[b]Pink![/b]

Pink's face fell a little. "Oh! The birthday already and I haven't even started! I don't have any of the ingredients I require, and I haven't even gotten to organize the invitations! Let me take a moment to prioritize."

She sits down, takes out her notepad and pen, and starts rapidly writing as she tries to condense something larger and far more elaborate down into what she can accomplish on the requested timeframe. Crystal might recognize this particular kind of stress as exactly what she went through when she tried to set up this entire convention on a ludicrously narrow timeframe, but condensed even moreso. Pink's evidently got something far, [i]far [/i]more elaborate in mind for a grand party where everyone is invited and Crystal can see her biting her lip unhappily as she is forced to start cutting features from it.

[b]Spearmint![/b]

"Threat profile," said Spearmint, falling into a daze. "Plainclothes police surveillance. Likely known face. Perimeter observation. Challenge concentrated in breaching that initial perimeter."

She's lifted by the claw, that one point of sharpness enough to suspend her entire body. Faster, stronger, more dangerous - there's no point in pretending there's anything otherwise. Her colour cools again, freefalling back down through the hues. "Digital camouflage. Fur dye patterns, black and white contrast spikes to break up MI silhouetting. Gait transformation is trivial due to low sample size, but still requires conscious effort. Depart during lunch to maximize crowd cover."

She's seeing patterns now, only seeing patterns. Her thoughts are never this focused. Not even physicality distracts her, because that would be it's own kind of failure. "Cargo locomotion methods. Band case is a classic and fits with the musical instrument cases already in possession but it is well known, lacks a sufficient alibi of having a real band, and it is too [i]proud[/i]. This is how an arms dealer in a movie would move arms and cops love imagining themselves as movie cops. Personal preference is to conceal within electronic hardware; computer hardware presents enough complicating metallics and electronics to fool casual scans, tearing apart computers is seen as expensive and unglamourous. Provides a valid cover identity as secure/disposable phone sales which is shady enough to move in the circles you wish to move in."

[b]November![/b]

After a certain point all that's left is reverie.

It's just Black in the end, sitting out on the balcony, staring at the stars.

Something about space has always felt safe. Something about its blackness feels perverse. In space, every man-made object gleams in white, in chrome, catching and reflecting light for trillions of miles in every direction. It's a world where everything is knowable - except the blackness itself. The infinite walls of the universe where no stars have reached radiate outwards and she's long imagined folding herself against that nothing and disappearing. It feels antisocial almost to the point of being a crime to paint a piece of space debris black, to coat Russel's Teapot in stealth compounds and dare even the philosophers to posit one's existence. Matter unsorted, unindexed and illegible.

She wonders if it's selfish to want to have gravity as well as invisibility. The galaxy's black holes are matter so dark and dense as to be invisible but for the way they distort the light around them. In exerting power they return themselves to the realm of the light, just as surely as the minute gravitic distortions of dark matter reveals its own nature. Identified it can be studied, studied it can be controlled...

But then, dark matter is far more vulnerable to study and control than black holes. Phoenix had wanted to build a vast orbital particle accelerator so that she could chain dark matter. It had been theoretically possible. Could the same ever be done to the black hole? Was power a more reliable path to safety than obscurity? It seemed so, but power felt like a self referential goal. There always needed to be more. More, more, more. She didn't know if it could ever stop.