[b]Pink![/b]

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'."

[b]Strategic Thought![/b]

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.

[b]Blue![/b]

"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 [i]mine[/i]. 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."