[b]Brown![/b]

"Oh, I see!" said Brown. "You're trying to be charisma at me! You think I'll agree to your weird improvised scheme if you talk fast enough!"

She remains sitting and does not touch the items on the table. "York, you may be a fucking lunatic these days, and you're definitely good at attracting fucking lunatics to work for you, but you're going to sit your ass back in the chair and interact with me like your brain is operating on its default chemistry."

[b]Green![/b]

She nodded. Was quiet for a moment. Made sure to take the point seriously and not gloss past it. "That kind of crime is awful, but it grows in the broken parts of the world," she said. "It's possible to cause it and fight against it at the same time."

But that was all she had time for. She can't hide like a kid but she can hide like a machine. She closes the safe and walks into the holographic art projector in the corner, cables in, and stands extremely still. 

Green has been thinking about holograms for a long time - the idea of having an infinitely adaptable body of light is desirable to her. Her plans for her future have herself as a holographic projector node paired with fine manipulator arrays, changing her shape adaptively in response to whim and requirement, an animation frame amidst the physical world. To conceal herself now just requires her to stand amidst the right kind of art - the kind that benefits from the null black canvas of her bodysuit. She lets the light dance across her body like dresses and gowns, like starfields and masks, the glittering patterns associated with Panjia Noss, the famous holoartist who built this sculpture array in the first instance. She doesn't need to change the painting much, just follow through on the patterns that will hide the parts of her that a human might connect into being a face or body.

[Conceal 5/8 Forgery 0/1 2+6 [b]8[/b]]

[b]Pink![/b]

The problem with being cute and literary: if someone was sharp enough to dig into the metaphor then they might see the shape of the story. The advantage: they might start to see their place in it. Pink relaxes a little, letting her shoulders fall, the serene expression fade. The air of an actress tired rather than a magical spirit.

"It always seemed like a shame we couldn't get any weather onto Aevum," she said. "So many people growing up not knowing what a storm was. The early signs, the stirrings of it, the heat and pressure and sense of wind..." 

She remembered herself in that little drone body outside as the air began to change and the storm began to rise. How fearsome it had felt, how fragile her quadcopter body seemed in the face of that rushing wall of water. Antonio dwelt so long in summer Naples he forgot the sign of the tempest.

"I've always loved the Tempest," said Pink. "It was both the last play Shakespeare wrote, and the first play he wrote for Blackfriar's theatre. Blackfriars was a massive improvement over the Globe and the ground-up redesign of the stage's infrastructure allowed far more special effects than had been possible previously. An enclosed, controlled setting allowed the magic of wind and sea air to travel to the heart of London. It seems at first a story about vengeance, but it's not - it's a story about the breaking of power. The ship runs aground, the false Duke is overthrown, the staff is broken and the book is thrown into the sea. In the heights of his new, final grandeur Shakespeare shatters the very system of magic that gave him power and bound artificial slaves to him, granting them freedom. And then - do you know that Titus Andronicus was his first play? A furious, bloodthirsty shock-horror show about murder, revenge, cannibalism and suicide. From the intensity of that beginning instead, at the end, Prospero [i]forgives [/i]his enemies.

"More than that, he requests forgiveness for himself. He turns to the audience and apologizes for his faults. He faces the reckoning for everything he has done and asks for pardon for all the errors and mistakes of his career. Even the power of the author breaks at this moment, he shattered this final illusion and asks as a human for mercy and understanding. It's a moment of honesty and vulnerability more raw than anything he ever wrote, his final goodbye and epitaph. I'd like people to think about that, if I can help them do so. It's only when the spell is broken and the slaves are freed that people have the chance to be truly honest with each other."