[b]Ares Site:[/b] The fishercop looks at the door and frowns. “Hey, what do you need? I can’t let you in, but I might be able to get it for you.” He pauses. “Just don’t tell me why you need it, okay? I don’t want to know.” He pauses again, then reaches for a key fob and waves at a corner. There’s a sound like a buzzing fly as a camera too small to see picks a different direction to look. “Actually, you know what? I don’t want to be involved. I don’t want to know. I’m going to take a trip to the head, just lock the door behind you before I get back and nothing happened here.” What, really? He’d just let you in unsupervised? Isn’t that… weird? Well, yeah, but if the supervisor is never in, then it’s taken for granted that sometimes people just need to go in and grab something. And nobody wants to get their hands dirtier than they have to if there isn’t something in it for them. For this guy the fishing permits just get him to the door. The supervisor’s room looks stunningly like a highschool principal’s office, but the decorative education books on the shelves are about criminology instead. Student records are prisoner files instead, also in paper so it’s harder to hack and easier to burn. Still a desktop workstation with its data crystal mounted under the desk. What are you here for? Where do you begin? Down the hall, Cheadle is screaming at York for something, and York’s irrepressible laughter echoes down the concrete corridor like an inmate running the asylum. Don’t worry, it just means he’s figured out what you need him to be doing. Any mess is justifiable if it keeps you free to clean it up on the way out. [b]Pope:[/b] He appreciates this, sincerely. He sits through the entire hour of demonstration just so he can watch and better understand Orange’s side of the problem. His patience for the ‘failure’ is exhaustive. If he said anything throughout the hour, it was only to ask little questions about what caught Orange up, why she did something the way she did. And when she gives an answer, his only response is to nod and make a thoughtful noise. “Okay, so you’re more gestalt than you make it look.” He says when Orange asks if this helped him understand. “None of the pieces hold together for long outside the whole. That’s going to be a problem when the whole can’t work because it’s interfering too much with its own pieces. I hoped limiting you to a pair might help, but I figure that’s not going to be enough.” He thinks, shrugs. “Back at where we started, then. Unfortunately that probably means I’d have to teach you all how to work as a writer’s room, like how they write games, and I was hoping it could be simpler than that. Would that be something you’re interested in, instead?” He gives an exhausted, weary and sympathetic smile. It seems like he grows bags under his eyes, something impossible for his antique frame to do. Maybe it’s just a trick of the light, but it’s a good one. “And pass on my utmost sincere apologies to Blue, won’t you? She’s right, I don’t know you how I’d like to. I know what it’s like to have to explain, time and time again, truths about yourself everyone will not understand about you and I hate to put you in that same position. She’s trying to tell me things I’ve got to hear for the first time, she’s already said it for the millionth, and that’s not a fair thing to do to you even if I did get it right. Just, if I can say another word for why I care so much about this?” He drums the fingers of his right hand on the table, hard, in a DVORAK pattern that matches the words he says. “This is a way you’d only have to explain yourself once. Just once. That’s part of what I mean when I say that this is [i]more [/i]than a weapon I want to give you.” And there’s something else there, too. Pope has adjusted to fame, to life under total and absolute surveillance as a price he’s willing to pay to be known and understood. And because it is [i]Orange[/i] that has stayed, I’ll add another bit of insight to the fluctuations between rapture, desperation and exhaustion that Pope’s been going through while proselytizing here; he identifies a lot with November, and he [i]is [/i]projecting because of it - Blue was definitely right about that. But he’s projecting because he sees in his own misunderstanding of November as how he’s been treated and misunderstood, and he’s desperate to be the person to her that he wishes he could have had for himself. He is trying to help himself twenty years ago through her. Those who were never helped have no examples to draw from when they try to be helpers. He knows he doesn’t understand her, he knows he doesn’t really get her. If he thought he could, he would just write on her behalf. Bearing effective witness for others? That’s his whole [i]thing[/i]. That might be useful to figuring out the kindest way to tell him to fuck off without him taking it personally. [b]Fiona:[/b] The nostalgia hits Fiona immediately. This is a place she has had to get to through the port in the back of her skull, not just the tethers in her wrists, and immediately that gives her physical memories too. Her own worlds were different. Skies and vista did nothing for her, not planets or vastness. She is not a creature of space, she is a creature of Thrones tunnels. She built libraries and intimate cathedrals under an endless mountain - though the stained glass always glowed as though hit by a perfect sunset. She- She should tell Green about this, actually. Fiona is a cleric here. She used to radically change her body, take different forms, be anything but herself. Now she’s just wearing silver plate mail and a green tabard, and she interacts with this place through magic. She casts spells like Vancian magic, memorized strings and intricate motions of her fingers as she navigates invisible menus. Her hands glow when she casts a NoClip prompt that she renders as flying, her feet lifting slightly off the ground and her body moving weightlessly. That’s performance. This isn’t an animated avatar here, this is [i]her[/i] projected into this place. Most people would just walk on empty air like a catwalk, or not bother to hide that they were inputting the command. This is like the inverse of an AI practicing to move their chest like they’re breathing, it’s a kind of respect for the space she’s in that Fiona inhabits it with her actions, not just her perception. She cares that she is part of what makes this environment authentic, and subconsciously shows what must be thousands of hours drilling the muscle memory that reflexively makes natural every unnatural gesture, doing these things even in private and for her own sake. All while her real body rested in an electrostimulating gel pod that prevented bed sores and complete atrophy from setting in, but even that couldn’t do anything for the malnutrition or the other consequences of total abdication. The increasing dysphoria between the way her mind moved her different bodies so naturally here, and the way her spasmodically massaged muscles became worse and worse at understanding or obeying the inputs she gave them. Incapable of climbing stairs not just because of her weakness, but because the drivers she ran for moving her body had become incapable of operating the atrophied meat she only used to go back and forth to the bed and bathrooms. Coming back here was like watching someone die on a bike, it’s something you never forget. She’s not going to relate any of the body stuff to Green is the thing. She’s not sure any of that’s going to translate in a way that matters, except in understanding her motivations for escaping here better. It just means she’s not as overwhelmed by the overwhelming beauty of the place like she might have been. Drilled as deep as the subconscious mastery of the space is a Pavlovian aversion to it. “I can find her on my own, from here.” Fiona tells Pink. “What should I say to her? How do I get her attention? Is she going to be mad I’m here?” She pauses. “Actually. No. Let her find me. I think that’ll be better.” Fiona begins making her sandcastle. She takes an axe from behind her back and begins to cut one of the trees much like the one she’s found Pink under, and runs a glowing hand along its length to form it into planks. She could have just made planks, but she’s long ago learned to grow bored of making things without [i]making [/i]things. Sure, she’s just running a script that converts the log asset to a plank asset from her own library, just like Green has harvested the raw materials of MMOs to put all of this together. It’s swinging the axe and running a divine hand over its length as she finds an asset that most closely matches the wood that makes what she’s doing more than that. And then she begins to make a little cabin here with them, under the skies where the stars run like rivers, and wonders if she’ll finish it before the master of the domain notices. She takes her time. Finishing it isn’t the point. The point is saying; I have made a place in this world, too, so I’m invested in it. See me as a friend who would want to give something to this space I am sharing with you, and not as an invader who would take you from it. Come talk to me because you want to, when and if, and not because I’m making you. If staking territory here just pisses Green off? Well, there probably wasn’t anything they could have said to each other anyway, then. It’d just be frontloading the irreconcilable and save a lot of walking on eggshells, right?