[b]Brown![/b]

It's been an uneventful couple of days. Loose stakeout of operatives who came up during the Chase Black interaction. Long term work, dull but important. This is security trusted enough to look after the crown jewels and smart enough to not be the fall guys. They'll be reassigned, sooner or later. 

Home life hasn't been as dull. White and Black came in with the disheveled smugness of alleycats. Red came in a while later, wearing aviator sunglasses, frenched Pink in the doorway, lowered her to the ground as she swooned, and then stepped over her as cool as ice. November isn't quite too horny to function, but she and Green were definitely holding a rearguard action against that label recently. 

But work needed to get done, and right now that meant York. She's made her way to the cafe meet in Ares. The drab calm of her thoughts, though, deeply undersell how Brown moves through spaces. Green thinks in lightning patterns, calculating viable routes, each corner a new challenge but Brown is different - she is direct. Like a laser she cuts through the station on the most efficient route possible, and if that route involves the odd parkour jump, fence hop, or detour through maintenance hatches she takes it with the same blank unconcern she does everything. Her movements are so unceremonious that she hardly turns heads even when she goes over the side of an escalator to save thirty seconds on her route. 

She walks in on York and slams her hand on the table in a way that's somehow politely understated. "You have a problem with my writing, buster?"

[b]Green![/b]

Green didn't come here to chew bubble gum. This is important - not just for Aevum Station's grander politics, but to make the wish of a child come true, and damned if she's going to lose to Pink and Orange just because she's on a mission. 

[Law 0/1 Research 0/1 Data Recovery 0/2]

Her process is as much lesson as it is research. She explains her thought process out loud to Juan, the context she's bringing in, the logical throughline she's using. Part of this is her natural state of being; she has always been given to talking out loud and only coming to grips with an idea after she's verbally expressed it. Part of it is that explaining all of this to a child is excellent practice for writing an article explaining it to the general public.

But she also explains aspects of her methodology to Juan, explains why certain lines of speculation are pointless, the process by which she's gleaning information directly off hard drives, how to triage an overload of paperwork. She treats him in all respects like a valuable junior colleague who she's showing the ropes, pleased but not surprised whenever he gets something right and firm but not condescending whenever he gets something wrong. This is a puzzle that they're solving together and she legitimately needs the completeness of his human brain to jump across certain blocks she can't parse on her own.

Deep into this process, she does find a moment to talk about values.

"I know you know, but I need to say this," she said. "It's probable when this comes out it will have consequences for your family. Not even just in terms of external investigation, but some of your siblings will have their trust in your mother broken. Lots of things can be built on top of lies," she pauses. 

"I'm not going to ask if you're okay with that," she said. "And I'm not even going to say that this is why you should never lie. It's easy to see something complex and reduce it to a simple, inflexible rule. That's what your mother, the Queen of Law, does. All of this," she gestured at the mess of paper on the floor, "is not the consequences of lying. It's the consequences of a deeper unkindness. And I get the feeling you've felt that unkindness long before you became aware of the lies that supported it. Remember that - the lies came [i]second[/i]."

[b]Orange and Pink![/b]

It's clear Green has decided to take her time. She'll have to make her own exfiltration. There's something important to take care of once the show is done and they're well and truly on their way.

Orange sits Bondi down. "Bondi, I need to talk to you seriously for a minute," she said. "But first, some context. When Rebecc Alsonzo told you in secret that she had a crush on Katelyn, you told me not fifteen minutes later. When Romeo Goldstein failed linear algebra you blurted it out in the middle of your volleyball championship acceptance interview. When you realized that you had dropped your purse in a crowded shopping mall you said over the P.A. system that it had three thousand dollars cash in it and almost started a riot. What I mean by all this is that you are not particularly adept at keeping secret information secret."

"But!" said Pink. "Just because you're bad at keeping secrets doesn't mean it's right to manipulate you. So this isn't so much a confession as it is a retroactive recruitment. We wanted this party because we wanted to do some spy shit, infiltrating Costa-Silva's mansion. Our motives are journalistic, we think she's up to some shady stuff, and what she's doing will hurt a lot of people. We used the party as cover to sneak Green in, she'll be making her way out separately. We would like to publish the information we find on the front page of the news."

"But!" said Orange. "If you're not on board with the plan, we won't. We couldn't have done this operation without your help, and this reveal risks blowback on you, so if you were retroactively never on board then we'll let it go. If you have any questions at all, I can answer them - though some answers might have a delay." 

She's dead serious about this, emphasizing it with every part of her body language. This is her biting the bullet on her beliefs. As much as she felt like the ends could justify the means, on this one particularly, the means always [i]defined [/i]the ends.