Where There is Smoke:
Snake girl first.
This stage is built like a stage in the exhibition hall, glossy black tiles like switched-off phone screens and walls of synchronized subwoofers, mostly just for show. The space is filled with white smoke, kept in-bounds by soundnetting. The audience can mill about this stage around the snakegirl raised on a central dais, and on this pedestal the snakegirl does a slow, sinuous bellydance in perfect synch with the show on the scales of her stomach.
Parvati. Her stagename is Parvati.
Bellydancing is the perfect dance style for her - a snake’s body can move like legs or as an extension of her stomach depending on what the dance needs, and two legs attached to hips wish they could gyrate with the full range of motion that a serpentine body allows. Every single piece acts as a point of articulation, and Parvati can actually do what bellydancers can only evoke.
In better lighting, her scales would be a deep red like an old shiraz. Here they’re dusky like the last minute of dusk as it falls into true night. Where there would be hair is instead a cobra hood that rises from the crown of her head and then folds around her face, receding into the necklace - covered in beautiful mosaics in scales of absolute black. The way her slit pupils flicker across the crowd, the way she smiles, the way she holds her hands locked behind her head as she drops and writes her hips when she dances, there’s an enthusiasm that’s impossible to fake. A sense that she really would have paid to be here, right now.
Thin gold wires clip to each of the scales and then braid into a heavy Persian necklace she’s wearing with a large, black stone set above her breast[1]. There’s a microcontroller in there, all those sparkly thin leads activate the blue-and-green bioluminescence in her scales. Sometimes Parvati will play Tetris using her body as the controller, other times Snake.
Right now? It’s the old bouncing DVD logo, her writhing synched to the bounces it makes off the edges of her stomach-screen. The crowd roars as it hits the corner perfectly, and Parvati rattles like a maraca in celebration with the crowd.
The necklace is the only thing she’s wearing, too. It takes a while to notice that, all of Parvati’s features are ‘innies’. There's no erotic aspect to it, it's just at the back of your mind you think "Someone else would be scandalized by this", and that other person can fuck off.
This performer is one Crystal chose to thread her needle very carefully, with, someone deliberately provocative in a harmless way. Look at how happy Parvati is to be here, how innocent her dancing actually is, and know that anyone who is against this is the villain of the story.
Stay here longer, Orange, or go check rooms now? If you’re lucky, and Parvati thinks you’re cute, she might let you be Player 2 and use the screen on her back. Parvati has to use her body to control, and you’d have to play against the distraction.
[1] “But snakes don’t have breasts they’re reptiles” Don’t even start with me.
There Will be Firefighers:
This part of the exhibition has two parts. One long section modelled after a firehouse, stacks of folding chairs for audience members to sit in. It’s nostalgic of old earth models, concrete flooring and a fire pole to slide down that goes nowhere, benches and workdesks covered with tools and equipment. The itinerary shows the topics that Leather will go through for the day.
Leather himself is incredible. A seven foot tall man made of a single contiguous surface of black, crocodilian leather. Based on the way it gives and flexes as he moves, it’d have to be at least half an inch thick. Still, it’s covered in burns and warped scars from where it hasn’t been enough to protect him from the extreme heat he deals with.
His head, too, looks like if an AI tried to design a Batman cowl and couldn’t quite get it right. Long boney structures make do for induction hearing without the need for external holes, and it’s unclear where his mouth is exactly, how he breathes, how he sees. He does, he must, but the details are entirely removed from his surface.
He’s different to all the other exhibits. Where everyone else here is an affirmation of self-expression in an intellectual or aesthetic sense, Leather is the innate desire to be a fucking superhero, to protect people, to be capable. This is a man who’s modified himself to be ready for anything, at any time. The equipment lining the shelves can copy most of what he does - in other cases it might even do it better, but what if you don’t have it on you? What if you don’t have the time? If a bomb goes off in a cafe across the street, Leather is already running towards the blast.
He gave up on aesthetics to optimize for this - and that makes him truly unique in the crowd, and worth showcasing.
He stands in front of the folding chairs and holds up an extension ladder in one hand, and with his other taps one of the gaps between the rungs. It’s about one square foot in size. “Ladder crawling,” he says with a deep voice that sounds amplified by an internal megaphone that comes right from his chest without moving through his throat, “Does anyone want to try getting through a space this small while wearing full equipment?”
He looks to the trio of November and tilts his head. He’s cheerful when he adds; “Now, I know androids like you three might have gotten used to unbolting limbs and throwing them through. In a lot of situations that’s a good trick. But what about in uniform? What about when you’re carrying something? You take your arms out of your jacket to make this, they’re going to melt. You might not be able to find them through smoke, then you’re just down an arm. But if one of you can volunteer for me, I’d love to show everyone how easy you can make it look when you do that, and then we’ll show them just how much harder it is for you with gear. It might make everyone else feel better when they struggle, too.”
He’s looking to Blue when he says this to encourage her to volunteer, but he keeps Red out of the corner of an invisible eye expecting her to jump at the opportunity first. She seems more like the sort to jump at this, but he doesn’t want to risk getting her Look messed up.
But Stars Burn Brighter Still:
The performance is slow, and subtle, but it draws Green and Yellow and Black like moths to a bonfire. There is more here than the performance. There is something about the performer.
She’s she’s performing she answers to Sun, but in the personal emails with Crystal she goes by Monk. Her six arms each hold a different stance as her legs orient her through the flow of tai-chi, her golden staff being passed from hand to hand wherever it will most naturally fit. Her skin is as blue as the deep oceans, partially dressed in a flowing white qipao that exposes more than it covers. The dress is cut into a loose hanging front sash, hanging between the legs rather than over them, to free her for the wide range of movements she flows through.
This all looks stylized, but human. An idealized human, a minor god in their pantheons, but human except for her head - that's where the imitation of humanity ends.
Her head is statuesque, not in the sense that it is beautiful - though, it is - but in the literal meaning. There is no illusion of life here. Elsewhere her skin flexes and there’s a rise and fall of her chest as she pretends to breathe, all the subtleties of biological warmth; that performance ends at the still white steel neck. Every time she passes a hand over the face it changes to a different kabuki mask. Some of her masks are bright red and angry, others are a cold blue deeper than her skin, one is a vibrant emerald green, another a sallow yellow. The tone of her dance, her movements, switches entirely to fit every mask the moment of the change.
Of course it does.
Monkey was the second, the first after Goat. She created new personas fluidly, but there was far less of an interaction between them, a mediation. That was the overcorrection response from Goat, who was too self-interconnected. Instead her personalities take turns, with each one being a decision as to what of her created personas would best suit a situation.
There’s still one shared face behind the mask, just as there’s one November between the colours. This is the face that creates the masks to wear, and chooses which mask is appropriate for the situation - but to see this as the ‘true’ Monkey would be like seeing Green as the ‘true’ November. She is all her masks, only one at a time.
She hasn’t recognized you, like this.
