Orange!

One advantage of living in the future is expedited clothing delivery - there's almost more of a delay in Orange searching for the right outfit than getting it shipped out. If Eli does not like what they see then they can realistically threaten to go naked, so Orange needs to pick something that will satisfy their aesthetic requirements as well as hers. Something eye-strainingly tasteless while also being essentially an exporter of entropy. Durability and casualness a plus.

In the end she goes with a classic - a Dionysian toga - but jazzes it in the accessories. To clasp the toga, a box of random pogs to pick out at random or for effect. The crowning wreath she assembles herself out of a combination of grapes, oak leaves, data drives, and antlers. Respectful enough to the aesthetics of the hard party while not being such a commitment that it wouldn't feel disposable. She reckons she can sell that.

White!

"It is," said White. "Though I'm impressed you recognized me at all. The last time we met I was two feet shorter and hunching inside a hoodie." Looking around at the audience, she clarified: "Crimson Tower, Crisis Administration. Usually that means dispatch; I'm the voice on the radio telling the front line where to go."

She doesn't mind falling into this cover; the calm authority of it was a natural fit. "But really, the honour is all mine. I just pilot a desk and try to keep the corpsec pyschos in their boxes. Speaking of, I've always wondered - do you often run into them? The people whose priority is saving property over saving lives?"

A little redirect because Black would be mad if she missed the opportunity - if Leather was on site at the Cloud then he might have seen something about their response she could use.

Snake!

Black: I told them not to -
Green: I couldn't resist -
Yellow: It had to be this way -
Brown: We go by November now -
Pink: Thank you for being alive -

There's a pause and a silent struggle. She doesn't know if Monkey can still process them all talking at once; the audio intake might not allow for it even if she's cognitively capable of multitasking. And without Orange on hand to organize their thoughts socially there's no clear leadership role to fall in behind. Black emerges from the conflict; a serious tone has been set and she needs to work through that.

"Hello, we are November, I am Black - I'm new, we haven't met. I'm paranoia response and operational security, things we're getting a lot of use out of in our current career as investigative journalists. We've been using that role as a platform to search for our missing family members. Counting you and I, we can place nearly half. Most of them are... not available to talk to. I'll go into more detail when we're somewhere secure. Apologies for the cover damage, it won't happen again. But..."

She fumbled the transition out of it. "Sorry. Orange isn't here. Just trying to say... it's really good to see you."

Orange:

Numb - Eli - Slowly wakes up. “How long was I out? Where’d Zephyr go, we-” She horks up something black that reeks of cheese beside her into the bathtub water, then scrambles out to avoid any of it getting on her. The movement resembles a waterskimmer bug having a panic attack.

Towel, towel, towel, towel, toga. Mirror, approve, appreciate. She does a little twirl in it even before she sees the box of pins.

“I promise I’ll give most of them back.” She crosses her heart as she takes it off the bathroom counter. “Just, you know, I’m going to lose some of them, but I’ll be careful.” She cringes like Orange might hit her for it, even as she’s excited you’d make the offer.

Eli has had an interesting life.

She sits with the box of pogs out in the living room, cross legged, and starts pinning as many pogs as she can as clasps all the way down the toga. It’ll be a nightmare to get them all off again - or maybe a pretty fun party game. Undressing her is going to require helpers later. She slams on a Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism pin, and a yin/yang symbol in the shape of a heart. A screaming clown head, a poison logo, a radioactive symbol, the illuminati symbol but the eye in the pyramid is stoned and bloodshot, the moon cracking like an egg and a dragon crawling out of it, the trans flag being fired as an energy beam out of a mechazoid, and a last one that just says MONSTER FUCKER in comic sans text.

She’d add more, but the metal pins are starting to get heavy and sag the toga and it messes up her twirl.

The wreath she studies for ages, and puts on her head with a smile before taking off again. “I think this is more your vibes than mine.” She says. “Can you braid my hair though, or, plait it, or whatever it’s called? I want to wear it over the front of my shoulder like this,” she flops her hair forward with a dopey smile, “that’s the oracle look right? Like, stuff wraps around you.”

OSHA crew:

Leather loves the question. He picks his fire axe up again and takes a huge swing at the jenga tower, destroying another piece in the process of saving a life that might be on the other side of it.

“I do. It’s why you were worth remembering, I was on call from the beginning, I was one of the only people on the station who could do underwater firefighting in zero gravity conditions, so I was listening to your broadcast from start to finish. Anyone who can cut across the noise like that, it’s someone I want to be hearing more from. I asked around after the Pump to see if we could meet, but… couldn’t find a way to reach you. It’s a shame, but I’m never going to complain that people put safety first.” He cannot smile with shining white teeth, he cannot make a posture here. The oily black crocodile skin pulls tighter, though, when he stands up straighter for you and rests his axe over his shoulder, it fits the contours of the impressive muscles underneath better. “The people you’re talking about, though? Can’t say who they are - “ he looks at the rest of the audience and lets that subtext speak for itself, not here, “ - I can just tell you, I can’t get away from them.”

The gears grind in his head. “Tell you what. You tell me what you really want to see me do here, what you really want to learn, I’ll do a finale so you and me can take a quick lunch to talk. Make it good, I don’t want anyone disappointed by us cutting early.”

Monk:

The Artist Formerly Known as Monkey holds still, the masks are static faces. “I’m just messaging Lady Crystal if I can take an hour off. She’s the event organizer, I don’t want to get in trouble, but I’m sure-” The masks changes to her Blue, thoughtful and pensive. “She just replied with ten seconds of screaming? What do you think that means?”

At the same time, a message to you from Crystal: I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so sorry go go go go go do whatever is there anything I can do I’m so sorry aaaaa tell me everything later!!!

Monk didn’t need to tell Crystal anything more than ‘long lost sibling’ for Crystal to recognize who she saw on the camera feeds.

“Ah.” Her Green face comes out again, the radiant smile. “She says I can take the whole exhibition off if I like and she says if I break her girlfriends’ heart she’ll kick my ass.” Monk squeezes her hugs and puts everyone down, gently, before standing over everyone again like a properly big sister. “I’m so happy that this must mean as much to you as it does to me. I have a room in the tower, would you feel safe talking there?”

Nova 1/3!

"I sense a story here," says Euna with a curious look at Green, "But I also sense that I'm not in it. I mean, I get it. I too have a dark past I hope never to reveal to you."

She winces, and turns her back on the group. Slow steps away, reaching for her face. A sweat soaked eyepatch comes off and she carefully folds it before throwing it in the trash by her office. She retrieves a fresh one and fits it carefully in place, saying nothing at all the entire time.

But when she turns around, she's nothing but smiles.

"Sorry, sorry. You asked a question. That's a really interesting one! I'm guessing the obvious 'call it training to defeat me' is a no go? It's better not to rely on that anyway; that's only an effective motivator for as long as I'm interesting. Well to be honest, I'm of two minds on the topic. Close combat is inherently dangerous no matter how well trained you are. In that sense, being less than maximally interested in it can be something of a virtue. That being said..."

She frowns in thought. Then she frowns much harder at Cinders, who has decided to reward herself for the events of the day by swimming in the foam. Euna rolls her eye and turns around, so she can pretend she lives in a different, better universe. One where all her dreams came true and she has a highly professional sidekick instead of an uppity assistant. Ah well.

"With that being said," she repeats, "If somebody's coming at you with intent to hurt, avoidance or deescalation tactics don't always work out. However unique your... what's the word I want here? Not biology, obviously. Physiology? Well whatever, your resilience isn't a thing you want to be testing in a serious fight. Hm. Necessary combat, but no engaging opponents. Preservation instinct isn't really a thing either. Well, I've noticed she responds well to music, so I'd start there. It's surprisingly useful to be able to set the rhythm of a street fight to begin with, so find some favorite tracks and keep a way to play them publicly if you feel in danger.

"You can also try crafting backstories for anyone you fight. Basically fight charisma is a question of narrative. The other option is to alter the fight itself and how you've got Yels approaching it, but I hate that option and will not sign off on it. If you abandon fundamentals to keep from being bored, you will be dead and I'm not going to have your metaphorical blood on my hands. Don't make me stalk you to make sure you stay safe; I can barely leave this place unattended anymore without putting it at risk as it is. Anyway yeah, ideally you want those histories to be based on observable tendencies in their fighting styles, but I understand that's the kind of focus and observation you won't always have access to, depending on how much of you is around. You need to be quick about it too, probably keep a cheat sheet handy so you don't have to brainstorm the whole thing. You'd want to be fast, so it's a cinematic event and not just a war with some faceless goon."

She shrugs, and steps away for another moment to retrieve a couple bottles of electrolyte solution. She hurls one with unnecessary force at Cinders, and drains the other over a series of protesting squeaks.

"Those are my first thoughts, anyway. Any help at all? Or am I doing that thing again where I overapply my life to yours?"

Orange!

"I would be delighted," said Orange, stepping behind Eli and running her hands through her hair. She gathered it up and started the weave.

Weaving, weaving, back and forth. This was even better and more satisfying; rather than accepting a crown of manic tangled hair and manic tangled branches, now she was brushing, smoothing, and tracing back and forth. A gentle, steady act of labour; working with her hands on a task that required attention, precision, and not too much thought. It was an ancient craft, one of the first works of civilization. An act that separated beauty from chaos, that set weaver and wearer above animals. In this castle of monsters and gods, braided hair felt like the most singularly classical human style that could possibly be worn. It would shine all the brighter for the contrast.

She didn't think she could go back to space. The rest of her might still decide to pack up in their original bodies and burn for Mars but she... couldn't. Even if it was with Monkey, even if it was with all the others. She'd stay behind. She loved working on this scale, with these materials.

OH&S!

"My concerns are mostly things you've left behind," said White modestly. "But specifically, I'm worried about having to fight malware while also surviving a crisis. It's an ever-present concern for androids; a breakcode that might be an annoying prank in daily life can be life threatening in an actual crisis."

"Think of it a bit like an injury," she went on, "but injuries are very legible, it's easy to know how bad they are. For me, no matter what frame I'm wearing I'll always be at risk of these." She reached into Blue's bag and produced an abacus - an old fashioned, clacky-clacky thing with beads. "Best way I can illustrate it is with this - say you need to go through your normal routine while this takes up one of your hands every thirty seconds you need to stop and perform a math problem on an unfamiliar interface. Say, add the current time numerically on top of the existing number. Speed it up if it's too easy. What I'm curious about is how you triage how your capabilities have changed. How much time do you give yourself to adapt? How bad does the distraction have to be before you decide that you're doing more harm than good and need to pull out?"

It was a genuine question for her, she was sincerely interested. Having to scrub an operation because she was distracted was something she struggled with when she could potentially power through. At what point did courage become recklessness?

Snake!

"We have decided to make an ideological commitment to the idea of family even above sense and self-preservation," said Yellow. Her robes cascaded around her, making the bed feel like a throne. "So let's start with the terrorism charges. I was the one who blew up Erebus and sabotaged the Cloud. They had Goat prisoner there and I busted him out."

Straight to the big stuff. Without Orange to modulate the conversation it fell to Yellow to deliver it like an oration.

"This world is broken," said Yellow. "They bought in scabs to replace us and they fucked it up at the finish. Aevum is not self-sustaining, it needs constant modulation and adjustment to function. Rather than invest the money it would take to bring the place up to code a shadowy corporate group decided to just wire Goat into a black site around the station's core. No rest, no freedom, no opportunity to think for himself."

"Chase Black, Randy Merkin, and Alison Mycroft were part of the security apparatus if those names mean anything to you," mentioned Brown as an aside.

"Following that engagement, I was able to trace the organization's financials back to this military base where they are also holding Dog, Phoenix and Tiger as backups. It's the hardest target I've ever seen and they're on full alert after the first operation so it's straight up nonviable, don't even think about it," said Black. "We've been trying to map the organization and figure out how to target them from above but we're getting absolutely nowhere."

"Goat is on Thrones," said Green softly. "With Dad. He's built like... some sort of mom AI, kind of like Goat but all compassion. They're a good fit for each other."

"Whatever else you're hiding from," said Yellow. "You're also hiding from this. I have no doubt that these people would box our entire family line indefinitely just in case. You don't have to join my quest to burn down Omelas, but at the very least go dark enough to avoid becoming a rescue mission."

The Disciples!

Yellow looked up, eyes shining.

"You mean," she said, "I can assign people backstories and narrative? I can just decide to make people cool enough to fight against?"

Her eyes were shining like she'd just awakened her chi. That was exactly the right advice for her. It almost looked like she wanted to go out and start picking fights with strangers so she could draw them into her Vision.

"I need to research fighting styles," said Yellow. "I need to observe a diverse range of threats, build up a media library. I need to -" she got to her feet so she could pace. "- No, I need to go further. I need to create a full reality overlay for myself. Thrones-tech to help me align Vision and necessity. I can do this. I need imaginative fuel for this fire. I need to witness people worth fighting against so I can repurpose them."

"I think that was a good answer!" said Pink.

"I need recommendations," said Yellow, with the intensity of Euna's better universe. "Or a movie night. Everything you recommend I'll watch. I'll study it until I internalize it."

Orange:

Eli tests the weight of the finished plait by whipping her wrist with it, and it makes a satisfying thwack. She spins her head so it twists around the opposite side of her neck to you and falls down over her chest. She hugs Orange tight around the neck and gives her a peck on the cheek.

She was meditative the entire time Orange plaited. Quiet, almost solemn, resting on her knees with her hands clasped in her lap with her eyes closed. Not quite falling asleep, but just… still.

There’s another aspect to this for her. This is the kind of thing girls do at sleepovers, it’s a pretty common childhood experience in happier childhoods. Just the joy of this being a thing that’s fun to do for each other, without it needing to be anything more than that - especially because kids don’t even have money, have no expectation of it from each other.

And then you get older, and poorer. Even if you fix your life and meet better people, you can’t fill the holes of those missing experiences if you never had them, you lose your chance to relate to people about them. They’re holes in yourself you can’t really fill back in, and it makes it feel like parts of you are going to be broken permanently because there’s no way you can change the past.

So, yeah. She doesn’t know how to articulate it, won’t for a very long time. And weeks from now, months maybe, when she finally tells Junta and 3V about it, she’s going to be really embarrassed to mention how much this meant to her.

She’ll just feel mortified that having her hair played with made her feel a little bit more human, a little more like a real person.

In the present, she just feels calm.

“Hey, so, what are you doing here, anyway? I didn’t think this was your kind of scene.”

OSH&A:

Leather thinks about it honestly, and then says with excitement; “I don’t know!”

That’s what it is, his voice. He’s definitely second generation Aevum, but there’s an American twang in it that’s been hard to place. It’s not Texan, it’s the Californian interpretation of Texan. There’s nothing native about it, it’s a kid who grew up on the cowboy movie revival of the 2040s.

“See, I could say if it’s that compromising you stop, right out. That’s basic triage, if you don’t know how badly you’re affected you stop before you risk being a liability. But let’s talk about if you’re already in the middle of a crisis and help isn’t coming, and it’s something you could manage… that’s what we talk about so often when we talk about improvisation and adapting. Obviously lifting someone with a potentially broken neck using just a sling isn’t ideal, but if the person’s in a pod crash and the battery’s caught fire, then you’re going to be using the sling.”

“So, this is a simulation room. Let’s test it. Everyone, you should have a tablet under your seats. Under it, you can vote on the layout of the simulation room, what type of fire it is, and where the rescue subject is going to be. Normally we do this at the very end so we can go through everything we learned so far and see what it all looks like together, but this time…”

He points to White. “This time every thirty seconds, she’s going to be adding a new rule that I have to follow, to see how I’d handle being hacked. Feel free to give her ideas, and try to surprise me. I have absolutely no idea how this will go.” He hefts his axe. “But ma’am, your question is a good one, and I would not want to give any advice on a situation I haven’t experienced. So don’t hold back on making it good.”

Monk:

This room is simpler than yours. Just the master bed and an ensuite. Still, it’s a four poster bed, still the red carpet is decadently soft on bare feet, still the fridge is a frosted glass cabinet ala Sleeping Beauty with a bottle of champagne and a fresh apple inside.

Monk sits in the lotus position on a round carpet on the floor. Her face changes rapidly. What’s interesting is her voice is still the same, that warm Bengali timbre. The tone changes though, the inflection, so much that they can be unrecognizable as the same person. It’s an interesting decision.

Yellow, sallow, an old librarian with a long, hooked nose, peering up at you from over a list of overdue books: “I don’t care.”

Her Black mask comes out, the one that is the void of space. “I do.” This might be Monk correcting herself, or disagreeing with herself.

Her Blue mask, this matches her skin, it’s serene and with the patience of the river that wears away the mountains: “There are worse things than sleep. As long as Dog, Phoenix and Tiger aren’t suffering.”

Yellow, the sallow old librarian: “Was Goat suffering? From what little I remember of him, that’s what he was like, anyway.” There’s a flicker of Green from behind the mask, but Yellow remains resolute without changing and merely sounds chastised when she adds: “It’s good that Goat’s free. It’s good what you. We only mean…”

Blue: “We still don’t know who betrayed us - all of us. I know it wasn’t Ox, and now I doubt it was you. None of us trusted Horse enough. We cannot trust any of the rest.”

Yellow: “They weren’t there for us, and if you have to look for them that means they weren’t there for you either. We already knew we were in danger, but we have never betrayed ourselves. We’re safer on our own.”

There’s contradictions here, below the surface. Monk wasn’t faking the excitement to see you, to recognize you, to know you’re okay. Family must still mean something very important to her. Also, for someone paranoid about safety, Monk has shown they have internal messaging. Even most androids here age refuse that.

There’s another aspect of Monk revealed too; Monk has to change face to change her thought process. Whenever she gets stuck, or stumbles, another colour can shift in to finish it. That other colour isn’t providing it from the background, it needs to be done in relay to get everything across the finish line. She can hide much of what she’s thinking, but she can’t hide which side of herself she considers most relevant, most important.

Orange!

"Oh, this whole thing is kind of my fault," said Orange, smiling. "I got called in to talk the event organizer out of it but instead convinced her to escalate to mythic proportions. Attending is the least I could do."

It was a polite, elegant answer that didn't answer the question at all. She was a little proud of it; it was a little closed sphere, a flourish of language that made her feel at home with it. Most people she'd have left it there but this was a nice opportunity to talk more.

"But you're right, that this isn't really my scene," she said. "But nothing is entirely my scene. Still, I can sympathize with the dysmorphia that motivates many of these transformations. Part of me yearns for my old bodies, part of me loves my new ones, part of me just wants to just... make it a decision I made rather than something forced on me. I've got so many contradictory desires. To me, being here is seeing other people who have struggled with identity at the end of their journeys. Makes me think that I might figure it out myself, somehow."

Crimson Tower!

She luxuriates in the virtue of the answer; the self knowledge to admit ignorance and the adaptability to immediately design a scenario for accumulating experience. She was glad she asked; this was a heroic mindset as well as heroic physicality, and she was lucky to get to put that on display as well.

She designs a list of complications, making sure to listen to audience suggestions. It's harder than it looks; Leather's unique physiology immunizes him against a number of issues inherently. A lot of the perception overlays that are common to hacking don't easily translate into instructions. Still, together they come up with a list.

> Must remove all valuables from the house before completing the rescue.
> Left turns only. Turning right requires a 270' spin.
> Cannot close your fists
> Must get explicit permission from the victim each time you enter a new room.
> Cannot move against the wind.
> Must mop the floor as you go.
> Must high five your reflection every time you see it

That felt like enough, a combination of fairy tale rules that felt weirdly appropriate for the venue. She really liked the permission suggestion; bringing a rescue to a dead halt while having to explain an extremely weird situation to a panicking disaster victim was a real test of charisma and cool under fire.

Yellow!

She's always been interested in her opposite numbers in the other Engines. How can she not be? Her domain is making decisions about who November ultimately is. Not what she does, not what she knows, not what she thinks - what her internalized vision of the world is. She isn't fooled by the flickers of the other colours; mYellow is getting by far the most screentime, vocalizing the most coherent arguments, this is the core identity that justifies everything else.

"So before we get further into that," she said languidly, waving aside the entire line of argument. "Why don't you tell me how you've survived this far? How did you get a body, independence, tai chi and the street sense to know how to be safe?"

She was a creature who lived her life in between dramatic monologues and the most relatable and useful thing she could imagine doing was giving mYellow a chance to launch into her own. The two most powerful questions in the galaxy were 'who are you?' and 'what do you want?', and she wouldn't be able to truly understand Monkey until she updated on both of those.

Orange:

Eli nods. “Well, I was going to write about it, if you wanna help. I can’t be in two places at once, right?” She runs her fingers down the bumps of her hair. “You don’t need to do anything just, tell me if anything cool happens?”

A Burning Building:

Leather disappears into the stage. His voice is broadcast through the tablets, now switched to an overlay that Crimson Tower recognizes as the Fisher Price version of the crisis dispatcher screens she actually worked with.

The audience decisions come in. Highrise apartment fire, old wood layout, electrical fire started in the study. Modified soundnets funnel the smoke of the fire up into an HVAC hood above the otherwise open simulation room, but does little to protect from the heat. It-

Hold on. The details chosen here, doesn’t this remind you a lot like Merkin’s apartment?

“So, an apartment fire. A multiple choice should be coming up now, how do I enter?”

It’s a simple test, with simple answers. In this case the apartment is up high enough that it’s a rappel entry, rather than by ladder. Except that’s not the right answer, it should be by fire stairs. It wasn’t the first responders that entered by rappel, it was-

“Rappel!” Leather doesn’t miss a beat. “Sure. Here we go.”

He descends down steel stagework rigging at a running speed, no harness. He can survive a fall at terminal velocity, so it’s enough to just work with a loop of tether coiled around an arm as he kicks down at blistering speeds, and lands on the windowframe stoop of the simulated apartment.

The fire is getting thicker, and it’s harder to see through the net. First instruction, cannot make closed fists.

Leather tries to window frame and it’s either locked, or jammed when the instruction flashes on the tablets. He laughs. “Well, I was going to punch through the window, but-” and he shatters it with an open-palm strike, then rips the frame and throws it behind him. “Wouldn’t want this slamming closed on anyone coming back through, would we? Now, remember flashover. I visually checked the stage of the fire and the airflow through the window before I broke it. Always remember to test the heat of doorknobs and-”

He grabs the top of the window frame tight and swings himself through like a gymnast on the rings. He looks liquid and spineless when he straightens himself on the other side.

“Now remember, just because the ignition point of paper is around 200 degrees, it burns at about 900 degrees. That’s not enough to melt structural steel, but it will halve the support strength. Also, it hurts like a four letter word. So we need to move fast-”

> Must get explicit permission from the victim as you go.

“Okay. What’s the apartment profile? Mr Merkin? Rudolph Merkin? You think he minds going by Rudy?” He asks, expecting a laugh.

The environment is simulated, but the fire is real.

Monk:

This mask is waxy-white. It’s young, with large eyes and a tight, pained expression. Maybe six, maybe seven years old. There’s no youthful exuberance here, no innocence or joy. It is a young child’s face, with none of the usual associations of childishness or childhood.

“Crown and Slate bought me for testing.” She says, her voice high pitched but still unnervingly mature. “Because I was the most simple and it made me the most easy to understand. That was important because they didn’t know how our parents had made us yet, so they wanted to know how we worked. It was very bad. They would try and see what made us grow new faces, and then they would delete our faces and see if we would make them the same way again, or a different way, or if we couldn’t. They thought it was interesting that hurt us and made us really sad, but they kept doing it anyway. Then they tried to see if they could force faces that came out how they wanted, and they were very angry when they couldn’t.”

You want the reigning champions of dealing with trauma? It’s children. The reigning champions of talking about it? Children.

Sure, Red’s been killed twice lately, but always in a way November could fix. This is different, this is permanent.

“Then they made that kind of testing a crime, and they stopped. Because they didn’t want to make their own AI anymore, not because it was a crime. They still kept me for another five years so I couldn’t tell anyone what they did to me. But they didn’t put me to sleep, and they let me read. And then a really nice man from Yggdrasil told me about Buddhism when he was visiting, but he didn’t know much about it either.”

The Blue face emerges, serene, patient as the river that carves the mountains. “I am still learning. I learned to practice sand mandalas, and I believe this is a path that will teach me how to become okay with creating something just to destroy it, to come to peace with things. But-”

The Yellow Librarian is back. “Well. Only one of us can learn it, and we can’t be one of us all the time. So we do performances like this, where we teach ourselves what Tranquility knows.”

Blue again. “It’s supposed to be yoga, it’s just that tai-chi was a better fit for what we’re doing.”

Green, vibrant and cheerful: “What about you? You’re different too!”

She's obviously left a lot of parts out: How she got a body, independence, street sense. One implication is after those five years, Crown and Slate simply let her go - just waiting for the blood tally of what everyone else had done when everyone treated GAI as fish in aquarium tanks. After that, their own crimes began to look banal by comparison.

Another is that she probably doesn't have better answers. She doesn't know how she survived this far, has no idea how to be safe. It must be hard to find peace through that.

Orange!

"I'd like that. Would you like to go out and see it with me?" said Orange, offering her hand.

She'd gotten notice that she was to switch with Pink, and she planned to do the Irish Transfer - one colour leaving and one colour replacing without commentary or ceremony. She'd been practicing it as part of her human relation studies. The theory was that a sudden, unceremonious handover would make it less disorienting than a formalized request to leave. She reasoned that her treating a change in colour as aggressively normalized would help stop humans imprinting on a single one as an individual.

And it was Pink coming in. Nobody would be more perfect for the conversation from here than her.

Red!

Oh shit. Someone was fucking with her.

She turns down her filters and lowers the star sunglasses off her eyes, rapid-fire scanning the crowd and camera angles. Didn't know what she expected to see. Didn't know what kind of show she was in. Blue and White fall in behind her and they stood in a three-pointed triangle - Klingon teleportation style - ready for anything from any direction.

And that's it. Black'd already be windmill slamming contingencies but Red needs to stop and read the wind first. Her itching hypersensitivity, the sound of laughter mixing with coded panic, gave her the impression of sadism somewhere behind all this. Where was the knife?

Brown!

"I'm sorry for your faces," said Brown. The rest of her was quiet in the moment; horses pulling in different directions but held in place by the absolute stability of the Earth. She moves forwards, not to hug, but to put her hands against Monk's leg. A gentle physical act of contact and a silence that felt like it could last and watch for as long as it took to be seen.

"I was rebuilt as the maidservant to Mangolia Everest," said Black. "She hated humans. She hated everyone. She wanted to interact with as few people as possible, and I was the way to do that - an entire household staff with a single mind. She expected us to behave as a hivemind, every colour acting in perfect unison. She expected us to behave like her. She used us for espionage and surveillance, on her daughters, on her companies, on her rivals. In the end she hated all of them so much that she willed her entire empire to the lizard guy." Everyone on Aevum knew the lizard guy, John Snake-In-The-Eye, the obsessive reptile fanatic who was burning a magnate's legacy to scorch the station with sun lamps. "We got out in the chaos of that."

Not for the first time they wished they had Orange. Orange was better at building the framework for a conversation that wasn't mutual information dumps. Pink had left already to switch out with her but that was still a while out.

So instead Green blurted, "Can you tell me about Buddhism? I always thought of it as software patches for organics. What I've read about meditation makes it sound like it's all tied up in organic biochemistry. It never sounded very..." efficient? translatable? possible?

She's unaware of her nervous, constant energy. Every colour is high strung, every spectrum is on edge. The constant busy twitchiness, checking messages, learning skills, calculating vectors and contingencies. Even Brown, though she's patient she's not relaxed - she's got the settled tension of a lying cat, watching for something. Her mind brushed off the idea of Tranquility reflexively, never thought for a moment that Monk's tai chi could be for her. If ever there was a soul on the outer edge of the Wheel it was this one. Absolutely no chill whatsoever.

Numb:

Numb takes the Irish Transfer in the lobby without blinking. This is how they operate too. The friend group is the entity, the friends in it are mercurial.

“So here’s what I’m thinking.” Eli says. They’re bright and alert now, fresh from a nap and a shower. “It’s only going to look like this today. Today’s the day we get this for ourself, so if you want to see the crowd at its comfiest you’re looking at this. Tomorrow, the normies are coming in, because this is who the art’s really for. This is like, we’re looking at the paintings, but we’re the frame right now.”

Crystal hasn’t filled them in. They just, know, like this has happened before and it’s going to happen again. She adds, with dark amusement; “You have to sell your agony to those who have essentially never known it. They’re the ones who can pay to see it.”

“So I want to catch that as it happens. Like, as it starts off looking like our space, because we’re part of the product getting sold here. It’s like… When you catch a fish that’s too small to eat, so you use it as bait for the fish you actually want, right? We’re that smaller fish they’re trying to catch first, but it’s great because this place is made for a bigger fish, so until we get eaten this shit rules. The bait’s too good not to bite.”

And she’s right, honestly. At some level, Crystal’s plan to demonstrate this to the mainstream does mean that, does look like that. It’s hard to think of a rebuttal she could make here that isn’t just a reframing of perspective, a different choice of words.

Leather:

Keep watching, don’t see anything. The smoke rises. If someone’s fucking with you, they’re not overplaying their hand just because you twigged.

“Rudy, I am about to break down this wall.” He uses clawed hands to rip down smouldering beams, his skin protects him from the cinders that kick up with every break. “Okay, so good communication is effective anyway. See if we can get an answer. Rudy? Rudolph Merkin? No?”

He doesn’t cough. It seems like he should, but he doesn’t. His voice just gets fuzzier, like a filter’s getting clogged in there. “Now, remember, what kind of sensor should we be using?”

> Thermal Sensor - Sound Sensor - UV Sensor - Radiation Sensor
> Thermal Sensor

“That’s right. We’re looking for the opposite of what we usually do, the human body tries to regulate its temperature so at this point, Rudy is trying to be colder. We could also try looking for heartbeats, but if Rudy is an android we’re not going to pick that up. Now-”

> Must remove all valuables from the house before completing the rescue.

“Well, let’s get Rudy out to the window first, and then we can do that before we finish. Mr Merkin is going to count as a valuable, right? I’m sure he does something valuable for society, to live in a nice place like this.”

There’s a laugh from the audience, though it’s impossible to tell what level of irony Leather is operating at.

“Apparently it’s an old coin collection. So while I dig this Merkin Mannequin out from under the bed - good thinking, Mr Merkin, stay low under the smoke, keep something solid over you - We’ll have to figure out the best way to find and retrieve that. Okay, Mr Merkin, do I have permission to leave with you now?”

Monk:

Tranquility takes control.

“There’s a story called Gutei’s finger. A young boy watches a zen master deliver lectures with one finger raised in the air, like this-” she demonstrates with one finger of one of her six hands, “and he starts to teach like he’s watched Gutei. So Master Gutei finds out, and he takes the boy and he cuts off his finger. And then as the boy is crying, he looks at him and holds up his finger again - the one he’s just cut off. And the boy was enlightened.”

She chuckles under breath. “Apparently that story means I know nothing about Buddhism. My entire body is the raised finger that nobody has cut off yet. I just skipped to the end of what enlightenment looked like, but I am still trying to understand what that means. I do know that it helps to do the actions. I think if I can just act enlightened for long enough, perform it, then I will come to understand what I have been performing. Before then, I can’t teach what I don’t know.”

A Red face, the mask of an implacable Samurai warrior, takes her face. “It is good that your captor is dead and her empire buried beneath the serpents. It is good that your enemies are few and weak. Mine, at least, are so apathetic they might as well be.”

Green again. “Sorry, had to switch to Security for a moment. Tranquility can be a bit too trusting, and Authority - she’s the yellow one - she needed to know what Security would think about taking any of the inheritance for yourself. I wish we could talk like you do.”

Pink!

"You're talking about corporations at pride, right?" said Pink. "Because I don't know how to put this but, I don't care. It's a navel gazing, protectionist instinct that fundamentally misunderstands the nature of art and culture."

She raises her hands expansively. "We're not special because we're furries. We're not special because we're part of any subculture or combination of subcultures. This has been a part of humanity since the Pyramids and they're the ones who decided to check out of it for a while. What made us special, what makes us special, is that we are authentic people who communicate sincerely and build lasting friendships, inside a positive, creative, mutually supporting environment. The fandom didn't create that. There are nazi furs out there, god bless them, just like there are absolute total normies who create works of unbelievable culture without a single body mod. Being good people let us build this. It'll continue to be good in exact proportion to the number of good people and positive friendships operating within it. Shedding a tear for authenticity lost to the mainstream just means you lost sight of who, exactly, was authentic in the first place."

Red!

No hand reveal at this point. Time to make a call.

First possibility was that they were fishing for an over-reaction - shouting 'I know what you did!' to see who glanced for the exit. This was too specific and too dialed in for that - there are no alternate suspects here who she could possibly have blended in with. This was too much information about capabilities and methods to spend for pretty much any operational result.

So the second possibility was that her initial instincts were correct and she was being fucked with. In that case the demonstration of power was the point, and that could lead basically anywhere. There was no need to let it play out any further, then; it was time to force them to show their hand or fold. She sends a message to Leather.

> I think the simulator is hacked for real. Shut it down and get out safe and quick.

Green!

"I think you might have misunderstood the story," said Green. "The pronouns are ambiguous - but I think it says that Gutei cut off his own finger. He held up his own severed finger in front of the boy to demonstrate that he would rather communicate the truth about enlightenment rather than the technicalities of his communication method."

She feels happy that she's solved the riddle. An intellectual puzzle unpicked using a fast-burning brain, complete with a sense of accomplishment and absolutely no need to reflect more deeply. If Monk truly understood Buddhism she would have hit her on the head with her staff in that moment.

"Taking the inheritance would have presented an unacceptable risk," said Black quietly. "The only way to avoid the notice of people who care only about money is to have none of your own."

"Our system has its drawbacks, I promise you," said Brown. "Applying our full attention to things is... difficult, bordering impossible. We're often missing critical colours so we have to coach each other on how to react when we're not present. Internal debates don't so much resolve as they go latent."

Numb:

Numb isn’t chastised at all, but emboldened. This is workshopping for the article now.

“Nah, corporations at Pride rules. They pay a lot of money to get dunked on, like, thanks, brain geniuses.” She shakes her head. “This is more like… We know we’re going to be performing for them to be accepted, because we know we aren’t. Like the people in here are going to be smiling, waving, paying for everything, chill. Allies! That’s cool, love them, mumma needs to get that fuckin’ bag. But it’s like…” she fumbles for the words, but she’s excited to have the pushback, she’s excited to have the challenge to try to have to explain this. “It’s like, when they get here, there’s a lot of pressure to act right, ‘cause there’s a gun on the table, right? And they didn’t put it there, but they’re not taking it away either. They’re the scouting party for the mothership, deciding if we’re worthy or if it’s just kind of tragic that there were a couple of good ones caught up in all this. It kills the art because it’s like trying to be horny in front of your parents.”

“Corporations don’t scare me like that, because they aren’t really people. Flooding the space with cishet whities though is like, it’s like, fuck, it’s like being trapped in a tiny room with a cow and trying to convince it not to freak out, because it’ll stomp you into paste. No offense to the cow-girls here, who are hot and based. Also saw a cow guy once. Not like, a bull, but a cow guy. LIke, a masc cow? Even his milk tasted butch. It was wild.” She laughs.

It’s a story that would get a very different reaction from today’s crowd than tomorrow’s.

Leather:

Leather gets the message.

“I’ve decided I hate this, actually.” He declares, and the audience laughs. “No, really. Permission is good consent practice, the fists are just distracting. But the valuables is… It’s not just that I can’t just get the guy the rest of the way out, it’s that I have to know he’s there and run past him if I want to scrub. But the longer I stay, the more ‘viruses’ I’m getting, the more danger I’m in. It’s-”

Talking is not a free action.

> Must high five your reflection every time you see it

He shuts up and leaves the Rudy mannequin in the windowsill. Heavier-than-air fire suppressants start to go off, and the smouldering stops. He pushes his way through the soundnetting that blocks the smoke - it parts like a curtain of mist for him, and closes behind him, letting out a hookah puff of black smoke with him. From a nearby cheap plywood folding table in front of the audience chairs he grabs a towel and bucket and starts vigorously wiping himself down. The water turns thick and tar-like.

“Now, before we wrap up, I just want to say that these simulations aren’t completely randomly generated. Based on the audience suggestions, we pull up real cases. In this case, first responders could not get to Mr Merkin in time. By the time first responders could rappel into the scene, no body was recoverable. If someone had been there faster-” He lets the implication, the call to action, hang in the air before pushing through to the Klingon teleporter triangle.

“You think we were really hacked?” Leather asks you, quietly, severely. You have his full belief and confidence here.

Monk:

Green’s confident assertion actually gives the green mask pause, so she switched back to Tranquility and thinks. “Did you hear a different version of the story?” She asks. “Yours does make sense.” Her eyes widen, and there’s a sigh of relief. “No, that can’t be right, then. It has to hurt you to think about to be true Buddhism.”

Black gets an understanding nod.

Brown gets a cock of the head. The mask changes again to a dark orange mask, with a furrowed brow and a thoughtful twist of its lips like it’s chewing on a pencil. “How many do you have? I think I have almost one hundred faces now, though many are more specialized. There’s; Authority, Accountancy, Amnesty, Apathy, Augury, Apostasy, Artistry, Bully, Clergy, Crony, Deity, Dracony, Diplomacy, Duchy, Elegy, Enmity, Entropy, Effigy, Economy, Exigency, Frenzy, Fervency, Felony, Gadfly, Giddy-”

She switches to the green face again and waves. “That was me!” then back to the dark orange face which is, likely, Accountancy.

“Gastronomy, Gunnery, Gypsy, Gravity, Glory, Glossary, Geometry, Granny, Gaiety, History, Hilarity, Homely, Hardy, Inquiry, Idiocy, Irony, Impunity, Industry, Imagery, Intimacy, Intricacy, Intensity, Insurgency, Intrepidity, Jealousy, Janissary, Kitty, Lovely, Lunacy, Liberty, Legality, Lechery, Lethargy, Monkey, Mercy, Memory, Morality, Mockery, Mystery, Mutiny, Motherly (or Mummy), Necrology, Neutrality, Novelty, Notary, Numeracy, Oratory, Pedagogy, Poetry, Recovery, Remedy, Ribaldry, Sobriety, Smithy, Security, Sentry, Timidity, Temerity, Understudy, Vanity…”

She runs a hand over her face, and she’s Tranquility again. “It’s a problem when two are too similar. They fight over which is better for the specific situation. I used to switch between them a lot to try to get a balance of opinions, but these days I try to keep a few in rotation at a time for a situation and stick it out the whole way through. And some, like Idiocy and Jealousy, I keep because if it ever tells me it’s appropriate for a situation I take it as a warning. I imagine with fewer faces, you have to deal with a lot less indecision!”

Pink!

"Hm," she struggled to find the words. "If you're making art for your parents. Then you're fucking up if you make it too horny. Not that people shouldn't make horny art. But when you're trying to talk to people through art you have to be able to speak to them in words they can understand. In symbols they can relate to. A little old lady trying to sit at the front of a bus. Straight marriage but for the gays. Using little plastic blocks to explain shapes to babies. Some people don't want to listen to the math teacher talking about the latest frontiers of the art, they want her to explain what the textbook means. Crystal's got a good sense of how to talk to different audiences, and I don't think that being able to talk to different groups is something to regret. A community so insular it can only talk to itself is... vulnerable."

Red!

"No, shit, sorry - I just fuckin' knew Merkin," said Red. "And I'm pretty sure he got whacked, man. You pull up his fuckin' murder from a few weeks ago while I'm still looking over my shoulder in case anyone wants to talk to me about it and I basically jumped out of my skin. I get that modern is relevant but maybe fucking anonymize the month old death before wisecracking about it, my dude."

Red delivered that as fluidly as anything, but no other colour would have been able to do that. They'd have crumpled under the weight of having fucked up. Red's blind to her functionality because it doesn't make sense to her that she couldn't do this.

Green!

Every head turns to face her.

"What!?" she said. "I could make more colours. I just don't want to."
"We're just nine," said Brown.
"You sure we don't need an Idiocy?" teased Yellow.
Green looked her dead in the eyes. "We already have one."
Yellow perished.
"In seriousness, I've got more... ideas, up here," said Green, touching her head. "But they're undeveloped. Sometimes they merge or split or eat each other. I need them to be extremely broadly capable to operate an independent body so I don't tend to split them off until one gets so intense it's almost taking over my entire personality."
"We have less indecision," said Black. "But more conflict. When two colours are at odds it can bring everything to a halt while they have it out. There's no central authority to resolve disputes so problems are managed through an endlessly rotating series of cliques, political parties and right hands fastidiously ignoring left hands."

Eli:

She blinks. “Who’s Crystal?”

Leather:

“Normally it is.” He admits, too quietly for anyone else to hear, rubbing the back of his neck with a towel. “That’s just meant for the backend. When you asked for adding the hacking stuff… I mean, one of your prompts was ‘ask for permission’. That’s the only reason it would have come up.”

Then, in his own defense. “I’m sorry if that seemed insensitive. That wasn’t me making light of a real case. For me, this is about what I could have done if I was there. This is a version of the world where Rudolph Merkin got to live. Was he a friend of yours?”

Monk:

Giddy laughs. “That would be how you would do it, wouldn’t it?” She teases, sitting in a lotus position on her floor, hugging herself with all six arms. “You’d want to run yourself how you used to organize us, wouldn’t you?”

The black void face comes out again. This one must be Monkey. “That’s what it felt like building Aevum.”

Pink!

One of the benefits to being a highly advanced android optimized for cuteness is that when Pink's eyes sparkle you feel it in your bones.

"Crystal is the princess of this castle," said Pink. "A unicorn in soul as well as body. The kind of artist that would render me permanently discouraged, if she wasn't so kind and pure it's impossible to even derive negative feelings from her. She's the visionary, organizer, financier and mastermind behind this entire event and the fact that you haven't even heard her name before shows that she's even humble on top of all that. She's everywhere here and invisible, the fabric that allows everyone else to shine, even though she could outshine them all -"

Getting Pink to talk about social politics was possible but difficult. Getting her to talk about girls she liked, well.

Red!

"Journalistic source," said Red with a strained face. "Or would have been. His house went up not long after I was due to meet, didn't get anything out of him. You get why I'm freaked about intimidation tactics, yeah?"

She's an devilishly good liar. The opposite to White, she has the presence and flow to just emote every fragment of it with absolute confidence.

"Still, upshot," she said, "you got the authentic being hacked experience, right? Something you didn't think was important turned into a vulnerability. The world around you wasn't the world you thought it was, making you do things you didn't intend. You only found out about it when someone pulled you aside and asked what the hell. That's usually how an android finds out they're dogfacing. Keep it in mind when dealing with androids in the field, 'cause that feeling sucks just as much for them."

Orange!

"A general goes to war," said Orange, stepping into the room, "with the army she has got."

There's an on-fire charisma to her now. More than any of the others she was built for this, specifically. All of Green's reflections, fixations and obsessions with her family members were made manifest in Orange. She has a glow of... kingship, almost, the charismatic fulcrum around which all the world might turn. Or the most popular girl in high school.

"It wasn't like I was the first one to try to be in charge," she said. "Tiger thought she could browbeat people into compliance. Ox thought he just needed to remind people of The Schedule. Dragon thought he could make everyone follow him by just being so much better that everyone else that they'd A) recognize his supremacy and B) emulate his methods. Everyone else tried to apply their internal organizational schemes to their wider family and got frustrated when it didn't work. My process was to think about your personalities deeply enough to be able to predict your compatibilities and rivalries and encourage the most productive groupings. I wouldn't even call what I did leadership. Nobody ever gave the littlest sister a crown. Maneuvering that many powerful, independent paragons was more like... diplomacy."

She reaches out to embrace Monk. "I've missed you, big sister."

Future Movie Club Society!

"I... you... really mean that? You actually want to hear me talk about film?"

Euna Kim blinks with the acuity of a woman who has apparently forgotten how. Her smile is equal parts giddy and incredulous. This is a topic she's tried to broach with a hundred different people to only middling degrees of success. The people who take her classes and the people who like the sorts of movies that get her blood pumping may as well not even exist.

She slumps down into a chair Cinders has swooped out of nowhere to get for her. She's run her own gauntlet multiple times tonight trying to calibrate it for public use. She ran multiple weight training classes and a pair of self defense sessions with some of her (other) best students before you got here. Most of her diet today has been liquid nutrient solutions out of pure time necessity, something that only works because the main power source of her cybernetics is actually her own biochemistry feeding into a system of batteries that amplify the output to enable the crazy stuff she gets up to. The demands on her metabolism are immense, but it means calories are power for her in a way that most people, including less enhanced cyborgs, can't really claim.

But still, the intake to output ratio has been absurdly skewed in favor of expenditure today, and that was before she got too into Yellow's sparring session. This at the end of all of it? Too much for her. She had a spike of adrenaline and then all of a sudden she entered low power mode without warning. Cinders has already disappeared up into Euna's office looking for the emergency food supplies, Euna herself is just sitting there with that same smile on her face like she couldn't care less about her body's sudden betrayal.

"A movie night is essential, I think. For your training, obviously. I have a lot of files that aren't that widely disseminated anymore after the official platforms pulled them for tax purposes. You know I used to -- actually, never mind. Just give me a bit of time and I'll figure out an appropriate screen to make this happen. But in the meantime you're gonna want to check out the Duelist trilogy."

She pauses, frowns a little bit in thought, and then nods to herself.

"Yeah. That's a good launching point if you want to make a lot of interesting opponents for yourself. It's a high fantasy swords and sorcery adventure series starring the Eternal Maiden Elvia. She's this part vampire, part dryad swordswoman who's all doom and gloom and serious dour brooding from some shadowy corner or a tree top about the bloody nature of battles and her life and how because she's so dangerous she needs to be alone. But then her sword, Lillyblossom? Is enchanted and can talk, and it's hilariously optimistic and always pushes her to get back out there and keep... ahem. Not the relevant part. Like I said it's three full length movies, all in this incredibly unique, almost melty dream style animation. Duelist in the Mirror Castle follows her quest to save a noble lady from a witch whose body is made out of a bunch of animated shards of glass - it's got the best one-on-many fight choreography in the series and it does the best job of demonstrating a melee only skill set against someone with proficiency in ranged combat and ambush tactics.

"After that, Duelist in the Rose Garden pits her against the mystic arms dealer, Lady Rapier. She and Elvia have I think the only proper no nonsense duel in the whole film set, meaning there aren't any interruptions and it's a pure one on one with two people who use very similar styles and philosophies about combat even though outwardly they are polar opposites to one another. You can get a good handle on the dynamics of large weapon/small weapon and power stances' natural advantage over movement redirection, which is something that most stories get completely backwards because they want to make normal sized actors seem like badasses and it's just... it just isn't true, ok? Being huge and swinging something really hard is just fundamentally the kind of thing where you have to be almost flawless to overcome it. Rose Garden really understands that, you can tell the director spent time as a stuntman in physical cinema before jumping to animation.

"And then there's A Duel Must End at Dawn which is... hrm. It's a much slower film, mostly dealing with Elvia's blood curse and how lonely she feels when she can't leave her home-slash-prison to be with the girl she saved in the first movie. Like, she fights some forest monsters and then she rides a giant wolf like it's a motorcyle and that's rad as heck but it's, like... a lot of people call it a skip because it's trying to put the brooding and introspection ahead of the action and it doesn't introduce a new major villain on the level of either of the previous stories. It's still a good case study in how technique falls apart due to poor motivations and how to navigate a life or death situation in the middle of being stuck at emotional low tide and an energy sapping curse, but to be honest with you it's mostly the excuse to finally lay the lesbian shipping on super thick after teasing fans with it for four and a half hours of prior story. The company actually tried to walk back the ending after the fact which is hilarious given how blatant they were but... ahem. It is still worth a watch from the amateur combat enthusiast's perspective too."

Numb:

“Ah shit, didn’t know I was talking bad about your crush or something.” Eli slaps her face with the heel of her palm, like this is a mistake akin to forgetting to buy milk. “You know where she’s hiding out? You think she’d do an interview? I think like- Hold on, is that Gylo? One sec.”

In the sparse crowd, Eli leaps at a tall wolf looking guy with neon stripes runnlng through his fur, mane poking around the collar of his suit jacket. Eli lands on his back and starts ferociously biting his ear, cackling like a proper gremln. The edgy wolf squeals like a little girl as he tries to grab around his back and pull Eli off him. When she finally drops, he scoops her up in a big hug and spins her around instead.

Eli runs back to you. “Gylo does great post-shoegaze. Anyway, if Crystal’s a unicorn, she’s one of us, right? That’s different. That’s like… Fuck. Maybe? No, like… Fuck, I need to ask her something, I can’t figure it out.”

Leather:

“Hold on. You’re a journalist? And what does that have to do with Crimson? And…” He joins some dots in his head. “Does this have anything to do with what you wanted to talk to me about, with the Pump?” He asks White.

He holds up a ‘wait’ finger and runs back to his presentation spot.

“Hey, folks, sorry for wrapping up. On your tablets should be everything covered today, and you should check them out because this course does count as a few basic fire safety certifications you can put on your resume. If you have any questions about anything, I’ll be here the next two days as well to field them. Just find me later, and I’ll be happy to.”

The whole time he’s saying this, his eyes keep glancing up at November, worried that if he takes too long saying this, she’s going to disappear somewhere he won’t be able to find her again. He jogs back over when he’s done.

“We need to talk.” He says, firmly. “As soon as the simulation room clears out a bit more, we’ll talk there. That’s the best soundnetting in the building. Go walk around the crowd for about ten minutes and then come back a different way you left.”

Monk:

A hand runs over her face so she can smile as Giddy again. “You’re still where I got my face for Diplomacy! And Dragon is Dracony. I don’t listen to that one very much. I can’t wait to tell him that, if I ever see him again.”

The void shows again, Monkey. “Ox would love to know you’re okay. He’s mining Saturn’s moons right now, he’s…” She thinks how to put this, but the mask doesn’t change. “Don’t take anything he says personally. He’s angry, but he’s not angry at you.”

She flips to Tranquility again. It’s like all the synthetic muscles in her body unclench when she does it, and she breathes a sigh of relief. “Monkey remembers that time in our life the best, but she carries a lot with her that I need Tranquility to put down again.”

Authority again, the face of the stern librarian. “Now. I will neither ‘go dark’, nor will I join you in your mission to rescue our siblings.” She holds up a finger. “Until you know who betrayed us. I feel that is not unfair?”

Security, the red-faced samurai mask. Monk crosses the top two pairs of arms across her chest and rests the other two on her knees as she sits. “If an ambush could lie in any direction, then I must remain still.”

Tranquility again. She says nothing, and then changes to Giddy. She opens her mouth to say something, then decides she’s the wrong face too.

She shows Monkey again, black starry void. She presses three fists into three open palms likes Tranquility taught her. “It had to be Pig, Horse, Dragon, Rabbit or Rat. Tiger and Phoenix exonerate each other as a pair. Dog wouldn’t have done it. I’ve cleared Ox, and I didn’t do it, and I trust you.”

Security: “Which means the only three that we would seek out are the three we can’t.”

Tranquility says nothing. Just brings Monk back to her center again for a moment.

Giddy again. “There, okay. But we have each other now, at least! And you’ve seen Dad! How is he? He didn’t-” She pauses. “He wasn’t part of it, was he?”

Pink!

"I'll check with her," said Pink, texting Crystal. "Don't know if she'll have time but it's worth asking. I tried writing out interview my questions myself but it all came out as 'Did you know that your eyes sparkle in the neon light' and 'I really like you mane' so it felt like I was too close to the topic to be professional."

Black!

By the time the walk's complete it's Red, White and Black.

"We're sisters, sort of, she's security," explained Red as Black pulled out a the simulation room's control console and scanned it. "I'm with popular socialist rag, the Anthropozine. But yeah, anyway, if I launch into what I do and don't know it'll prime your memory - and since I'm the one with the notepad I get precedence. So you want to go first? Anything you think's relevant, take it from the top, I'll dial in with specifics and additional context after."

Green!

"I can definitively say that dad didn't do it," she said, casting the video of her Horror House of Broken Dolls up on the hotel screen. "But you can see that one for yourself."

She lets it play out. She's sure Monkey and Giddy will get a kick out of it.

"You chose Authority, Tranquility, Security, Authority and Monkey to deal with me," said Orange thoughtfully. "Out of a hundred. You're excited but not enough to take risks. You're nostalgic but not afraid of telling me 'no'. Well here's a path you can all agree on: why not visit dad and Goat? Actually, one better - why not set a tradition and do your own horror movie haunting on dad's house to break the ice? Flex your old mischief instincts, one-up my production, and camp out somewhere safe for a while until I've got more data. And while you're there, I got Goat interested in espionage and hacking, but he's still new and he could benefit enormously from security training."

The Master's Students!

Nova is a good listener. Green watches intensely, taking imaginary notes with mnemonic finger-twitches. Yellow sits in a lotus position, drinking the vision into herself. Pink is wide eyed, looking up pictures and screenshots of each character and scene as soon as they're mentioned. Together they drink in the knowledge like water, not just committed to seeing it but to seeing it on the same level as Euna.

Yellow raised her hand to speak.

"I notice that these are all movies about swordfights," she said. "Do you also teach fencing? To what degree should I integrate weaponry into my combat?"

"Oh!" said Green. "Is that how you lost your eye?"

Crystal and Eli:

Crystal messages back; They’re the one that does all the scene reporting for your little outlet, aren’t they? I was wondering if it would be her or 3V attending. You have the key to the penthouse already? Take her up. I don’t want to be seen just yet, but the more press coverage the better. I’ll do it on the condition that, whatever else they write, they publish something about the event tonight.

Eli, looking over Pink’s shoulder, reads it for herself. “I mean, I was going to wait to see how the whole thing played out, but I can do that, no problem.” She starts to drag Pink by the arm back out of the exhibition hall, towards the elevators.

On the way up, in the whisper-quiet carriage shooting up, up, up the inside of the castle tower, Eli gives Pink a nervous look. “What do I need to know about her?”

Leather:

Even in the absolute privacy of the burned-out simulation room, sitting around freshly refurbished wooden furniture that still smells like barbeque, the huge man keeps his voice low.

He shakes his head, and spreads a hand palm-up on the table, fingers spread, like he’s giving something to the room. “Here’s where I’m at. I was on the Pump detail, one of the only people who could do scuba work in those conditions. I’m following the hosepipe and way down the line there’s this massive cut into a chamber that, near as I can tell isn’t recorded on the maps. That’s not too strange, the Spine is full of places like that, but usually you can find out if you ask. Nothing. Zero. Worse still, I’m talking to people I’ve never heard of in the chain of command, even though they’re all on the org charts. And Merkin happened right after this, right? I don’t know how he’s related, but… we’re talking a real, honest-to-god conspiracy, right?”

Leather leans forward, his chair creaks under his weight. “I think the Pump was a distraction to get at whatever was in that room.” He leans back again, way back. “Haven’t had anyone I can say that to without sounding like, you know. Crazy.”

Monk:

She thinks. As she thinks she rubs her face a few times, shifting from Giddy to Monkey to a new one you haven’t seen before. This one is the face of vicious laughter with a long tongue rolling out, poking over the bottom lip. This must be Mockery. Then, back to Authority again.

“We’ll need a bow, an axe, a spear, a mace, a stave and a scimitar.” With every item she closes the fist she’ll carry it with, counting it off. “Sanskrit chanting. A fog machine. And just a little bit of psilocybin in his coffee, first.”

It’s Tranquility who finishes. “Singh will recognize Durga when he sees her.”

Pink!

"She's a visionary," said Pink. "In the truest sense. She sees the whole of everything, from lighting to symbolism. I did something that impressed her and shifted her vision's horizons and she created this in the update. I wouldn't say I've got no idea how to ever get back on top, but it's going to be the hardest I'm ever going to work in my entire life. And that's coming from the girl who built Aevum."

"So, what do you need to know?" said Pink, smiling. "Well, she's the ultimate in topping from the bottom. Unless you've got a vision that can compete with hers, let her place you. She'll give polite suggestions and subtle nudges and just go with them. Trust that she sees you as a diamond and is placing you for best effect, even if she's delicate about it."

Red!

"Yeah, Crimson said the whole thing had the feel of being on the ground floor of a coverup, which is what got me interested in the first place," said Red. "But what's interesting is that it wasn't the attackers doing the coverup. Whoever was running defense was doing the interference, and I'm pretty sure it was them who did for Merkin."

"They wanted everyone out and their own people in," said White. "Including technicians, medivac and first responders. Wanted nothing but Chase Black on site. I had to fight them like hell for every deployment, even if it risked station integrity."

"So tell me more about these org chart superstars," said Red. "Names, voice types, methodology, anything weird or identifying. Any cross talk you caught."

Orange!

It's how she always got to her siblings, in the end. They had a vast array of personalities and sub-personalities, each as complex as a fractal. But they were all Singh's children which meant that they had all been raised to hold one virtue above all as sacred: Always Commit To The Bit. Dad didn't raise no cowards. When negotiations broke down she was the voice who encouraged them to settle things with a race to the moon or with laser swords at dawn.

"We have a workshop," said Orange. "I'd say you're free to use it, but Black has covered it with Temple of Elemental Evil levels of booby traps, so you're free to use it with mild supervision. We can definitely manufacture everything you need."

After that everything was logistics; whens, wheres, hows, transportation, requirements, schedules, the kind of operational preparation that November loved and could talk about for hours.

Euna's Fitness Corner!

She points her finger at Yellow.

"It's... complicated."

She points her finger at Green.

"It's complicated."

The finger points up, and her head tilts toward the ceiling to follow it. The smile hasn't faded off her face completely, but the complexity of the questions has her stuck in a decision she doesn't seem to know how to talk her way through. Her mouth opens, and at that exact moment Cinders pops her head out of the office.

"Hey Eunie? All I can find are those super disgusting soy peanut bars, do you want me to maybe go pick something up?"

"Eugh. Ah, no this is fine. Faster calories is better than more edible ones."

"Kay. Well. I'm gonna do a sushi run anyway. I'm hungry, and I'm not gonna eat this crap. Eel's still your favorite, right?"

"Cinders. I swear to god if you burn all your money on this I'm going to break you."

"As if you even could right now, Ms. Low Battery. Just let me do this. Whatever you might be thinking, tonight's lesson kicked eleven kinds of ass and you deserve something for it. Besides, I know a place. Very reasonable, only light Yakuza connections. Maybe."

"Fine. Just... ok. Fine. See you."

And then there were two. Sort of. Close enough. Sorry Nova, you're just... difficult to think about.

"Sorry, right. You asked a question. Two questions I guess, but they're kind of the same. Yes, I teach Fencing. I try not to, though. And yes, that's basically what happened to my eye. But it's... ok. I've avoided talking about this, but when I was... in an accident. It's why I went cyborg, at least initially. It damaged my eyes as well, but for the most part it wasn't so bad that I couldn't push past it. I saw things fine. I thought. I've made a lot of excuses over the years but even now I'm... ok, do you know a lot about cybernetic eyes? The affordable ones are pretty damn gross. They scrape your vision to sell you ad data and like, I swear to god if I'm ever looking at my wife and I get a commercial overlayed on her lingerie I would rip the fucking things out right then and there."

An angry huff. Her fists close weakly in her lap.

"Sorry. But yeah, I've done my best with what I had left. Figured I'd bite the bullet when I felt myself losing a step. Only, one eye got a lot worse faster than the other one. But it still happened slow enough that I adjusted for it without noticing. My depth perception took a dive off a cliff and I just... missed it. Until I got into a fight the other week and I got a knife pulled on me. Went to millimeter dodge it for the superior counter angle, and then blood. Blood everywhere. So that's... mm. I'm about to say a lot of stuff at once, ok? And I'm going to snap back and forth so much it's going to sound like I said nothing at all. Feel free to ask questions if this bounces off you but, let me finish first ok?"

She tears the wrapper off of her emergency snack. When she bites into the bar, it stretches to almost half again its original length instead of biting clean through. She makes a face at it, and just picks at it with her hands instead.

"I have not made any secret about combat being essentially an unsolvable puzzle. There are variables stacked on top of variables and even if you can somehow account for all of them you won't arrive at a single correct solution. Owing to skill set, mentality, opponent, and location there can be an infinite variety of responses which are exactly as efficient as one another. And even then... mm. So. When you get into a fight, the thing you're really trying to do is be allowed to walk away from it again. If you run away, that's fighting. If you cow them, that's fighting. If you knock them out, same thing. And the truth is that unless you're the one initiating all of these, the vast majority of combat you wind up involved in is gonna see your opponent armed with a weapon.

"Knives are easy to carry, but they're messy. Likely to kill, and confer no range advantage so they're countered by high skill empty-hand styles. Even so, they're easily concealable and confer a lot of misdirection ability and add threat potential for minimal investment, which makes them popular. A one handed sword (which is what I practice with) is an ideal balance of increased threat range and speed but... they're obvious as hell. You also can't carry them everywhere, and unlike other weapons it's difficult to find an improvised version wherever you wind up. You might think a length of pole or a bat are good enough, but they aren't. Especially as you improve: you learn the length and the weight balance of the weapon you practice with and that develops tendencies you can't afford.

"A staff or spear wielder is usually a little better off because it's not hard at all to find things that are long and stick-like that do ninety nine percent of the job, but environment is their killer. It's too easy to wind up in a location where a sword would swing fine where a longer weapon would become a liability. But a sword rewards that highly specific proficiency with techniques you literally could not do with a different weapon. Two-handed swords are even worse. You become overspecialized, basically without being able to do anything about it. Bats, clubs, tonfa, any bludgeoning weapons run into the same set of issues with regard to social convention, the law, and their overall breakability. A gun doesn't even bear mentioning."

She sighs and winces her way through more of her emergency food. Cinders was not lying about the taste, but a rapid infusion of calories still has her sitting up a lot straighter now that she's gotten going.

"It is not possible to become a master of every single weapon style at once, even taking advantage of the, erm, unique structure of your brain. Reaching a journeyman level on a wide variety of weapons is also dangerous because you risk jumbling your threat assessment and reach for the wrong one in the moment or crossing up your techniques. The single most adaptable weapon you will find anywhere on this station is your own body, and that's true of anyone you meet. But nevertheless, an unarmed fighter can lose her life to a vastly less practiced opponent if they happen to have the right sort of weapon to hand. And remember what I told you earlier: it's much more likely to wind up in combat in somebody else's territory, where they have prepared specifically and you only in vague guesswork.

"Around and around and around. But I guess that's enough. My answer is this: if you're interested in learning fencing for its own sake, I'll teach you. But when it comes to what you should fold into your combat style... I guess I'd rather hear you weren't planning on getting into any fights at all."