[b]Brown![/b]

When observation turned inwards it focused on those graceless moments. The large scale revisiting of every imperfect moment had begun, and with it Brown's limited imagination stretched itself to the idea of excusing herself so she could beat her head against a wall. The fantasy ran right up to the point where her scream of frustration attracted concerned passers by and then it recursed on itself as a new moment of imperfection joined the others. It was difficult to function at all through this autocondemnatory trial. It made her feel overexposed; she was aware of so much evidence of her own failure that it surely wouldn't take too much more for even disinterested parties to start piecing it together. Withdraw, hide, disappear...

But she could handle it. She took a breath. She missed her wordless reverie and direct lines and would very much like to fall back into them, but she had to keep fighting no matter how much she wanted to check out. "Thank you, but what I was actually intending to ask was about the first group of people who interrogated you. I'm speaking accurately about my welding knowledge; I know how to do it but my skill is extremely out of date."

[b]Blue![/b]

Blue notes it down. There were a lot of advantages to getting a single, large fabrication purchase - not least the practical effects of outfitting a dozen people in matching outfits. One top of the line item also offered an 'impossibility hinge' - that was, being able to do one impossible thing could bypass security as a concept rather than fighting a number of smaller, riskier battles within the spectrum of the possible.

"What about lifting and hauling?" she asked, changing topics. "The station is so hostile to motor transportation but all of the physical shit of construction still needs to make its way around. How do you get a vanload of tools through an overbuilt Hermes alley at night without waking the neighbourhood?"

[b]Green![/b]

"Oh - that's -" 

She laughs. November has not laughed like this in - even subjectively it's been a decade. Delight.

"You know, sometimes I forget that I'm actually kind of basic?" she said, spreading the image around her head so she could move around while viewing it. The shifting resumes but slowly, more deliberately. "I mean - not in [i]absolute [/i]terms, but..." She turns it over. "This is about a mental framework. The physical structure exists purely as a vehicle to enable the mental framework. No interest in communication or aesthetic. Tyrannical control over input, both in what is and isn't included. Disinterest in features of a body that does not suit the mental framework."

That stops her, commands her attention. The faster her thoughts run the more electric green seeps into her design. "Oh. The framework. The framework for the mind - that's what's important!" She laughed again, folding Fiona's body back into itself. "It's not that I miss my previous body. I lived for a decade before that without any body at all. It's not even that I'm unique in the inexpressibility of my desires - ah, stupid, can't believe I wasted all that time! I need to work backwards from how my thoughts are into how my body looks, and I've already done that. I'm -" any pretense of photorealism was abandoned entirely; now she's a cel-shaded animation, now an impressionistic painting, now a pencil sketch. "- doing that right now."

She settles into a shape like a bird landing on a branch; momentarily stable but ready to take off again at any moment. It's the glitchwork dragon she first appeared as in the sky, scaled down; green-tinted white, scattered with pixel-effect stars and brilliant eyes, jagged in poor resolution artifacts. "In my ideal state I have no barrier between what I think and what I do, between what I think and who I am. That's what makes me dangerous - each check and filter I add to myself feels like a checklist I have to go through before I can be myself, but those checks are there for a reason. But that's," the dragon's snout crinkled, "only a problem [i]here[/i], where I have control over the environment as well as myself. In the physical world I have a containable level of agency but not enough adaptive expression -" A check triggers, her tone of voice changes. "I am talking about myself too much and not acknowledging what you just trusted me with. Thank you for that."

It obviously derails her entire flow to stop examining this fascinating idea and acknowledge another person, rather than forward-predicting their half of the conversation from information she already has. It's as good an illustration as anything of what she's afraid of in herself.