[b]Crystal:[/b]

When Pink finally puts the plate in front of Mrs Killamanjaro she takes her earbuds out, finally, one last snippet of the book she was listening to heard before she puts them back in their charging case. 

“I will say that the spoons were an inspired touch, I’ve never seen that twisting technique before. The refrigerant, too.” She pokes the the plate, which clicks and chitters. “Why don’t you tell me about what you made, here? In your own words.” 


[b]Panther:[/b]

She opens the sniper round case again. “What, these?” She thinks. 

She starts there, before anything else. She doesn’t even blink when you mention the Supreme Court news, you might as well have told her it was raining while she was standing out in the storm. 

She heads back through the bathroom and speeds through her instrument cases until she pops one with… well let’s do some history here first. If you want to find the ugliest, dumbest firearms ever made you look for frontier colonialist states. It’s why a 10km radius of Mormons in the 19th century were responsible for bringing firearms technology from the 18th into the 21st century. Colt’s 1911 was called that because of the year it was made, and as of 2023 it’s still a standard service weapon with minimal changes. 

Still, with the sensible and generally practical mined out, later designers wanting to push boundaries for distinctive weapons got stupid with it. South Africa, Rhodesia, fantastic examples there. But the most iconic, the most famous of the godawful is the Israeli Desert Eagle. A handgun chambered to take .50 caliber rounds. Designed in 1980, this ridiculously ugly handgun could not be surpassed for its ability to be a semi-automatic self-loading pistol capable of firing rounds made for sniper rifles. 

But in the 1950s wars of economic and ecological collapse, the Spanish finally did it. Long thought impossible, they finally made a handgun that was even fuglier. The Cordoba is essentially 2080’s answer to the Desert Eagle, a handgun chambered for the antimaterial rounds of the future, with a bulging cylindrical barrel for the hydraulic suppression system and a one-size-fits-none custom handle because every single person who has ever bought this has been expected to buy their own custom grip, so why bother building anything but a frame for it? It’s too big for her hands. There’s no way for her to comfortably fire it. 

“This is for guys like Minotaur down there,” she says. “You got to think, when guys like that get scared, what are they scared of? Who’s coming after them? We’re talking the serious cyborgs, the kill-droids, Chase Black like you saw on the news a while ago. Can’t believe those guys still exist.” She shakes her head. “Guys like that don’t care about collateral damage. What the hell else can you do if you’re in their blast radius because some terrorist ran through your greenhouse trying to run away from them?”

“The rest are just re-ups to the folk I seriously trust not to start anything. That’s the thing about [i]rifles[/i], Spearmint. It’s the small things here you should really worry about.” She puts the Cordoba away and pulls from a different case a pistol so small it disappears entirely into her paw when she balls a fist around it the right way. “Except for that one Yank that got his head popped a hundred years ago, every politico since Lenin’s been done by someone going point blank with something like this.” She pulls the trigger and clicks the empty handgun into the bed five times, then one last time with her hand over the muzzle, before she dares mime showing Spearmint just how close she can get to her before she sees the gun in her hand, pointed at her the whole time. “Rifles don’t conceal, rifles are harder to move with. Rifles you’ve got to ambush, or run through the open. I only sell the things to long watchers, people checking the crowds at big open events. If they’re buying rounds like this, it’s because they want to be able to take out the engine block of a rented moving truck before it hits a crowd.”

The last time it happened was less than three years ago, and it killed about 80 people. The trouble with stuff like this is that Aevum’s got billions of people on it, so it’s incredibly rare. But when it does happen, everyone knows about it. Everything’s local, here. Stuff happening in Ares doesn’t feel foreign in the same way something happening in the Middle East used to, especially when you can see Ares with a good pair of binoculars from basically anywhere on the station. 

“Problem is it takes this many rounds for someone to finish getting their practice in, even if you’ve got a good simulator.” Aevum laws make it illegal for game devs to publish too-realistic shooting mechanics. This doesn’t stop fan mods and soldiers on military bases leaking cracked copies of their training software to complain about how bullshit the balance on Honourable Warrior VII is. “Cases like this look scarier than they are. I’d bet you anything, all of these are going to end up in a concrete wall, or collecting dust for the rest of time.” 

She shakes her head. “I’m careful about who I sell to. You’re telling me tomorrow we aren’t going to be a protected category? I got some people I need to strike off, then.” She pulls out her phone again and cancels two more deals she was going to make, clicks her tongue in frustration. “The rest, though, they’re going to need it worse than ever. Some of them were scared the cops wouldn’t get there in time, now all of them know the cops aren’t even coming if they call. The people coming for them are going to realize the same thing. What do you want me to tell a stalking victim booked with me? Sorry I can’t give you anything this week, the courts took away all your civil rights and now if you actually do anything with this, the cops might get a gallery organizer on bullshit charges? You’re on your own, good luck?” She snorts. 

She’s not mad at you, is the thing. She’s not arguing that you’re wrong, dismissing the chances or the risks here. Read all the sarcasm in that, all the dismissive energy, as entirely aimed at the no-win trolley problem situation she’s been put in. Chaka intimately, personally knows about all the lives she’s been responsible for saving doing this - it’s hard to put that against an abstract chance of a future riot over it. It's hard to weigh the issues of the forest ecology when it's all you can do to tend your garden. 

But no, still when Chaka gets her breath back, she looks to Spearmint in pain, like there's a sickness in her stomach. She narrows her eyes and hunches her shoulders forward as she tosses the empty pistol onto the floor at Spearmint's feet. “I bet you have a gun, is the thing. If you’re who you’re saying you are, you came alone ready to threaten me, which means at the back of your head you know you’re safe. You’re the one knocking on doors ‘Big Mad’, coming in and causing a situation when I was trying to keep quiet, and what’s fair about that?” 

She is mad about that one, and more than that she’s hurt and scared. Underneath all the practical and the political, that’s the one thing she’s taken personally in all this. There’s a way through that'll make Chaka forgive, maybe even respect Spearment for it. But if Spearmint really is sane and stable, then what she’s doing here makes her something lower than a cop; she’s a self-deputized sheriff, a Concerned Citizen Militia, who came here while having a mental break. 

To Chaka, she’s doing the very kind of thing, acting like the kind of person she’s telling Chaka she’s worried about. 

She's committed the most high-profile act of terrorism in Aevum's recent history. Crystal has to be worried about being associated with her, for all the reasons Spearmint's giving Chaka. She's kept a gun out of paranoia, in case she's needed it. She's been in a shootout with Chase Black that ran roughshod through Gaea. Spearmint has personally infiltrated the secure compound of a Supreme Court Justice trying to find blackmail material. She's knowingly moved into a new home bought by another one of the event organizers that was bought with money from a bank robbery. She's blowing Chaka's cover when she could have left well enough alone. 

Chaka doesn't know any of that, of course, but they're all reasons Spearmint might wonder if she's a self-righteous hypocrite - or if those are ideas that matter to her, bother her. Even beyond an argument over whether she [i]is[/i] self-righteous or hypocritical here those are still subjective value statements. Would either of those possible self-assessments bother her, even if they're dismissed? (Self-righteous, especially, being so subjective as to be irrelevant to dismiss if Spearmint simply doesn't identify with it. I bring it up not as a personal read of this situation, but as a potential grain of sand to make pearls from in her broader conflict of how responsible she is for the world around her.)

[b]Remember, Remember, The Rest of November:[/b]

This is about to be the end of the first night of the exhibition. Eli plans on crashing one last party before writing their article - Red is invited along, of course, there’ll be sex, drugs and rock and roll spilling out between three adjacent rooms of a hallway. After that, they’ve got to write their article for Crystal. 

Red is otherwise invited to join Pink to Crystal’s Penthouse. Fiona lost her dibs on Pink when Pink started cooking despite being scared of it and, besides, she’s got a snake girl right now anyway. Don’t mention this to Pink yet, Crystal doesn’t want to interrupt the purity of artistic expression happening in the kitchen right now.

How do the rest spend the night? Tomorrow will be a big day; The SES investigation, Pope’s Costa-Silva article going live, Red getting the Persephone treatment, Crystal debriefing with Eli about what they wrote, and obviously the Court’s decision itself. Everyone else will find out about Blue and Dragon. Leather would probably appreciate knowing things went well. Am I forgetting anything?

[I’d love to see this across at least two posts, I think, so as not to feel rushed on Pink and Green without shutting out the other colours - I also suspect Pink and Green are staying where they are for the night. But this feels like a good place to just vibe the current situation, because today was a [i]hell[/i] of a day. It might be worth doing some debriefing on it all. I definitely think there’s enough here to reflect on, trying to condense it down would feel like rushing anyway.]