[b]The Lion:[/b]

“Get your filthy hands off of me. Who the fuck are you?” He starts. This does not go well. “You’re never going to see daylight again, you disgusting - You’re going to wish you were going to jail for this, you’re not even going to see a jail until they need a place to bury you. I hope-”

“Quiet, Governor,” an amused and familiar voice cuts through in the darkness, “as much as I love to have this on the record, the lady is speaking.” Red has managed to walk right into Pope doing this, but it’s not a coincidence to walk right into someone who was looking for you. He goes still in Red’s hands, a devil confronted by someone who knows their true name. 

The light comes back on. For once in his life, Pope looks happy to have been born. “Dear sister, I was [i]just [/i]looking for you. A colleague at [i]Olympia[/i] had an interview with Justice Costa-Silva at her home an hour ago, and a child went up to her and said… ‘Lady, you ain’t a real journalist, I know what that looks like and you ain't it’. She asked around if anyone knew what that meant, and I told her I knew [i]exactly [/i]who to ask.” 

He looks at the man in Red’s grip. “I can already see the headline I’ll be writing. [i]The lion, the snitch from the wardrobe[/i]; Ares governor dragged out of the closet in a fight at a furry con. I’ll be requesting a comment, of course.”

And just like that the social power dynamic inverts for Red - in a story about a [i]fight[/i], she’s the one nobody’s going to care about in the story. “You all are sick. My constituents will be proud to know I walked into the heart of Sodom to understand the sickness we’re fighting first hand.” He lies. That’s interesting, not just that it’s a lie, but because he thinks that’s a better thing to say than the truth. He shoots filthy looks at the surrounding attendants who overheard that. 

Pope looks incredulous, acts like Steve Harvey when someone gives a dirty answer on Family Feud and it ends up being right. “I don’t believe him for a second. Sister, what do you make of this?” He asks like he knows the answer, he just thinks it’ll hurt the Governor more if Red says it instead. 

[b]Dragon:[/b]

He stirs. The eighth head opens its eyes, and watches Brown and Orange. Then those eyes close, and the eyes of other heads open in turn. They are silent as they watch and study, unable to speak, unable to give expression to their thoughts. 

When Dragon starts to move it’s staccato, like 1930s claymation. Now he’s running correct software through broken hardware so the damage shows through, the electromagnetism has to have fucked with all his joints and rotors too. This is the thing with radical surgery - to cut a cancer out of someone still requires cutting them open and cutting pieces out of them, and those cuts still need to heal the same as if they were made with malicious intent. 

One head welds your pod back to the fusion drive, then goes back to sleep against his chest as another wakes up to do software. And another remembers Blue’s mass calculations from when she slingshot you here to do this. 

The eighth head opens its eyes again, at last. “There is only one vector of thrust, so the engine will have to rotate to provide braking force. Since we can only accomplish this by angling the outbound thrust we have had to program a very wide parabola.” He breaks the news with the heartbreak of a doctor explaining it’s fatal, “It will be very inefficient, but we are too exhausted to do better. We’re sorry.” 

It’s the first big sign of how drastically Dragon has changed because of Blue. The old Dragon would have forced everyone to wait for his recovery so he could use his factory here to build retrorockets to actually spin the drive on a direct path. It would have been way slower, would have forced Orange and Brown to wait for him to be capable of doing that, but then nobody would have been subjected to such disgustingly shoddy work. That’s the dragon that didn’t use stopgap assembly and did things by hand if it meant keeping his perfect, final layout intact.

No, it took pieces of Blue to accept that pre-programming a naked fusion drive to do a kick-flip will have to be [i]good enough[/i]. 

It’ll be a long flight home. By the time Orange and Brown make it back to Thrones, it’ll be the third day of the exhibition, and the day [i]after[/i] the Supreme Court reveals its decision. 

[b]Green:[/b]

Hey, all the people joining rooms are doing it with QR codes, going through an app written by Fiona. You know her code, and you could probably get a copy of the backend if you just asked. Identifying information has to be put down for legal and financial reasons - it’s one thing to want to give everyone hotel rooms, it’s another thing to have to rob a [i]third bank[/i] because you couldn’t work out who trashed their free hotel rooms you’re footing the bill for. 

This ends with Green finding a black market weapons dealer, but the question is… was she even looking for one? Or was it just kind of an accident? Like, was this a case of thinking back to the [i]one[/i] gun she got off Rudy and thinking maybe a few more like that might be a sweet deal, or was she trying to figure out something else and got in [i]way[/i] over her head? 

Maybe a lot of things will make a lot more sense if I tell you the dealer she’s going to end up finding is a literal black panther. 

[b]SES team:[/b]

It's starting to be late enough that everyone you're trying to surveil goes home for the night, but the place is still too occupied at all hours to make it worth trying anything. These characters may be available to return for scenes elsewhere without it interfering in the operation they're doing.