girl for trying," she rasps, slumping over on the magic table, folding into positions that emphasize legs and curves. This is the counterpoint to their performance and the antidote to a lack of sheer technical ability - all of the magic tricks will be false contests. Bondi will try to work a spell, Ariel will try to help her, and Caliban will try to undermine her. Sometimes Caliban will defeat the trick, but she will do so in spectacular fashion - opening a curtain to reveal a hidden Bondi mid-costume change - but sometimes her attempts will fail, such as her obvious and growing irritation when shaking the wizard's hat upside-down results in a never-ending cascade of animals, roses, fireworks, and other magical items pouring forth with perfect comic timing. 

It's all they need. Basic tricks, carried with sheer charisma. The drama of the angel and the devil in their contest for hearts and souls wielded the old magic of theater. They played it as only natural thespians could.

[Filch 0/1 Flirting 1/2; 1d6+4 [b]8[/b]]

[b]Red![/b]

"Oh," said Red. "Oh, yeah, for sure, I get it. Space if you need it. But you've got some other options too, right?"

Sometimes solutions were straighforwards. She unlocked the access port in her neck. There were rules against it but Sophie had already been in her head today. "So I mean, like, other people's presence is a binary, right? I'm a sliding scale. You can take out my quantronic core and stash my body in the shed. Hook me up to some speakers or put me inside a game, mind with no body. You can stash my quantronic core in the shed. Put in a machine intelligence drive so you can order me around like a puppet, body with no mind. You can hook up my short term memory to loop so I don't remember any of this."

She smiled. "If you want. It's easy for me, so long as I'm useful."

[b]Black-White![/b]

White was delighted. Transcendent. Glowing. She could not have been happier that her riddle had been solved. Crystal had seen the false trinary and risen above it. White was so radiant that she almost sprouted her wings then and there, which would have been a blessing given the immanent demands upon their budget.

"Fuck me, am I going to have to rob a bank?" Black muttered. 
"We gave you the information in trust," said White, "and we let you know the stakes. But we did not ask for a promise not to reveal it - that is the other part of trust. You have just demonstrated that you are as wise or wiser than we are, so we have faith in your decisions." 
"Yeah, I'm going to have to rob a bank," Black groaned, standing up.
"While we won't question your decisions, we will help you practice good tradecraft while making them," said White. "I'll send Brown over to give you a basics of information security crash course. She'll want to give you the full day version but the full day version is basically repeating the information from the one hour course over and over until you're so sick of hearing it that fear of having to retake the course acts as a deterrent. Essentially a choice is different from a mistake, and we'll help you avoid the latter."
"Why does no one let you buy clown masks in bulk?" muttered Black, staring into her phone.