[b]Brown:[/b]

“Yeah. Probably should.” Right now he can’t think of a reason he’d want to stop her, so he doesn’t try. Still, it’s hard to sustain a fight when they don’t fight back. York seethes, but he looks back the way you came and seems to consciously remind himself of that part of today. “Sort out what happened here, get your head right with your other heads.”

Then, Zhang is yelling at York; “What did you say to her?” 

“She’s- I don’t-” York pinches the bridge of his nose. “Some of her is like that sometimes.” 

“Some of her?” 

“It’s a whole thing.” His voice is receding. “One sec. I’ll see if Tess- If ProvocativelyFickle is free today, I can’t remember if it’s her or Numb that did metalwork.” 

it was both. Fickle did metal sculpture until she got bored of it, and Numb did jank stage rigging for student budget concerts and short films with stolen scrap metal. Neither should be anyone’s first choice, but either would be [i]fine[/i].

Then Brown has a tap on her shoulder, and Zhang takes Brown’s hand and starts writing on it with a marker pen. “I gotta go too, but, I owe you, okay? Won’t forget it.” Then she runs back to York to stare over his shoulder and figure out who her helper is going to be. 

[b]Blue:[/b]

Shtern lets out a little wail, and Serino stands taller. He is about to be insufferable. This is what he lives for. Shtern finishes his beer in three gulps. “Look. It is empty. I must get another.” He makes sure his path is completely clear before he throws the empty bottle underarm across the workshop, where it shatters over a waste basket meant for metal shards. “Then I must clean that. Excuse me.” 

“I own a small firm in Ares.” Serino pulls a hologram of a logo up. It’s a stylized animal rendering like the ones you used to see for luxury car companies like Lamborgini’s charigng bull, or Porsche’s rearing horse, or Ferrari’s rearing horse, or Jaguar’s - you get it. Except Serino’s heroic animal rendering is of the Italian cave salamander. Not an animal you’d associate with a dramatic pounce, but Serino’s committed. “Cornelion. It’s not the biggest of my companies, but it is the closest to my heart. It is… I was born in Corniglia, you see? This [i]beautiful [/i]town on the cliffs of Italy. The salamander looks so much like the cornelion stones you found there, we try to use a silica blend that looks like that stone as much as possible.” 

“Corniglia was tiny. Tiny! More people in an apartment building than were in the entire town. The colours! Every day, [i]bambino[/i] Serino would walk down those long black stairs to the ocean, and fish while watching the smugglers go by in their beautiful speedboats. And if a police boat gave chase!” He claps his hands together and rubs them, and it makes a hammer striking an anvil. “The whole town is gone now, those cliffs - the ocean. But here, Cornelion, it is home again. It could be bigger, but… I like to keep it as small as the town I remember.” 

Shtern shuffles past in the background, glances at the teenager’s trebuchet design, and sighs. He holds up a hand to them, ‘one second’, on the way to clean up the glass, and doesn’t spare a look towards Serino. His ability to deliberately ignore this is powerful. 

“That is all we do there, this glasswork. One thing -” He pulls up a hologram of a luxury railpod with black glass windows, and an exterior shape like someone dipped a baseball in molten glass and pitched it lightning fast, letting the shards cool behind it in flight. “Private railcars. Beautiful, sleek, and impervious to crashing. We learned where it is best to be as hard as diamond, and a cushion where it must give. A braced passenger will survive an impact at 80 meters per second, a third the speed of sound. Each one handmade, no two alike.” 

Ignore how many asterisks there are on that one - that passengers in luxury pods are rarely braced, that such impacts are incredibly rare. He’s not proud of this because it is necessary or effective, just that it’s possible. It’s a flex. 

“Look at this, too!” He projects a hologram of a cavalry sword, and looks disgusted by it before turning it off. In the second you saw it, it looked fae. Like something made in the Winter Court for the Queen Titania. “No. Hologram doesn’t do much of this justice. So much is in the way it catches light, in the colours. We have become a favourite of Yggdrasil executives wanting to make their weapons of office. So much of the shaping can be done with your hands that it is allowed for them.” 

Is it an effective weapon? Not compared to what Blue used against Chase Black. Is that the point? Absolutely not, diamond swords are their own justification. For all Yggdrasil’s silliness, this is a case of real recognizing real - they want for the same things as Blue. 

“This, this was me.” He pulls up a carnation corsage for a wedding. “I made every petal of this with my fingertips, one by one. Shtern’s wife asked me for it for an anniversary present, flowers that would not wilt. He cried, and cried, and cried.” Serino laughs, sarcastically rubbing his eyes. “Boo, hoo, hoo.” 

Shtern waves him off from the dustbin, then goes back to pretending not to hear as he shuffles back to the teenagers, and starts lecturing them all about how their center of gravity is wrong, and if they really want to send the cinderblock payload flying, they need to get more of a [i]snap[/i] on their rope, like- 

“You. You should visit.” Serino says proudly. “You want to see the best on the station? You come to me.” 

The patronage system lives on. If you specifically want an expression of emerging technology that’s more artistic and expressive, then it’s probably going to be a billionaire’s money pit passion project. It’s not the renaissance anymore, sure, but paint will always be expensive to the painters. 

And as Serino glances over at Shtern again, and there’s a twitch of a frustrated smile, there’s a story here too. It’s not Blue’s interest in technology, her knowledge of the old ways, anything else that Serino likes and shares with her that’s the reason he’s making an offer like this. It’s Shtern, the fact that when Blue went out looking for someone to learn from, Shtern immediately clocked her as someone who’d care about what he had to say and listen to him, and Blue did. 

Serino spent this entire conversation looking like the billion dollar man, and Shtern looks like his wife still packs his lunches for him, and at every point Blue has treated them as if they’re complete equals. 

[b]Green:[/b]

Fiona [1d6 +3 = 5+3 Surveillance =8]

She makes a motion like coiling a loop of rope around her forearm, like you do when pulling a boat to a mooring. She yanks and her little kobold workers from before are pulled from all the way down at the tower of babel to here. 

“Terra Null.” Fiona pats the pink one on the head. The kobolds begin to take hammer and pick and cartoonish carpentry saw to the boundary of a ten by ten by ten meter cube of perfectly nothing space. What’s more, they [i]keep[/i] doing that, maintaining the space and constantly refreshing and resetting it as Fiona stands in the middle of her newly erected digital watchtower, admiring the beauty in what Green is doing around her, always trying to understand her better. 

For now Fiona is spending more of her attention on trying to see what Green shows of her heart, here, than she’s worried about where the next hit might come from. She feels like she’s trying to read poetry off the claws of a paper tiger. 

When Green strikes it can be on her own terms, in her own form. But it won’t be in her own environment. And this has still yet to take any of her concentration to maintain - Green’s yet to overcome Fiona at a resting neutral. 

[Both pass - lead increases to 7, difficulty remains at 5, and Fiona will spend 3 from her Digital Intrusion pool again.]