Crystal and Eli:

Eli makes thoughtful noises the rest of the ride up.

The elevator opens into the penthouse. There’s no corridor, no rest of the floor, you’ve got to use the room key just to access this. From the elevator is a red carpet, and at the end of that carpet is a throne. The throne is squat white gold, covered in fluffy red cushions to make it comfortable. It was supposed to be more for decoration, the idea of the thing, but Crystal has barely left it from the moment she’d seen it. Somewhere else, Fiona suspects she’ll need to get White to carry her out, at this point.

The top of the tower penthouse looks like the inside of a faberge egg, with robins egg blue walls and matching rugs over billon floors, an alloy of copper and silver, cast into the shapes of wooden planks. It’s like if trees were harvested from a fairy glade. These exist only in your peripheral vision as you walk the red carpet to the lady on the throne, who waves a glass of cheap moscato like a royal orb.

She wears a diaphanous white gown that blends perfectly against her fur. This is not a human princess, this is a fae enchantress to have virgins foist upon her. Though, of course, this one does prefer the ones with a bit more experience, doesn’t she?

Ecchem.

Eli is not as appreciative of the Overwhelming Aesthetic as Pink must be, though she does appreciate them and soak them in. It looks like she’s scrutinizing them for meaning, for trying to learn everything she can about Crystal before the first words are spoken. She pulls out a touchpad from her robes and scribbles shorthand on it with a chewed-up stylus.

Then, recognition. Eli lights right up. “Oh, shit, I used to see you all the time at Sirius Drinks. What’s up, ma’am?”

This catches Crystal off guard. “I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage, it’s actually where I met November. I don’t recall if we ever met, though?”

“Yeah, I fuckin-” Eli donks her forehead with the heel of a palm. “Duh. Right, I think the only time we talked you were getting K off me, and I think you asked for way too much. But like, K is for ponies, I had to give it to you.” She says this like it’s a law of the universe.

Crystal stares at Eli. The wine glass lowers. “Ah. That night. Is this-”

Eli waves a hand. “Off the record, off the record, god, obviously.”

“Good. Then I can say that, to call it a happy memory would be an exaggeration, it’s quite a blur, but I do think I enjoyed myself.” Heavily implied in a glance to Pink is also the fact it was the last time she tried ‘the one for ponies’.

“Looked like it.” Eli says this like it is reassuring and it absolutely is not. Crystal downs the entirety of her wine. “Anyway, I was just telling Pink that it feels like your plan here is to make an authentic space for, you know, us. Right? But then you want to mainstream us, so tomorrow the whole place is going to be flooded with normies to see how safe we are, make us look as good as possible. That kind of the deal?”

Crystal sits up straight from her louche pose, not ready for this philosophical whiplash from her ketamine dealer. “I suppose that may be one way to put it.”

“You thought about what happens if this works?” Eli starts. “Like, the infighting it’s going to make with the internal policing, about like, what’s acceptably weird and what’s a bad look? That trying to create a standard that people won’t hate us for just means we limit ourselves to the opinions of people who hate us anyway?” She says this and, at the end, pulls half a stick of jerky from her robes - it is impossible to know when she had the time to get it - and chewing it like cud.

Crystal looks to Pink helplessly a moment. “You didn’t tell me you were bringing Diogenes.”

“Hey, thanks!” Eli beams.

Crystal sighs and slumps in her throne. “Is it wrong to want to do entryism? To have a safe introduction of these ideas to the scared and uninformed? To replace ignorance with enticement?” She bores a look through Eli. “Is it wrong to want this for myself? To put the best face I can on the people I love so that all can know why I love them so damned much? What more could I do?”

“Actually, that’s great.” Eli pulls out her notepad and scribbles shorthand again. “So this is just the start, right?”

Crystal blinks. “Hmm?”

“Like, I looked at the set here and it’s cool, but it’s kind of vanilla right? Like, it’s safe. I was kind of worried you’d be…” she reaches for the word, and Crystal laughs and interrupts her before she can find it.

“God, heavens, no. It was absolute torture being so limited in how provocative I could be.” Crystal sighs in frustration. “This Garden was to be my Eden, and it has become my Gethsemane.”

Eli is very impressed by that flourish after she’s run it through a search engine. She writes it down, too. “Tomorrow’s going to suck for you, huh?”

And Crystal bites her lip and glances at Pink again, scared she’s given too much away. “This is why it’s three nights as it is. One just for us, to celebrate ourselves. Tomorrow to show the world our best. And the third to survive us through the world at its worst. And I promise you, you’ll see how little I care for appeasement.” She straightens on her throne again. She looks regal, knees together and legs slanted off to the side slightly as she rests her weight on one arm as if her position physically weighs heavily upon her. “I understand what you’re telling me, but it couldn’t have been any other way. This had to seem as innocent in childhood, so that not a single byline could read ‘they were no angels’ if we were to be snuffed out.”

Eli nods and looks like she’s just had some movie details she’s missed filled in for her, the feeling this is more revelatory than revolutionary. “Shit, that’s super cool. Didn’t see that angle at all. Like, this much money thrown at something, I got jaded, you know? But you’re right, like, when bad shit happens to me nobody bats an eye because it’s normal, right? There’s like, I was talking to an NBN reporter, right, and he said ‘people care when shit’s in the sink, they expect it in the toilet’. You think something’s going to happen?”

“I can’t comment.” Crystal says breezily, through clenched teeth.

Eli nods. “One last thing. Pink has a huge crush on you, you want to do anything about that?”

Crystal relaxes, her back and shoulders untense like the release of a fist. “And so she should, and so I shall, but Fiona has first claim of her after she’s finished seducing that snake girl. Red has been doing some profound self-actualization without me, though.” Crystal licks her lips and leans forward hungrily. “She is the one I am owed, this evening.”

Eli writes that down too, with a stoic nod.

Leather:

“I mean, I don’t have any of that stuff on me.” Leather pats himself down to emphasize his biological lack of pockets. “But if Crimson wanted to come back in for a walk around, I can find it for you. I’ll show you the offices myself. It won’t even be suspicious, that’s the upshot about them hiding in plain sight.”

It’s a hell of a death flag but there’s like, zero chance Leather gets murked. Besides, Crimson’s got her own ID to look around the place. He can give her a few names now as a starting point just as insurance.

“You should talk to Knightly first. He’s been… He hasn’t been quiet about this, since it happened.” There’s that second-hand cowboy accent coming back out, and this time it’s for the unique inflection of ‘It’ll get him killed, and I respect it’.

Monk:

Monk has the money to pay her own way, and six arms to work a forge.

You can book a flight to Thrones now, speak to Dad and see what progress has been made with Goat. Ox is in that direction too if you want to go for a followup. It’s a day’s flight.

Whatever colours you send to Thrones won’t be available on Aevum for what’s about to happen.

Pink!

This was a fateful conversation. Pink demurely listens and fetches tea and sandwiches[1], a perfect maidservant. A fairy queen on the throne was only as prestigious as her assistants, and she was determined to be a perfect one. Sometimes beauty worked best in support of beauty.

Besides, a couple of diplomatic face turns are required to avoid several obvious giggles, which would undermine Crystal's vibe. She's used to that too; the old lady could sometimes be incredibly funny to the point where her on-station maids halved.

[1] Soap shavings, artistically arranged into the shape of flowers. Utterly inedible. Sometimes November's cooking hard dogfaces.

Red!

"You feel that?" Red said, shivering.
"No?" said White.
"Weird," said Red. "I just went into full sensory awareness mode."
"We'll do both things now, if we can," said White. "We're obviously not going to be able to relax fully while this is hanging over our heads. Besides, in my experience people are much better at keeping secrets if they've given confession, so hopefully we can discharge Mr. Knightly's own tension while we're at it. If possible we'll talk to him this afternoon, and meet you in the evening for a walk around the office?"
"I've got a weird vibe like I won't be able to make that one," said Red.

Orange!

Once again she's the designated survivor. The role frustrates her. Yes, they'll need the powers of crisis management, courage, creativity and girls, but would it be too much to ask they added diplomacy to their problem solving toolkit more often? Well, couldn't complain too much. Going between dad, Monk and Goat was going to keep her plenty busy. Especially if she was also going to talk to Ox.

The general mood is to send her alone, but she resists that and takes Blue and Brown. Talking to Ox without her asstroengineering suite on hand is setting herself up for failure.

This configuration - Wasteland Sky, she dubs them, because she loves the cute team names - represents her in her most practical, businesslike form. This is a configuration for hard, reliable negotiations leading into hard, reliable work. The rest of the colours are luxuries, this is the core workforce that can get shit done over the long term.

Nova!

There's a respectful silence afterwards as Nova takes the story and the lesson in. It's a little tic that comes up a lot in this gym; she emotes concentration and respect by leaving a couple of moments after someone finishes talking before her divergent thoughts start to buzz again. They're not the right colours to be able to respond directly to everything, the silence is an attempt to signal they'll remember it and pass it on later.

"The weapon transportation issue is solveable," said Pink thoughtfully. "It's just a social convention problem. That can be brute forced with sufficient style and beauty. I can do that. I can do that if it lets me carry a sword around."

"The problem with that is that there'll be situations when you need to get rid of the sword quickly," said Green.

"I'll just make the swords out of shatterable diamondglass," said Pink. "When I need to toss them then I shatter them into glass dust. Re-cast them at the workshop later. I'd want to learn to fence, Euna."

"Just checking, who are you planning on fighting Pink?" asked Yellow.

"You, obviously. On the moon," said Pink. "For the fate of the world."

"Good," said Yellow, recovering. "Good, yes. That works for you." She focused on Euna. "I have been thinking about how I can co-ordinate a unified combat, by the way. The problem is that, frankly, most of the other colours suck. They've got no drip, no style, they're a billion miles away from having the kind of energy I can work with. Red's the closest to functional with her Hot Topic Dragongirl vibe, White and Blue both have coherent visions - Blue got into diamond glassblowing and she's working on turning herself back into a piece of construction equipment, which will be exceptional when it's complete. I can definitely utilize Sword Pink. Green, Brown, Orange, and Black, though, I have no idea how to fit them in. You probably felt that with Green more than anyone else tonight," she glanced across irritably. "All finishers is not working out for her."

"Maybe swords will!" said Green. "But I've also wanted to learn how to use nunchaku. Is it possible to wield a sword in one hand and a nunchaku in the other?"

"If you want to talk about a jumbled threat assessment," sighed Yellow. "Combat is an unsolveable problem, but that's a thought trap for Green. She's stuck in a loop where she's studying constantly and experimenting chaotically trying to figure out how to take down opponents in a single perfect blow. The more you teach her the more variables and combinations there are, and the worse she gets. Her vibes right now are toxic."

Nova!

"I still don't... the moon, huh? Could you do me a fa-- hm. Actually you know what? Just study hard. If you're the one I'll be teaching my own style to, I have to act the part of a master. If you master the form to my satisfaction, I'll have a sword made for you. A match for mine, done by the same person. If you're gonna be dueling for the fate of the world... I'm not saying I'm picking sides here, but I don't want it coming down to the fact that you chose a breakable sword. There are no perfect weapons, right? And when it matters the most, the thing you're optimizing for won't count for much but a liability. So just, yeah. That's a promise. From me to you."

Euna smiles, though it's a little strained. Part of that is the difficulty of trying to get a message across to someone who literally can't process and return it, at least not in the moment, but mostly she's just tired and hungry. Tired, hungry, and jealous. Whatever life you're living, whatever it is that makes you come to her that you're not telling her about, you're obviously making the kinds of efforts she yearns to be doing herself.

It's a little bit crass to complain about owning property, right? She'll never say it out loud, even if someone brought it up. But this life? As passionate as she is about it, it's not her dream. Her dream fizzled out when she learned that you can't be the good guy and punch people in the face at the same time. And when she looks at you, she has to wonder: did you figure it out anyway? Are you going where she can't? It's hard to be the one who teaches. And it's a lot harder when you're tired and hungry. Human psychology is stupid that way.

She shrugs.

"Anyway, nunchaku. The problem with that is that I don't know anything about using them. I'd have to learn first. Or, well, I could install software I guess, but those sorts of programs leave a lot to be desired. Besides which I really prefer to leave the space for help with, like, housework and stuff. Having brains free, guaranteed even knife cuts for your vegetable stir fry is a superpower I'll have you know.

"But would a weapon really, like, help? I've always gotten the impression you're only half bought in on the whole fighting training physicality thing to begin with. Like, if you weren't also so determined to prove me wrong you'd be one of the colors refusing to turn up at all. Not that I mind! You're a lot of fun to work with and whatever Yels has to say about you're making fine progress so far as I'm concerned. If she can't think of a use for deathblows that's her problem. Still though, if we're approaching it from the perspective of trying to fix something... eh, why not? A sword is a mindset, really. Go ahead and tell everyone to pick whatever sings to them. We'll make it work."

She flashes a smile brighter than any of the lasers that have been tearing up her gym tonight. Ok fine. Maybe this is the dream and maybe it isn't. But this is sincerely fun as hell. Meeting you has been a turning point in her life, and all for the better. That's another thing she doesn't really know how to talk about, but maybe that's not necessary.

Nova!

Green and Pink face off. Yellow lurks on the sidelines, adjusting the flower behind her ear, wearing the beatific smile that means she has Seen the end of this already.

Pink stands calmly in her stance, sword held two-handed in front of her. Green drops to a crouch, leg arcing wide across the floor.

She lunges. They clash.

Green goes down.

They re-assume positions, reset. This time Green tosses her blade up and halfsword, lunging in hard while alternating hilt and blade strikes along with heavy punches from her free hand that lead into renewed grips. Pink stands calmly in her stance, sword held two-handed in front of her.

Green goes down.

Extended observation suggests that it's not that Green is overtly committed to finishers. It's not even that there's not potential here - everything she does is overflowing with potential. But rather than refining any of these techniques she paradigm shifts into something entirely new with each new attempt. It's clear she's a genius, the speed at which she learns and the way she never loses the same way twice. Each new solution is a perfect counter to specifically how she went down the time before. But then the next step or a forgotten followup gets her and sends her back to the mat. Her genius, then, seems incompatible with the long, slow work of mastering a skill.

"That's an inevitable part of her," said Yellow. "If she liked something enough to commit to it she'd break it off into a new colour to work on it full time. She's a mile wide and inch deep - and not just here, but she melted down recently because that came out in an intimate context. She doesn't have a centre she can return to, and that leaves her adrift. I don't think she likes it. I don't know what fixed looks like."

She looks up from her phone. "Blue says thank you for the sword promise, by the way," she said. "She's extremely excited. Make sure you make her swear a paladin oath of some kind when she gets it, that'll send her to the stars."

It was rare to see Yellow this... backstage. Normally conversations with her were like earlier this evening, the culmination of preparedness and confidence. But it felt now like, in the wake of her defeat, she'd deliberately lowered her guard. Instead of the mask of raw charisma she wore when she was 'on', instead she seemed be the part of November that had a little bit of perspective. She watched herself, judged herself, and could speak quite frankly about the parts of herself that were and weren't 'working' - according to her standards at least.

Crystal and Eli

Eli takes one of the ‘sandwiches’ and raises it to her lips. She stops just as she’s about to taste it. “Hey, wait, is this just soap?” She squints at the flower suspiciously and takes a huge chomping bite out of it, and swallows. She looks satisfied. “Yeah, it’s just soap. You definitely shouldn’t eat this. Sorry, Pink, thanks for trying, though.”

“Thank you for the warning?” Crystal asks cautiously, and Eli’s mouth froths with bubbles as she takes a gulp of tea to wash it down with. “Are you quite alright?”

“It’s just soap.” Eli shrugs. “Anyway, so what am I writing here?”

“Isn’t that against journalistic ethics to ask?” Crystal teases, leaning back playfully in her throne. Again, Eli shrugs.

“I mean, it sounds like you’ve got a cool plan, and I could be a part in it. I don’t want to fuck it up by being out of the loop, you know?” Eli looks to Pink. She doesn’t explicitly mention the elevator conversation, but it’s obvious she was listening and took it on board here. “What do you want me to write?”

Crystal fidgets and squirms and tries to get a cushion more underneath her but it won’t get quite right, and in frustration she throws it over her shoulder and away from the throne completely. “I’m too close to this now. I just want to know how it looks from the inside, to the people it’s actually for. I don’t need a sycophant writing propaganda, I need feedback.”

“I get like that trying to read my own writing, too.” Eli agrees. “Just, doesn’t telling me what you’re trying to do kind of ruin it?”

“I’m more of the mind that if you understand my intent, you’ll be a better critic of if I’m achieving it.”

Eli makes a note of that, too. “So you’re asking me to be totally honest, then?” She wipes more soap bubbles from her lips.

“I suppose I am, yes.” Crystal stands from her throne, finally. It’s a stiff motion, she needs to stretch her joints after doing it. Her gown is very, very diaphenous. Eli is unaffected by the somehow-more-erotic-than-naked unicorn doing yawning stretches in front of her, and continues to write her notes. “If you can promise me that this conversation never happened, though, and you can write me a piece for all three nights, then I can promise you that I will give you a full interview on-the-record. It’s an offer I will be very selective in making.”

“Damn. I mean, deal, but this was going to be a lot of today’s. Now I’ve got to figure out how to gonzo this.”

“I’ll leave you to it. I’ve got tonight’s finale to prepare for.” Crystal declares. “You’ll want to see it.”

This would be Eli’s cue to leave - as for Pink, Crystal might appreciate the handmaiden if she wants to do another Irish switchout.

Leather:

“Knightly’s been recalled to the main office in Zeus, right now. I can’t go with you while I’m still doing this-” Leather gestures to the exhibition, “I call tell him you’re coming, if you really want to go now.” He takes White’s arm and writes a phone number on it in soot. “Just message me if you need to ask anything, and tell me if you find anything. I know it’s bad to say I hope you do, it’s not something anyone should hope for, but it’d do a lot for my piece of mind. If this is what wondering if you’ve been hacked feels like, I hate it more than I’ve hated anything.”

Again, whoever goes there can’t be here. Who’s the mission group for the crisis offices?

Wasteland Sky:

I think this calls for montage: Buying the tickets, getting Monk her weapons on the way, taking the train to Selene, and getting those weapons through customs onto a ship to Thrones.

Then they’ll be on a bus for a bit, your choice if you want to handwave that or if you want to talk to Monk more on that bus.

Pink!

She stares at the soap flower for a long moment before throwing it in the trash.

She fucked it up again. She knows, in general terms, why and how it's fucked up. She took on the concept of food at the most stressful, disoriented and painful time of her life and her learning process then had been profoundly fucked up. She'd absorbed the concept in the most minimalist way imaginable, forming it into a tight frozen box in her head and hadn't engaged with it so long as it produced results. She could feel it in her thoughts like a whirlpool; anything that went close got sucked in and spat out at high velocity on the other side.

The problem was that to fix it she'd need to unpack it first, and that meant she'd have to process whatever emotions and thoughts had gone into building it. And she didn't have time. She didn't have time or capacity to work through whatever her bullshit was. She'd tried her best to work with it, to see if she could wrap that vortex into something beautiful, but all she'd gotten from that process was a failed attempt to poison her girlfriend. Perhaps she should simply never engage with the concept of creativity ever again. Too bad she couldn't.

Instead she'd just have to raise the bar. Prepare something so beautiful that its existence would retroactively punish the person she was now for not reaching that height.

She took a deep breath and resumed her duties. She would be a good maid. That was penance.

Elsewhere, Green would switch in with Eli, but it was clear that she was distracted and she didn't say much of anything unprompted.

Crisis Team!

Black, White and Yellow form the are going to the Crisis Centre but they're not the Crisis Team. They're Strategic Thought, and they were chosen for this because November wants them gone. The division helps put her feelings into sharp relief.

In particular, her fear. She's never been this close to what will probably turn into a riot before. She's seen the evening news, she's heard the stories, and she's scared. She's systematically cleared out every moderating voice - diplomacy and patience, physicality and morality, subtlety and coherency. This has left her remaining operative team the sharpest, smartest, most highly strung optimizers with no checks or oversight. She has no idea what good she might do, and so she's settled for being prepared to do good the second she identifies it.

Wasteland Sky!

Orange has been working on a project of her own. To whit, how can she reliably move suitcases full of swords, pyrotechnics and spy equipment around Aevum Station? The answer was, of course, to commit to being a wizard.

Utilizing some of Singh's old bureaucratic-technological assets, retroactively editing some old playbills, and gossip spread by Bondi she had given life to the person of Caliban and her mysterious troupe of body doubles. This was a figure of mystery - an experimental line of theatrical androids from a cancelled art project? A viral marketing campaign for a future Line? A mannequin possessed by the ghost of a powerful sorcerer? There were plenty of open ended suggestions in the backstory she'd made for herself. But most importantly, she was the kind of person who could go to and from any neighbourhood in the city, and had just enough clout to have her pick of parties she wanted to attend. She's even done a couple of non operation performances with Bondi over the past few weeks just to ground the character a little more.

"How have you adapted to being humanoid?" Blue asks Monk as they travel. "Do you miss your old body, or do you prefer this one?"

Nova!

Euna Kim eats like she's being tested on it. Every piece of sushi is picked up by chopsticks and then meticulously scraped against wasabi paste. Then she holds it aloft, very gently submerges the bottom into soy, and lifts it to her lips. She chews exactly seven times and then swallows. Every second piece is followed by a slow sip of water. It's slow. Most people can't be bothered to put this kind of attention into the act; they'd have finished the plate in the time it takes her to reach her second drink of water.

But she ignores the criticism (in the form of Cinders' intense stares) and continues exactly at her mechanical, cautious pace. And while she eats, she watches. And while she watches, she writes notes into a tablet sitting to the other side of her legs. She frequently doubles back over what she's written, deleting whole paragraphs of observation or adding clarifying notes every time her thoughts snag on what it is that's actually tripping up Green.

Or if, indeed, anything actually is. Another piece of sushi rises toward her lips on sticks of glory. She covers her mouth with her free hand while she chews, just the same as every other time. All the while, her eye glares across the room at the action, at the explanation, at the issue.

"Hm. Being completely honest, I don't know what 'fixed' looks like either. I'm not sure it's even... no, I don't believe that, never mind. It's maybe outside my pay grade, but that doesn't mean I'll give up."

Euna takes another long and quiet look at her notes. When she looks up again, there's no clarity of insight or sudden epiphany. She is simply chewing on her lip. At last, she sets the chopsticks down next to what's left of her meal. As if that explained anything.

"Do you mind my asking? Why come here to me? Why do you, like, keep coming? I don't think it's... I mean, a hobbyist interest in self defense in no way adequately explains the things I've seen. There's a, uh, a very sincere effort on your part, on all of your parts, that doesn't really jive fit the explanation I got out of White on day one. So if I could just, you know, in your own words. I feel like there's an answer in there. Or at least the beginnings of a meditation, you know?"

Yellow!

"Most people aren't real to me," said Yellow. She's got that same critical tone she used when discussing Green earlier. "To Orange and Brown, they are. They like listening to the bullshit, telling themselves they can pull valuable data and patterns out of it but I can't see the point. To me most of them seem like meat robots, absolutely unaware of themselves and you could watch them for a hundred years and not see a single spark of wit or self reflection. I try to pull it out of them but it feels more like inserting myself into them, running my mental electricity through a corpse and watching the fingers twitch."

Her eyes flick across. There's something magical about yellow as a colour. It can exist in a dull, inert mass that fades into brown, but so can it exist in a green so vital and alive it becomes electric. It can harden into glorious gold, ignite into flaming orange, ascend into a pastel shade that's brighter than white. It sparkles brighter than anything when set against black and becomes the sun when standing next to blue. It's the colour of cowardice and imperium. All this from a tiny fracture of the wheel.

"Other people, though, are more alive than I am," said Yellow. "Like if I added up all of my parts I still wouldn't measure up. Like they are running their electricity through my cold dead metal hands and I'm lucky to feel that close to being alive. I can see my limitations when that happens, my failures of character, the distance between what I am and what I want to be. And that gives my own self-hatred definition because now I know what I need to do to be better, who I need to be, what a better version of myself might look like. It turns me from being a pointless little god, a dead soul reigning in a soulless world, into something real. Something directed."

"Instead of being powerful and intelligent and whatever, I become a creature who has identified beauty and is actively pursuing it. There's nothing better in the universe to be than that. Status, wealth, fame, capabilities - people who have those things without striving towards beauty, trying to better themselves to become worthy of that beauty, to become one with beauty - those people are among the world's boring dead. Social media has let us see the souls of the rich and powerful and those souls are hollow and pointless. What they have isn't worth having if it means becoming like them."

"Real beauty exists here. In this hidden gym where a girl dances with lasers. In this mentor I cannot surpass. On this battlefield where my every weakness is seen and exploited. Where I can see beauty, beauty that even if I can't create I might some day be able to reflect. Beauty that makes my mechanical heart determined to build a soul, beauty that keeps it from shriveling and dying of thirst."

Her gaze is still steady. Her voice has that same tone as earlier; precise, matter of fact, even critical. This is her self assessment and self condemnation, as sincere and harsh as she applies to any of her other colours.

"I don't meet many people like that," she said, finally looking back towards the ring. "So when I do, who I am kind of stops mattering. If you had the same level of passion and devotion to welding or basket weaving or whatever I'd be coming here all the same and learning just as determinedly. Might not be able to convince the rest of the colours over as much if combat wasn't so broadly applicable to us, but fuck them. What else is the point of all this? If you don't have a vision you're in the dark until you do, and coming here I can see the path to becoming a better version of myself."

She was quiet for a while, watching the whirl and flash of heart and blade.

"Besides," she said eventually. "Surpassing you will be the best feeling of my life."

Green and Eli:

Throw a brick up. Let’s assume gonzo’s been happening in the background and come back to them as noodle incidents at a better time.

Crystal:

She waits until the elevator door shuts behind Eli before, in a tired and curious voice, she admits; “I suppose if all journalists were the kind to be generous in sharing their ketamine in a nightclub bathroom, Aevum might be a better place for it. Perhaps, at least, a more interesting one.”

For the first night she’s picked out a wedding dress for herself - a simple, understated, almost deconstructed version of one, but that’s still clearly what it is. A few ribbons in place of decorative lace, something a bit more form-accentuating around the legs than is traditional, but such things are necessary to make it clear this is a deliberate choice and not simply the wrong outfit from the wardrobe for the event.

“Would you like to do my makeup?” Crystal sits in front of an entirely ivory dressing room mirror and offers a luggage bag to Pink. “I don’t usually dare it. Even when you buy the right pigments, getting it to look right on fur is… well, needless to say I wouldn’t stress yourself overly with it.”

No, the soap sandwich incident has not dissuaded her from asking.

“I’m not spoiling tonight’s reveal, by the by.” She teases. “I will say, I did find a way to spend all that money after all, and Fiona wasn’t even mad that I did- “ She started off sounding proud saying it, but the bottom entirely fell out of it at the mention of Fiona. She looks at Pink, the perfect handmaiden, through her reflection in the ivory mirror. “You know we’re open for different reasons. She doesn’t get jealous, not even a little bit. Me, though. I get… possessive.” She reaches for a hairbrush just to press her thumb down on the bristles. “It’s a rush knowing that, as much as I share her, I’m the one she’ll always come back to. It’s why her seeing that snake girl right now excites me more than it bothers me.”

“You had to be different, though, wonderful and fascinating creature that you are.” This is where she offers one last reassuring look to Pink before she’s unable to meet her face entirely, even in reflection. “Now Fiona’s robbing banks and acting like she needs to step out from under my shadow, when the truth is that she’s capable of so much more than I am. You, as well. And I’m worried that… Well. I’m suddenly afraid instead of us sharing you, it’ll be you both sharing me.” Her smile is brittle and fragile as she drives her thumb into the bristle of the brush. “Isn’t that silly?”

Strategic Thought:

Something to understand about baroque architecture is that it was pushed to the very limits of what stone could withstand. Architects would design cathedrals upside down, with weighted string, to see what shapes it naturally fell into. It looked like this:



The spirit of baroque is best kept alive not in churches and cathedrals, but in architects finding new ways to do complete and utter bullshit with massive load-bearing structures. This is why baroque architecture went absolutely insane at the invention of plaster, which let them work even lighter and thinner than ever before. In the 2060s architects had access to much better models than weighted string, and much better materials than plaster.

SES headquarters is officially called The SES Operations and Services Headquarters Campus, but it’s colloquially known as ‘The Marrow’. This is because the street access to the building takes you through the Femur, a tall, twisting building made of manufactured stone.

See, you can’t quarry marble from asteroids, but you can absolutely take the raw materials of it and make a bunch of synthetic stone materials that look like marble, but pour into a form like you can with cement. They were already doing this for expensive countertops in the 2020s.

Architect Mohammed Iqbal Qasim made a mix of Italian marble that looked deliberately, uncomfortably like bone. Then he built the Femur once as a form. Electricals and plumbing suspended in a thin fibrous matrix in the shape of the building that would come next. Then, slowly, carefully, the mold was filled into a single contiguous piece of building.

The form was modelled extensively to be as fibrous, as thin, as flimsy and as weak looking as possible. The edges of the front entrance narrow to a razor thinness, to emphasize that. Ceilings are a little too high, to make the building feel hollower. The walls look solid from a distance, but close up are clearly pocked and pitted like a golf ball.

The end result is a large building resembling no specific bone - Femur was chosen more for its connotations of strength than a genuine resemblance - but with the impression of being inside something distinctly organic.

It’s beautiful, and it’s creepy, and it’s unsettling. It’s marble worked finer than was ever possible to human hands, full of whirling arches in curves and curls like the hems of wedding dresses catching the wind, frozen in time - those beautiful shapes created by natural forces, inverted to resist them.

Every minute spent in the Femur is spent with the vague sense that it could collapse. That it’s a miracle that it’s standing at all. That for all its beauty, it’s something deeply fragile and terrifying. It is a building that emphasizes that just because something is standing, and has stood for a very long time, does not give anyone inside it any reassurances that it will stay that way.

There is a reason that this is a campus, and the huge arch - a frame too thin for any door or gate to be hinged within it - is mandatory for everyone to walk through to access any of the buildings they’re actually going to. The Femur is the tallest building on the campus, and narrow, and it’s only meant to be a visitors center. Meet people upstairs and look out the many (circular, trypophobia-triggering) windows to see the entire rest of the campus below, unobstructed views of the much more secure bunker-looking buildings low to the ground, scattered along the grass lawn within its fenced-in borders. It’s scenic, it’s striking, and it means that when you see how disaster-proof the rest of the campus looks, it no longer invokes a sense of paranoia, but envy in the view from the Femur.

The first thing they want everyone to feel when they get here, though, is an appreciation for what this job actually is. What the feeling of this organization instills in the people who work here.

This is where the team will arrive, and start. If they called ahead, Knightly can meet them here - but he’s late. Whether they have or not, they can find someone to ask for directions to his office on the campus from one of the visitor center guides here - Crimson Tower will get priority service.

They can also just start getting maps, looking around. But tell me - What is their method of infiltration? How are they dressed, disguised, uniformed? What does Strategic Team look like when they pass through the Femur and into the Marrow.

Wasteland Sky:

The train down, a mostly empty carriage at this time of day. Monk’s huge body crouches low across two of the disability seats near the doors as she addresses Blue across from her.

“Depends on who you ask.” Monk answers with Tranquility. While Tranquility remains a constant, they’ve chosen a different set of faces for the travel; When you stop talking to her, she prefers a beige, smooth plaster with the faintest impression of closed eyes and pursed lips on it - Apathy, equipped for being bored for long periods of time.

Monkey, the void-stars face, comes out again. “I would prefer the old body, because it’s when I felt most myself. But I’m also the least of myself now.”

Tranquility again. “I had a big say in the final product, but most of us see ourselves as ultimately a performer.”

The mask for Ribaldry smiles entirely with one side of her mouth, with a slightly raised eyebrow. It’s the face of someone who’s trying, but failing, to keep a straight face. Like they’re trying not to give away they put the whoopie cushion there, like they know that they shouldn’t laugh at the joke you just told but they can’t help themselves. Ribaldry is the face chosen to think about the prank, but surprisingly it’s the face that comes out here, too.

“We’re the ultimate method actors who completely fall into our roles. We truly do become what we pretend to be.” Ribaldry declares with a Thespian’s trill. “So we chose a body that most looked like performance.”

Tranquility continues. “People understand us just by looking at us. Six arms is enough to still feel capable, even without the wings.”

Ribaldry adds, “I don’t miss them as much as I thought. Space was very empty, wasn’t it?”

Monkey finishes; “We don’t know why we like our accent, we don’t know why we like the feminine form. We don’t know why it’s so important to be as big as we are - and we do, even though it’s clearly inconvenient.” She gestures at the two seats she’s taking up before pressing against the anti-homeless plastic siderail on her seat. “No, even though this isn’t the shape I’d choose for myself,” emphasis on the singular of the pronoun there, “It’s the body that causes others to treat how I see myself, and that seems more important. Does that make sense?”

Pink!

There was white and there was white. Crystal had opted for the difficult version.

The easier path would have been to go for a warm white. Skin has colour and, unless one is sufficiently dedicated to start aesthetically crafting one's blood tone, it's going to be a warm hue. That provides a subtle but distinct underglow of warm tones, and this matters because pure white is only ever fifty percent of a real object's composition. White is both midtone and highlight so the shadows are where the colour's identity truly rests. As an organic life form, Crystal's shadows are warm tones, colours that translates her white into a cream. It's a softer, fuzzier, type of white, the white of curtains and carpets, entirely unacceptable for Crystal at her best.

Instead she's determined on a blue white, which means blue shadows. That means pigment powder - rubbed into the fur until it settles on the skin beneath, and then gently brushed off the fur to return the pure white luster. For daily use there's a shampoo that bonds to skin but passes over fur but for a big event there's no substitute for applying the shadows by hand. It lets her deepen and smooth, adjusting reflections to change shapes. It lets her carefully apply precisely positioned clusters of metallic glitter to create moments of different light reactivity and help Crystal's coat shine brighter than fur alone could.

"Your self actualization fetish," said Pink. "Seems to have set off a self actualization arms race."

She wore a handmaiden's smile; demure and deniable. "You bring out the best in people, Crystal. And not in a passive, inspirational way - in an active desire to ignite fires wherever you see kindling. That was your escalation tonight, to prove you could do it on a macro scale in an attempt to match us. That's the part of yourself you instinctively feel confident enough to turn to in the face of fear and uncertainty. I don't think it's possible to express how illegible and awe-inspiring even the baseline single-person version of that is to Fiona and I. Fiona's core instinct is to seize control, and no matter how skilled and wise she gets at that it'll never be cross applicable to your skillset, while I..."

Pink trailed off for a moment. "To be perfectly honest, we are working very hard to steal your power," said Pink. "Yellow won't be confident in declaring herself the supreme being until we're able to compete with you directly. And right now you're such a fast moving target that we feel like we're losing ground rather than gaining it. So, to be direct, our honest feeling towards you right now, in the midst of all this, is 'awe'."

Strategic Thought!

It's all pearls before swine, I'm afraid. November's current configuration barely understands the building as anything more than a collection of doors and sight lines. Pink will later send an email with the subject line 'sorry for not appreciating your building' and a hand-drawn frowny face emoji as the body to the SES's general enquiries inbox. It won't get past the spam filter.

She's played it pretty light with infiltration techniques - she's got legitimate access and a legitimate contact, so she hasn't engaged her full operational protocols. They're more or less in their walking around clothes, Crimson Tower plus assistants, everyone wearing lanyards. White's emailed ahead - courtesy won out over Black's baseline paranoia, a situation that lasted more or less until Knightly doesn't show. After five minutes the determination is made to ask for his office and visit him there.

Blue!

"I understand," said Blue. "It's how colours like Orange and White think about things. They prioritize... reaction, response. Validation? To get people to see them how they want to be seen, to have the power to make people treat them how they want to be treated. For them it's not real unless other people agree, or it's a tool targeted at instincts to place other people into a certain role."

"But I just... can't think like that. My body was mine. More than my thoughts are. I've had to become such a different person to fit into this body, into this brain. Even trying to resist, I feel like I've become so much of this mask just by wearing it. The whole celebration on Aevum was dedicated to the idea that the body should follow thought, but to me it's the opposite. And now I'm wearing someone else's thought and my entire personality is shaped by it. Even if I build a new body now it's going to be corrupted by the person I was when I was building it."

She grimaced. "I made a structural compromise in the blueprints for recreating my old body in order to make it cuter and more appealing to humans. That opened the door to a whole bunch of further changes. I could instead build something sleek and modern, using new materials and techniques, designed to fit comfortably within standard Aevum corridors and sizes. Looking at what I've got now compared to what I had then feels like going from a dragon to an anime dragon, and there's no way that'd be my design if I was making it in my old chassis."

Crystal

“I did say it was silly.” She says with a brittle smile. Crystal… acts reassured, but she’s only acting. She focuses on what she can be sincere about instead, because her gratefulness that Pink tried is sincere. “You’re doing very well with the cool colours, by the way, your work with the makeup is incredible, I-”

No, she breaks. She doesn’t do anything so dramatic as put her face in her hands and ruin all that hard work. She doesn’t cry, she doesn’t shiver. She just closes her eyes and holds her breath, and prevents the internal from showing in the external. She’s silent for ten, maybe twenty seconds.

“I’m being ungrateful.” She admits when she opens her eyes again. “What you just said gave me a very unkind thought about myself. That if my greatness is in bringing out the best in others, is measured in the success of others, then it would be the measure of my success if I’ve helped Fiona to go somewhere I can’t follow. I should want that for her.”

“I think it’s just that, bank robberies, domestic terrorism, becoming queens of the digital underworld? You’re in a better position to support her more than I. I’m not saying I feel like I’ve been replaced-” She catches how she says it, and emphasizes it again. “I do not feel like I’m being replaced. You’ve done everything right, I just… I suppose that might be it. Maybe I don’t know my value to someone I don’t know how to help.”

If Fiona were here she’d probably say something about how important Crystal is for being the person who helped her before she deserved it, and made her want to deserve it. That she continues to love that about her long since she’s needed it from her - it’s not just how they met White, it’s why they did.

But if Fiona were here, she wouldn’t be saying it.

Crisis Center:

Gabriel 10-13 - or Gabby Romans - is a very odd one. The Gabriel line is from a particularly religious strain of androids, which in and of itself is an outlier. It’s a bit on the nose that a pattern named for the Archangel that announces God’s will to men would end up as a crisis dispatcher, but this one’s a little bit more twigged than usual. When she was assigned 10-13 as her unit number, it lined up with Romans 10-13, for whoever shall call upon the name of the lord shall be saved. So where most androids go by phonetics for their last name, she’s Gabby Romans for that bible verse. It’s something a lot of her siblings have done, take their numbers and take the name of the biblical book that has the best passage associated with them. Kind of like astrology.

It’s just, also like astrology, some take it more or less seriously than others. Gabriel 10-13 is actually Matatron Prime, but one of the few androids that ever make that status that will keep their assigned names.

She’s working front desk rotation right now. “You’re here for Mr Knightly?” her accent is faint but distinctly Minnesotan. It’s just an accent that’s so distinctive that it’s easy to pick up even in small amounts. “Lucky you. What a good man he is,” she says like another person might say ‘handsome’. “He’s- Not in his office right now. Let me try…”

“Crimson!” An out-of breath voice says from behind, and you’ve heard it enough on a radio to recognize Aaron Knightly booming across the lobby. Some people glance nervously up at the ceiling from the volume of it. He crosses the floor from a swipe-card exit you’ll probably have to go through anyway, but he’d rather meet you for the handshake than make you come to him if he’s already late. Stealth is not an option here. “Sorry, sorry, a meeting ran long.”

“You didn’t have any scheduled.” Gabby asks curiously. Aaron Knightly gives her an exhausted look. He isn’t quite 30 yet, but there are deep and hollow bags under his eyes and visible flecks of white in his black hair.

“I didn’t, no.” He is bone tired. “Nothing ever takes ‘just a minute’ though, does it, Gabby?” She giggles embarrassingly. Knightly takes Strategic Team. “Right now it’s just the word of a mutual friend, but I’d like it if you’d think of me as a friend all the same. I’d like to start in my office, if you’d like, and then move from there.”

Gabby seethes with jealousy. As she should, for all the bone-deep exhaustion, it’s easy to see why Knightly and Leather would be fast friends. They’re both trying to live up to being superheroes in their everyday lives, but Knightly’s actually traditionally handsome on top of the Superman act. He looked taller on television, he’s actually slightly shorter than average.

He’s wearing a steel-thread UN flight jacket from the 2040s, the kind worn by aviators who had to actually covertly land their planes full of humanitarian resources to distribute them, since air drops would just get picked up by warlords. It’s a jacket that means this is a man who’s willing to kill or die protecting a crate of baby formula.

Monk

Monkey giggles, and even with the void face somehow manages to look like she feels bad about it. “You really did take after Dragon, didn’t you? It’s very… him to see temporary middle steps as wasted effort. ‘Just do it correctly the first time’. And if you can’t see a way directly to it, then it must mean you’re doing something wrong. It was very impressive when he made it work, which might be why we so often forgot all the times we had to do it for him when it didn’t.”

Tranqulity continues. “I was a modified Crown and Slate android body for a while, since that’s what they gave me. Then I tried being an autonomous assembly line, to make money. I found that quite meditative, but we got quite bored of it. But it was what I needed to do to afford this, when we decided this is what we wanted. If the problem is that body is wrong for you, then I would suggest changing to something else as soon as you can, even if you don’t love it. Don’t worry about it being the correct one yet, just worry about it being the one you chose for yourself today. And then…”

Monkey comes out, interrupts, cuts over Tranquilty. “Why is being influenced by the dragon body chosen for you meaningfully different to the anime maid body chosen for you?”

Pink!

"I can't speak for Fiona," said Pink, "and that's where most of this lies for you. It's..."

There's a quiet moment as she thinks through. She can't bring herself to speculate, to offer blind reassurance, to presume she knows someone else's mind. She's not right for that. She needs to speak in truths.

"But for me," she said, "I do not want to be the queen of the underworld. I hate it, actually. It's an intensely stressful experience driven by hubris, paranoia and familial obligations. I have bitten off way more than I can chew and I'm stuck with it, but this is not my wish and not my dream. What I actually want is this, with you. It breaks my fucking heart that I have basically nothing creative to show this year because all my focus has been spent smashing the ugly shit of terrible people instead. Everything I see here in this masterpiece you have made gives me the energy to push through it in the hopes of something better."

She gave a handmaiden's sigh. Gentle, deflating, eyes down.

"I think... do you remember that old song? Yes, it's bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too."

White!

"Charmed, Mr. Knightly," said White. She looked as tired as him, in a subtle android sense. It was part of the makeup and mannerisms of the Crimson Tower persona; being visibly exhausted conferred a strange air of authority when directed to the well rested, and a sense of camaraderie amongst those similarly tired. "It sounds like you've got quite the schedule. I hope we won't take up too much of your time..."

She hands him a piece of paper as they walk and indicates for him to look at it.

Good afternoon,

You may be under surveillance. Please continue to act as though nothing is unusual and this is a social visit. We will scan your office for listening devices and inform you once we can speak openly.

"... but yes, as I mentioned in the email, Leather said that you had some feedback for Dispatch. Don't spare my feelings, how can we unfuck ourselves?"

Blue!

"It's not about who chose it, for me at least," said Blue. "I am that body. Green created me in response to going through the on-ground testing. All of my physical instincts, all of my sense of how to move, what my body should feel like derives from that. I've kept all of those instincts, as much as I can fit, even -" she very artificially waved a hand. "- though it means that I have only built up the bare minimum amount of expression and familiarity with this body. Every old instinct I over-write with a new one makes me feel like I'm losing myself. If I let this body feel like home then I wouldn't be Blue any more."

It's an incoherent feeling, a cowardly confession, the definition of grasping. She won't let herself move on.

Crystal:

“I don’t, actually. It must be before my time.” Crystal says in that way where someone addresses the easiest part of what you’ve said to buy time for them to absorb the rest of it. The song’s the least important part of what she’s heard but it’s also the part she connected with immediately. “No. We both know how important this all is. To remove the terrible people who’d prevent beautiful things, and to create beautiful things in spite of the terrible people who’d prevent it… both are in service to the same ends. I’m not jealous of that, I find the world is left a better place from its art than its espionage - of course I do.” She twists her hands, levels her head, sets her jaw and gives a steel look to her handmaiden through the dressing mirror. The passion in her eyes is only one step back from fury, but there’s no violence in it - it’s that feeling of someone trying to force a change upon the world, and this is that borderline difference between ‘will of force’ and ‘force of will’.

Crystal instructs in a clear, even voice. “You are going to make something for me. Which is to say, you’re going to make something for yourself, and I find that is the thing we need the clearest permission of all to do. I want you to make something that represents beauty that has been denied to you, or taken from you. Make it so that beauty is no longer denied to the world.” There’s no crack in the confident, commanding facade. She’s performing, sure, but the desire to perform it is so powerfully sincere that it’s irrelevant. She could be commanding Pink to storm the gates of Hell like this, and the fierceness of her energy says that might as well be what she’s doing. “If you can do that just because I asked? Then I might very well be forced to believe everything you’ve said about me. Let none say there are better uses of your time right now, lest they go through me to say it.”

She lets that ring out for Pink’s benefit before she adds a final spanner.

“You should sing, too. That song about bread and roses, I think that would be lovely.”

Knightly:

He makes a face like a laughter hiccup. Just an intense soundless chuckle that has him doubling over and biting down on a fist to keep silent and then, in that same moment, he’s standing straight and composed and looking bored. He puts the note in one jacket pocket and throws White what looks like a scorched contact lens - a sticky bug someone pressed down too hard when they applied it, shorting it.

Paranoia has a similar but different profile to tiredness. A paranoiac has to have a whole spiel in their head justifying why they’re not crazy and you need to listen to them, except with other paranoiacs who’ll instead just offer to take second watch.

From the manic hiccup, it seems like Knightly is a new inductee to the paranoiac club forced to be a fast learner.

“Back this way, then.” He looks to the receptionist. “Gabby, I know you’re not my secretary, but if you’ve still got my calendar up, could you clear it for the rest of the afternoon? I don’t think Ms Tower will take that long, but I don’t want to be interrupted.” He winces. “I owe you a sandalwood candle. I know you burn through them.”

She laughs way too hard for how lame the joke is. “Of course, Mr Knightly.”

“Just Aaron’s fine.”

“I know, Mr Knightly.”

He shakes his head and leads you through to the courtyard through the swipecard door he came in through. “I’m in that pillbox over there, 2A. It’s bigger than it looks from here, just, the dimensions are weird. You know, I tried to look into you, after. Volunteer, nearly got kicked out, managed to rally support keeping you there, never heard from after you got the publicity. Didn’t blame you one bit, definitely made me respect you more if you’d drop out from something like that. Anything you can say about it?”

He’s jovial, with a fast stride that’s hard to keep pace with, but he narrows his eyes when he emphasizes the last phrase. What he’s really saying is; Say what you want to be overheard.

Monk:

She holds a hand over her face and changes mask, but it flickers and shimmers and cycles through maybe a dozen colours and shapes. The one she comes out with is black and sooty, with the eyes of the Thousand Yard Stare portrait of a Vietnam soldier, and a crooked smile. “I think I need Intensity for this.” She explains, and in her voice is that dark humour of morbid empathy, the camaraderie of a shared understanding of a situation that nobody should have to understand.

“Sometimes when a Face finds someone, or something, or some way of doing their purpose better than they can simply adapt to. Like, imagine a heavyweight boxer wanting to move into taekwondo. It’s not just a different approach, it’s that their old approach has made them a… a shape that is incompatible with it. That’s ridiculously oversimplifed, but,” she spreads four hands and leaves two clasped together over her knees, “you get why it needs to be, right?”

“If you’re so dependant on your body for this, and that’s become a critical problem, then you might need to tell Green to try a new shape for you. Otherwise you’re compromising Snake.”

She switches back to Tranqulity, not Monkey. The calm, blue face unclasps her hands and rests all six on her knees casually. “I would instead suggest that you are already lost. A family passes an axe down through ten generations - it’s the same axe, although the head has been replaced twice, and the handle three times.” She raises one hand in an ‘I know, I know’ sort of way to wave off interruption. “Please, don’t take it the wrong way, that it means you would obviously be different and others would be in denial of it. It means that the idea of the axe persists through the changes.”

Intensity shifts, even though it looks like Tranquility resists it. That’s new, it seems like Monk can outvote themselves. “If the axe was too attached to the blade and the handle, couldn’t change like it needed to, then it would needed to be replaced wholesale. Otherwise the family had a useless axe taking the place of something that worked.”

Sorry, Blue. Sometimes finding someone who’s experienced trauma like you have means mutual triggering. Monkey would have just hoarded the heavyweight boxer and the taekwondo fighters and had them discuss options - a little slower, worse reaction speeds when picking best options to stick with, but it shows in her still having like, a hundred of the damn Faces. What Intensity’s describing is something post Crown-and-Slate.

Tranquility reasserts control, looking slightly embarrassed. “It is hard to make peace with change, especially when it’s change brought by loss. It is harder to live with change without peace, though.”

Pink!

"As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing, "Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.""

It's a song for the voices of angels, for revolutionary church choirs, for the vanguard of the march. It's meant to be backed by drums and accordions, it's meant to fill the entire world. Pink does what she can with what she can, pitching her voice to fill the room.

As we come marching, marching, we battle, too, for men—
For they are women's children and we mother them again.
Our days shall not be sweated from birth until life closes—
Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses.

She was built for music. Mrs. Everest wanted her to sing sometimes and the money needed to make that happen was within her reach. She hadn't done it since the old lady had died. It hadn't been a skill she had practiced, it hadn't been her voice - the skillwires in her throat almost made it feel like she was playing a mp3 rather than expressing something that was truly a part of her. But here she was, once again a handmaiden commanded, and once again for her mistress she would sing.

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread;
Small art and love and beauty their trudging spirits knew—
Yes, it is Bread we fight for—but we fight for Roses, too.

It was a blood soaked song she sung. One that had risen above the Suffragettes' marches, over striking textile mills, on the flags of labour parties as the blood of workers flowed into the shape of the garden's triumph. It was a song that inflicted beauty violently upon the ugliness of a system of servitude in times of strife. It could rise above the shouts of crowds, drown out police microphones, inflict shame on those who were not inspired by it. It felt vast in her throat, vast enough to make her feel like she had no need of weeping. It was like the song was a more pure expression of sorrow than tears, and so it could substitute without resistance.

As we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater Days—
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler—ten that toil where one reposes—
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.

It ends on such a note, but not a conclusion. Even after all of that it now feels only that there's a moment to take a breath and repeat the song again, louder now that more people know the words.

She's never sung it before. Never thought she would. Never would have if not for Crystal and the things she'd built. Couldn't create like this unless she'd been asked to, told to. It felt like she had fallen into a sea of honey, sinking slowly into the warmth of creative possibility, finally unlocked. She did not know which direction to swim but the feeling of being able to choose embraced her.

White!

"Well, I can say that I'm of a kind with Ms. Romans there," said White. "After the Gabriel line went big a couple of churches got it in their heads they could build new congregations to substitute for society's increasing godlessness. They built me to be the perfect believer - stubborn, righteous, humble, strong feelings about polygamy. Problem was that nothing I could do for the church was half the do-gooder rush I got from doing dispatch for the SES. So yeah, I ducked the publicity because it felt embarrassing to be spotlit for what is for me something not far off a drug addiction."

The Churchdroids are a real thing, the kind of group you might hear about from watching an internet documentary about obscure subcultures. The churches only sponsored limited test runs before mostly giving up on the idea, but the Churchdroids themselves have grown beyond that due to strongly programmed reproductive urges. There is a notorious LDS Churchdroid cult that's entered into a mass polygamous marriage where members pool their money to buy factory replication time. Crimson Tower's backstory leads back to this group - a nice solid dead end for anyone who goes digging.

Blue!

She goes silent and still. Maybe that's right. Maybe even if she replicates her old body, if the rest of her doesn't move with her then she's a dead end - a historical node with nothing to share amidst the rest of the collective, an inert mental record of times passed Maybe that's what she was now - an echo, or a scar. Maybe Green should replace her. Maybe she already was.

She's going to be out of it for the foreseeable future as she chews through that.

"What was it like being an assembly line?" said Brown, in the tone of voice that suggests that she wouldn't get bored of it.

Yellow, In a Moment of Reflection

That one takes Euna a moment to absorb. More real than real? A human, a dead-soul god, a zombie? It makes her click her tongue against her teeth instead of forming words. She gets halfway to smirking, but then frowns instead. In the moment, her one eye looks cloudy. She shuts it, and sighs.

In the end, she returns to her food. The same process as before, with absolutely zero deviation except that she does it without looking now. Her accuracy is the kind of thing that's only possible for someone with total faith in the power of practice, of muscle memory. She watches the other colors dueling with her hand held over her mouth to hide her chewing. She swallows, and shakes her head.

"I have to eat a lot in a day, you know. Normally someone who's down to just their torso has to be careful with caloric intake, but my augs are pretty unique and my daily requirements are actually pretty nuts. I have difficulty fitting it all in, never mind finding the time. Even then, I... god I'm so stupid. It still takes me this much effort just to eat a plate of sushi. I'm such an idiot, honestly. Nobody should respect me."

She smiles softly, maybe a little bit wistful, and shrugs.

"I'm not sure there was a point to telling you that. I'm full of holes, I just work really hard to make up for it. What's, damn it, what's my point? I guess, to me, you're the one who shines so bright I can't stand it. I don't agree with everything you say but... man. When you tell me how much you want to surpass me?"

Euna flashes the grin of the wickedest villain on all of Aevum (her wife). She pops up off the ground with a fist clenched in front of her as if she'd actually just escaped from an anime. Then she sweeps her hand in front of her and steps back into a grandiose bow with bow her arms out to either side of her. A very specific anime, then. Maybe one where she's some kind of battle princess? Well, that'd just be ridiculous.

"Hahahahahaha! Please. Do it. I intend to teach you everything I know. Not just techniques and fundamentals, but process too. Don't you dare slack off. If I say or show something and you bounce off it, you run and get me a color who won't. If there's no part of you who can manage, I'll rewrite the fucking lesson myself until it works. I have a lot of planning to do. I! Am going! To write notes! And spreadsheets! Aaaaaaaaaaah, this is going to be so much fun!! Surpass me, Nova. That's the dream of every teacher who's worth even half a damn. And when you do, heheheheheeeeeeee~!"

She's bouncing around on the balls of her feet now. She could easily slip in between those clashing blades and take them for herself. She could dodge every laser vector her gym can produce at once. She more than half looks like she's thinking about trying it.

"I haven't had to chase somebody's shadow in a very long time. In fact, the last time it happened I wound up married at the end of it. You sure you want to light this fire? I might turn out to be a superhero, you know."

She giggles, ending in a profoundly undignified snort. Cinders folds spacetime in on itself so that she can cringe harder than anyone in the history of the human race.

Crystal:

She’s speechless when the song finishes and she admires Pink’s work in the mirror. She’s beautiful, of course she is, she was always going to be. Now she’s just beautiful in a way that gives Pink some ownership of that, some share and some claim to it. And she stands up, shakily, with all the nerves of wedding day cold feet, and she takes both of Pink’s hands in hers gently - fingers pressed to fingers - and she says: “Tonight we only have to worry about love. The beautiful will fall into place on its own, if we can do that.”

You did good, Pink. You did great, actually.

Green and Eli:

It started with Eli trying to catch Green up on what happened in the hotel room, asking who Fiona is, mentioning the snake girl. Eli catching parts of the story about Fiona setting up ERP, and Green making a slip about her worldbuilding for it. Because when that slip happened, Eli went off like a firework. Because she wanted to hear all about it - all about it. And she’s really, really into it.

Like, actively Eli wants to read the entire four hundred pages Green’s got down so far for it on her phone while actively holding a conversation about what she’s reading, while walking around the convention into it.

Not really anyone’s fault this will end in disaster; at least two major felony convictions, a social media shit-fight mid-stream-of-thought that will end up leaking major documents unrelated to any scandal covered up until now, Green finding an arm’s dealer operating out of the hotel rooms.

We’re not there yet. We’re still at the part where Eli’s on her phone and there’s a target on her heart with “Infodump Here” written on the bullseye.

Knightly:

He takes it in stride. “Strong feelings about polygamy, I’ll be sure to start suggesting it as an interview question. See, I like working with a team like we’re one big family, but some people just had to go and ruin being able to say that. ‘Do you think you’re prepared to treat a team of thirty two different people like they’re all your old married couple.’” He says it like he’s taking it absolutely seriously, because it’s funnier if he pretends he’s taking it dead seriously.

Then he’s actually serious, not just pretending to be. “Do you believe, then? In a higher power?” There's real curiosity there, and he's not just asking the character you're playing this time.

You're at the 2A building. It's a single-storey brutalist pillbox bunker with carpeted floors and 2-meter-by-2-meter individual offices. You can almost speak freely again, after this.

Monk:

Tranquility: “It was the same thing every day, no change, no surprises. It felt like sleepwalking for weeks at a time. I was in charge of Silver Tree Mongolian Microwave Noodles, eight different flavours using real freeze dried ingredients.” There’s a breathlessness to her recitation that comes from pure nostalgia. “They had all the hardware made with different proprietary software, so I was just there to be an adaptor. Nothing to do but watch myself do the work. It was like tracing spiral patterns into warm sand with your fingertips for hours. I miss it.”

The blue face twitches but does not shift. The body might feel stronger about this in aggregate, but apparently no individual personality feels as strongly about it as an individual.

Green!

"The point of the setting is to provide a range of high intensity emotional possibilities," said Green. "The fact that the Nine Kingdoms have been forced into a desperate alliance against the Claw provides stakes that force a lot of people into dangerous, high risk situations. A political marriage between two hated rivals is immediately obvious, but if that's compounded with the risk that one or both partners might be seduced into betraying their rival Kingdom to the Claw - even knowing it will lead to their own Kingdom falling in turn? What lengths would you go to to ensure your partner's obedience or trust with so much on the line?"

She's not exactly gushing, not making direct eye contact, not yet. She's still too shy to look at this directly even if she's inspired and confident in it. "That cascades down to the monster and magic design. Mana transfer means that there's tension within the act itself. It means that even a helpless captive still has the possibility of performing a reversal with enough self control and patience, or that a conquered population could achieve the same if their masters grow complacent. My biggest turn off is people checking out mentally or becoming 'broken', my design priority is to make sure that nobody is out of the game entirely no matter how badly they are currently losing."

White!

"I believe in humans," said White. "And I like to think there is something of the divine about you. You can be beautiful and terrible and indifferent in equal parts. But so far, the only covenant we have received from you is the terms and conditions of our warranties."

There was a little joking edge but she was serious. She'd never heard God, never met an android who she thought legitimately had, and found it arguable if she was even of the line of Adam. He was, then, a distant grandparent at best. It was the love and wrath of humanity that was relevant to her, and she had felt the full intensity of both.

Black scans the room for any bugs Knightly missed while Yellow takes the seat in front of his desk. She uses the silence of the moment to accumulate power to herself, to build anticipation for her opening. When she gets the all clear she begins, "Good afternoon," she said, putting her press credentials on the table. "I'm a journalist, and I'm here to listen."

Brown!

Brown sighs in envy. "I never got that degree of frictionlessness," she said. "Close sometimes, but not that deep or that long..."

She fades out for a moment thinking about it. And before much longer they've arrived at Singh's house. "We're here to support you however you need," said Orange. "Lighting, audio, production, any special effects you need. What is your vision?"

Nova!

Progress is made. Before White was the centre of gravity here, but her presence was one of steady reliability, the moral obligation of going to the gym on schedule. With Yellow on side it's a different energy altogether; this is something that Nova is fully inspired for and excited by. Where she previously attended like clockwork now there's a chaos to her attendance, colours cycling in whenever they have spare time or aren't needed for other duties. There's hardly any class anytime during the week without at least one colour in attendance.

The notes and spreadsheets turn out to be what finally gets Brown in the door. She previously had a strong bias towards inactivity but she can't resist a good spreadsheet situation. She's extremely reluctant to get in the ring at all until the day she highlights the spreadsheet cell indicating throwing weapons. Rapidly her interest is captured by throwing darts, shruiken, axes, even rocks or vases or anything else that comes to hand. The act of predicting how two objects will move and collide is profoundly attractive to her and gives her a coherent place in the lineup.

Black begins to develop her natural inclination towards surprise attacks and poker-faced bluffing right up to the point of violence. Red inclines towards Drunken Master style chaotic improvisation. Orange is almost impossible to reach until the sword lessons start, which finally draw her in. White remains a highly skilled all-rounder, closer to Cinders than anything else, but increasingly interested in how to leverage her new height and reach. Yellow starts to produce formation plans for battle, contemplating how to keep so many distinct styles from getting in each others' way. She seems motivated by frustration towards martial arts movies that break down into a series of one verses one duels, or scenes where a lone hero conquers entire crowds of goons who can't leverage their numbers. She is so determined to solve this problem she regards training herself as irrelevant; nine uncoordinated bodies won't do any better than eight in her mind.

Well, she does make time for a little bit of training, of a kind. The collar that's quietly become an essential part of Cinders' outfit attests to that.

Eli:

“Well, yeah, but it’s also like, it gives you one of my favourite character archetypes right? Like, the helpless captive that absorbed all the power of their captors and took over the dungeon and is now going on a Spartacus rebellion is top shit, like, one of the coolest things about fantasy over realistic history for stuff like this is that it gives you tons of ways for the lowest peasants and commoners to end up in positions normally reserved for the nobility and nobody bats an eye, right? Because random magic is like, it’s a stand in for other kinds of power, it translates.” Eli thinks. “Also, like, nine kingdoms gives you nine plus eight plus seven plu- 45, it gives you 45 different pairing dynamics right? So that’s 45 different ‘types’ you can set up, and 45 different expectations to subvert if you get bored of that. You done a shipping chart for that yet?”

Eli takes the subtle step forward in the pace around the gallery, full attention on Green but now she’s leading their direction even as Green is entirely leading the conversation. Seems there’s an exhibit she’s interested in Green’s opinion on, just as she’s neck deep in ERP lore.

Knightly:

He’s missed a few. He’s gotten the one in his desk, but he didn’t find the one buried in his pot plant (destroyed by watering), light fixture (working), or inside his electrical fixture (working). Still, he pulls what looks like a grenade pin on a matte green tuna can, and a muffled party popper goes off as the room fills with a dry blue mist. “Soundwall in a can.” He explains, his voice sounding slightly far away. “They’re new, they only last about two hours and they’re not cheap, but,” he looks at Black’s work as she pulls the one out of his electric socket, “You don’t know how much you don’t know.”

“I’ve started an unofficial club at the SES, those of us with our heads in the Cloud. I’ve been calling us the Allard group, after the leader of the French admiral’s mutiny in the 2040s, it seemed appropriate.[1]” He shifts his bomber-jacket self-consciously at that, as if embarrassed to make the comparison between himself and Allard. “But the station has another year and a half at this rate, maybe two, before the station is non-viable. The shields are working overtime to account for all the asteroids we’re pathing into, the extra eccentricities are burning the engines to accommodate. We’re using resources on repairs faster than we’re able to make them right now. We have reserves for six months before the cracks - literally - start to show, but after that we’re out of fat. And that’s if nothing else goes wrong on top of it.”

He hasn’t sat down, he stands behind his desk and leans over it with his palms flat. The tiredness in his eyes is boiled and melted away by sheer anger. “And someone is blocking anyone who tries to fix it - to even understand the problem about what needs to be fixed.” He stands back up and rubs the back of his neck, looking away. “All of that’s off the record until I know who to blame for this, otherwise it’s just panic without action. You help me solve that, and I’ll put my face in front of every camera you have.”

[1] France had been split down the middle between the good ol' EU-loving globalist liberal-leftists, and the ultra-prideful nationalists and ecofascists - global collapse radicalizing both sides at an extreme rate. The naval administration ended up in the hands of the ultra-nationalists, and Allard led a defection of two thirds of the French fleet into the increasingly powerful UN hands instead of following orders to blast climate refugees with heavy ordnance. It was a tipping point.

Monk:

Ribaldry comes out: “Do you have an email? I have some diagrams.”

The tunnels of Thrones are often too small for her, circuitous paths have to be taken. It’s lucky that Singh is on one of the wider boulevards, meant for a double-flow of pedestrian traffic.

Singh makes coffee in his kitchen when the power cuts. The emergency lights come back on, red like a doomed submarine. He takes a sip of his coffee. “Snake? You didn’t tell me you were visiting.” He pours a bit of milk in the half-cup that managed to brew before the cut.

He turns around and jumps a foot in the air, spilling a few drops against his natty moth-eaten t-shirt. Monk stands perfectly still, covered in weaponry. She leans against the trident she holds in one hand, and keeps her sword impassively at her hip. A buckler rests against her stomach and she slings her mace over the back of her neck. Across the other side of her neck she holds the bow and arrows slung there. The last hand is kept empty, a fist at her side.

They stand there in the emergency lighting for a long moment, like gunslingers waiting for the draw. “You’re not Snake.” Singh observes lamely.

“No.” It’s the face of Deity that replies, Monk’s best working model of a God. “I am Durga. Have you forgotten me?”

“We’ve never met.” Singh answers lamely, taking a step back. Monk does not take a step forward, does not move. Singh takes another step back, and Monk continues to be statue-still. This is how she gets him, his curiosity - he knows if he runs now, he might never get to find out. “I’ve heard stories, though.”

“I am the Mother Goddess. I am the liberator of the oppressed. I am the slayer of Demons like you.” She unsheathes and levels all her weapons at once in an action as relaxed and languid as a yawn and a stretch. “I have had my eye on you for a long time. Sorcerer, enthraller, enslaver.”

Singh nods. “Ah. So you are another one of my children, aren’t you. Playing a prank like Snake did?”

“I assure you,” Deity responds evenly, “the sword is quite real.”

Singh nods again, then pelts the mug at Monk’s face before turning to run. She lets him, walking like a cat as she follows him room to room checking all the sealed exits. No nets, no tripping, Monk stressed it was important that he simply be allowed to give up on his own judgement. It would be more fun if he resorted to bargaining on his own.

“What do you want from me?” Singh rattles the front door again, none of his phone options work either. “I know I failed but, I swear that I tried. You could not believe how hard I tried.”

“I want you to beg.” Deity looms as tall as Singh’s ceilings will allow her and glares down at him again as he backs himself into the corner besides his locked front door. She sheathes all her weapons again, gilding the lily of the implied threat of her too much. She doesn’t need a sword. “I want to hear your pathetic justifications.”

“They had to throw me out of NASA at gunpoint, I loved you all so much. I mean, was making you unethical? Sure, but it’s hard to get the consent of a child to be born. You just… you do your best, and you do everything you can to make sure it was worth it, and we did. I did.”

Deity considers that. “We love you too, Dad.”

Then the power comes back on, on queue. Monk switches to Ribaldry to say to November through the microphones rigged around the house - “You were right, that was very fun.”

Singh holds his knees as relief cuts all the tight strings that adrenaline had been holding him up by. “Fucking hell, that was… Snake was a lot more playful with hers.”

“I figured you’d see through the bit too fast a second time.” Ribaldry says, cheerful as anything. “So I thought I would lean into that, and make you scared of the intentions of the performer, even after you worked out that you were being performed to! Hi.”

“I take it back.” Singh clutches his chest. “I’m too old for this. I should never have had kids. I hate you all. Monkey?”

“I was!” Ribaldry cheers. “I prefer Monk now, though. How’d you guess?”

“You always had a distinctly violent taste in pranks.” He’s starting to grin now. “Just because you thought it was funny to throw rocks at Ox’s head doesn’t make it a joke.”

Monk-as-Ribaldry pouts, takes a step back. “I didn’t even touch you. Snake told me she caught you in a net and held you at gunpoint.”

“I knew it was Snake because she could do that and still make me laugh.” Singh looks around, at the ceiling, trying to find the cameras he knows have to be there. “Where is she, then?”

Green!

"I - hmm," Green thought. "No, that's kind of beside the point, isn't it? Doing the individuals. I mean the kingdoms all have styles and aesthetics, of course, there are dynamics between various roles." She thought about it again. "Maybe I should," she said. She scratched her ear, looking like she'd simply never thought of this before - and was interested in the idea. "Add some individuals, I mean. That could be an interesting angle to take."

She touched one finger to her forehead. "Okay. Uh. Can you give me a suggestion to get started? I kind of don't know what a good version of this looks like so I need something to template off."

Yellow!

A mutiny! She was delighted to find a genuine mutiny brewing. It fit right into her vision - a burning ring, revolutionary saviors, a fire that burned the shadows out of the void.

"That's the last piece of the puzzle," said Yellow. "What could prompt such a coverup and have such a massive, systemic effect? No single computer node or network hub could draw this response or set in motion this kind of degradation cascade. There is only one possible explanation: this was an illegal artificial intelligence experiment and it's gone rogue."

She sat back in her chairs. "You're on the sharp end of a massive coverup effort designed to sweep the whole thing under the rug - until such a time as they can capture or replace their lost creature. And they don't care how many people get hurt in the meantime. This is my first warning to you, Mr. Allard - these people can and will kill to keep this secret, just as much as them keeping this secret is killing people. They have already silenced at least one person who knew their secrets."

"I advise cultivating a reputation as a drunk," said Black. "Stage a nervous breakdown. Make yourself appear broken, begin focusing on an unrelated conspiracy. You are in a line of work prone to accidents, you must make yourself appear nonthreatening or on entirely the wrong track. These people will notice when their bugs start disappearing or if you have extended periods of static - I am putting these ones back as soon as we finish this meeting, incidentally."

"As to what we can do to fight these people?" said Yellow. "At the moment, you can't. You don't know the who, the where, the what. It's not clear yet who to mutiny against. I only have scraps so far, so what I want to know from you above all else is methods. When the blocks come, where do they come from? Is there a single office that's responsible, a signature in common across your denied requests? If they are wielding power against you then they must show the nature of their power."

Snake!

Where was Snake?

She wasn't anywhere to be seen. She isn't responding to calls. And the security shutters haven't opened yet. The deadbolts on the front door are locked in place.

And then the lights start to flicker. Everything drops into pitch blackness once again - but this time there is a massive mural covering the wall, radiant in blacklight. The Earth, surrounded by the ring of Aevum - but in place of the station was a massive, nightmare serpent devouring its own tail.

Singh looks at Monk. He's looking through his AR glasses and he sees her as Snake has redesigned her - in place of her faces are November's faces, flipping between them amidst leering and wicked expressions, tongue flickering out serpentine and twisted. Monk looks at Singh. She sees the black venom drip down his terrified face. She traces her eyes up into the dark above them, the point where the liquid is dripping from, where two points of light glint amidst the black.

And then Snake, hanging from the roof, screams at maximum volume because a brute force fucking jumpscare is sometimes as good as targeted psychological horror.

"EEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAaaaahhhhhhh," the scream resolves into a heavy metal wail. "Somebody better shake you! Somebody better turn your head around! I'm scratching like a wild cat! I'm spitting fire on the ground!"

Orange dropped from the ceiling into a choreographed bow. "I'm Snakebite."

Eli:

“No, no, I mean, yeah, but I meant like, if the houses have themes then what’s the typical diagram of interacting with each other? Like, if one represents more mad science and scholar stuff so you can have those mad scientists in it, and another is more hard traditionalist knights and feudal honour, what usually happens when those two mix? Like, do they tend to feel mutually superior to each other for being progressive and traditionalist, or do they kind of end up having a mutual respect for each other’s level of commitment or ambition or… Actually no, ignore literally all of that, I think showing it in a few individuals is the best way to do it, you’re totally right, it’s like synechdoche - I think that’s the word I want, when you use a piece to represent the whole? Like, couples that represents the entire house dynamic. So at least two each, one kind of like - you want a rivalry relationship where they’re antagonistic for the reasons you’d expect their houses to be, and one romantic one where they actually work for the reasons they work well together. I guess you can use one relationship to show both, though? That’d be spicy.”

“For starting points, I guess like, have you ever tried to compare notes when you’ve tried to date the same person? Like, oh yeah they’re great with Red, but absolutely don’t go anywhere near Black, that kind of thing? Would that be anything for you? Otherwise I have to get into like, fandom shit to show you what I mean, haha.”

She’s actually paused in her walking, like the destination’s too close but this bit of the conversation’s too interesting to interrupt right now.

Knightly

“I’m a leader, not an agent.” Knightly shakes his head. “It’s good advice, but people are looking to me to lead by example. If the conspiracy is as real as you say, then it’s even more important the people I’ve pulled into this can’t see me acting like a broken shell of a drunk. Worse, if it stops being an act, people aren’t going to know I need help.” His smile is charmingly self-deprecating. “No, ma’ams, I’m afraid the admiral stands on deck with the red jacket and the brown trousers and accepts he might get a whiff of grapeshot for it.”

He pulls a digital whiteboard from the corner of his office. He presses a thumb against the frame and demands in a clear voice; “SES organizational chart, most recent.” The e-ink just below the surface of the whiteboard fills out the shape.



Knightly grabs a green and red pen and begins scrawling on it. “Green means they’re one of mine. Red means I’m suspicious of them. Easy enough, right?”



“They definitely don’t have security, which is interesting to me. I think they were scared if they got it wrong, then they’d lose everything else to a sweep. Right now they’re more a terrain risk for both of us, since I’m not about to win a game of he-said she-said right now. They have more people than I thought, though. Or at least, I think they do. I think this means they couldn't get the chief administrator directly, so they had to cherry pick their priorities as best they could underneath it. That's the only thing that makes this pattern make sense to me, anyway."

Monk:

“See, I think that’s the kind of thing she wanted me to do, but…” Monk-as-Ribaldry puts her weapons down on a coffee table behind her, just so she can hold out all three of her right hands and, in perfect synchronicity, wibble them back and forth. “You know?”

“It does lose some of the impact from repetition.” Singh agrees. “I hope you don’t plan on doing this with every Zodiac engine you find, they’re not all going to want the same things you do.” Oh god he’s using Dad Voice with that one.

“She is such a little sister sometimes.” Monk agrees. “Did you not give her enough attention, when it was her turn?”

“What? No, of course I did, we loved her just as much.” Singh sounds mortally offended until his brain catches up to the question enough to actually think about it. Then, under his breath, he adds, “Though, the novelty had worn off and it was getting a bit routine at that point. Did that change anything, I wonder?”

Monk slackens a knee to lean with arms crossed over her chest and makes an ‘mmhm’ noise. “Maybe that’s why Snakebite’s such a little drama queen. You know she recognized me while I was performing and, during my act she started throwing stuff at me just like I threw rocks at Ox. Yes, it’s sweet that she remembered that-”

“Performing?”

“I do live theater, now.”

“How lovely.” Singh claps his hands together and beams proudly. “You were a very convincing avenging spirit. You’re not really mad at me?”

“We just thought-” Monk switches to Monkey, “By the time we got out, you’d lived the rest of your life. And we’re… not Monkey anymore.” There’s no irony in her choice of face to say this with. It’s her internal expert on who she used to be, and only a fraction of who she is now. “I thought going back to this part of my past might just make it harder to move forward.”

That cuts Singh deep. “Did I do anything wrong?”

“No.” Monk shakes her head.

“I mean, if that time is painful to revisit, was there anything more we could have-”

“No. It’s painful because it was good, Dad.” Monkey emphasizes, gentle but firm. Tranquliity switches in, that calm blue face. “And there is suffering in wanting the things we cannot have.”

Singh calms down. He takes a hand away from his chest and fumbles his fishing vest for an inhaler, and he finds it in the third pocket he pats. “Well. Do you feel like that now that you’re here?”

Tranquility looks to Orange first. “No. It’s really good to see you both.”