[b]Chaka Zulu[/b]

She leans away and her smile is very, very different now - she knows she’s got the power here, now, and it’s her, and she’s about to flex it. 

“You really have no idea who you’re talking to, do you?” Chaka’s claw runs up the side of Spearmint’s face and she ruffles her hair as she pushes herself up to her full height again, lingering for one last look before she disappears into the bathroom. She comes back with two more instrument cases hauled from the back, from the shower that’s now reachable. She pops the lids. 

The saxaphone is old, every atom of its surface is covered in patina. The shine is long gone, what remains has more in common with the look of brown suede than metal. When it covers the valves and levers like that it looks like a piece ripped from an ancient steam engine, and it’s impossible to imagine the sound it could make. The other case has a flute, a clarinet and a piccolo, but it’s the saxaphone she lifts from its paper nest of sheet music. 

You don’t have to imagine the sound it could make. She shows you. 

[url=https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/678663207837106216/1170234763181838376/For_Spearmint.mp3]For Spearmint[/url]

She looks at Spearmint when she starts, at first, just the first two bars. Just to see the look on her face. She closes her eyes and gets completely lost in it. Another two bars and she’s forgotten there’s anyone else in the room with her. Another two bars and nothing in the world exists outside of the music. 

Her hands choke the neck of the saxaphone as her fingers straddle the keys. There’s more than just technical playing, here, she’s trying to feel the instrument as much as possible. Some musicians play as if the instrument’s just a medium between themselves and the song, Hendrix played the guitar like it was just the closest imperfect thing he could get to what he needed, and it couldn’t keep up with him. Chaka plays the sax like the music’s an excuse to work the machine in her hands, and there’s rapture in what she gets out of manipulating the physical to produce the transcendental. 

There was [i]almost[/i] no way any of those instrument cases had real instruments in them. They’d come in at the top of the pile, which left them buried at the back of the room before. 

The solo ends. She opens her eyes again with a smile that shows just how white and sharp her teeth are. “Chaka Zulu. Second chair saxaphone for Ares’ Sankara Jazz Orchestra, reserve clarinet for the Eisenhower symphony, founding and lead member of the Zulus quartet set, and [i]under no circumstances to be fucked with[/i].” She raises her saxaphone over her head with one hand like she’s raising Excalibur. “And how you doing tonight?” The cry is euphoric, like Spearmint is worth as much as an audience of thousands. 

Sure, Ares is not a district known for jazz or classical music and she probably couldn’t cut the reserve list of the least prestigious orchestra in Aphrodite, sure the Zulus make more from wedding gigs than album sales, who cares? If she cared about any of that, she’d have picked something way harder to play, something that showed off how much better she is than the piece needed her to be. 

If Spearmint plays anything, the second case is still open and there might be a third still in the shower (Unless it’s strings or drums, then no shot). Digital mixing won’t work here, this is just another one of those sentimental human things like good handwriting. It’s really not just about the music itself, you can pour your heart out in an EDM track, but Chaka’s all about that mastery of the hands and the fingers, the tongue, the lips and the breath - the way she can use them to make you feel things from all the way across the room. 


[b]Crystal:[/b]

“I’m happy to help where I can, of course.” Crystal said it thinking that it might be the best way to make sure nothing too expensive happens with this little experiment. Pink did have an affinity for explosives that might be better off redirected into other forms of creative expression, should it come up. “We have all night.” 

She can’t say to Pink yet, but she’s hoping if she’s allowed full expression of these impulses, to see she’s still loved in spite of them - loved [i]through[/i] her expression of them - it might be easier to talk about, be one less reason to repress all this. But even if it isn’t, well…

Seeing how much Pink is enjoying herself is a pure enough reason. She doesn’t need any other. 

Scratch that, she sends an encrypted text to Fiona asking after a chart for expected damage from various explosive yields. [i]No[/i] explosives was unreasonably stifling, better to learn what might be healthy boundaries to play within. 

There’s a ding and she thinks Fiona has replied unreasonably fast, worried she just had that information on-hand, when she sees it’s Eli. They’ve written what she asked for. When she starts to cry, she tries to excuse herself before Pink can notice, it would be too much of a waste to interrupt her. 

[b]Eli:[/b]


[hider=Want]
I wish saying a place felt like home wasn’t an insult if I’m the one saying it, because I don’t know what else to call the Annwn Castle transhumanism gallery.

There’s this thing they used to talk about with queer culture where people asked why a bunch of us seemed to immature for our ages and it’s cause none of us had a first childhood like they did, we never got it out of our systems. Trans people got hit with it the hardest because they just straight up went through the wrong puberty years and had to catch up on that.

Like, one thing I had to think about a lot when I was going through the crowd today was makeup. Girls would practice makeup at all their sleepovers and parties, and guys didn’t. So if a guy transitioned then she had to be shit at makeup because nobody taught her. Looking at guys who are minotaurs and cyborgs now, it’s hard to remember how it was basically only a couple of years ago that guys wearing makeup got called slurs for it.

My Dad did when I started to. Like as a joke, it was funny, I laughed, but there’s a reason he knew I’d get what the joke was.

I think that’s kind of it, though. It’s about socialization, it’s about being taught how to be the right kind of person to fit in. And for some people it’s about trying to be an entirely different kind of person you weren't taught how to be, and for some people you just get taught wrong and you have to go through all the steps everyone else did when they were kids, when you’re too old to get being a kid as an excuse for it.

If you want to get what that feels like, you come here. If you’ve already dealt with that, then this is a celebration of it. If you haven’t, if you were raised right and like how you turned out, this is where you come to wonder if you should be. If maybe there’s something past ‘adult’ and ‘normal’ that it’s worth thinking about being. Something that doesn’t take twenty years of practice or being born with better genes or you haven’t already spent years getting good at it so it’s already too late. You can be something entirely new, that nobody’s ever been before.

If you did that, you start having to think about how you’d be all the time. Because it’s not just going to change who you are, it changes how people treat you. You have to write an entirely new social script where you’re acting the part of whatever new thing you are. You’ve got nobody you can learn it from, because you’re the first person trying to do it.

It’s just that when you look at the people here you think that’s worth it. You think maybe that people not being able to treat you by their existing script could be the only way to be treated as you for once, because they have to learn who you are before they can put a label on you. They have nobody to compare you to that makes being how you are get seen as a failure to be something else. It might start to feel like the only way to get treated like a person is to move past being human.

It’s why I love being here. Even when I don’t look like that, yet, that’s how the people here think, that’s how they treat you. Everyone who succeeded at being unique is someone who failed at being normal first, and I love them. I love them all, and this place is a celebration of everything about that, and why anyone who doesn’t like this because it’s weird is missing the fucking point.

Because I can tell you this, whatever excuses they tell you for it, whatever bullshit they give you, that’s the whole thing to them. That’s what I worked out today, when I helped tear the head off a lion. The transhumanphobes hate me even though the transhumans love me and they hate us both because of the same thing; These are always going to be the people who judge you based on how close you fit their idea of normal, and even if we wanted it that’s always going to be impossible for some people. What’s at stake here is our right to be anything other than the most boring kind of asshole.

The good thing is, even these assholes have totally different definitions of normal to them. It’s just that the weirder someone gets, the more of them you can get to agree it isn’t normal. Get weird enough and they can form a coalition.

If all you’ve ever wanted is to be what you are, if you’ve managed to fit in, then you might not get why that’s such a big fucking deal. You might get that the assholes are wrong for pushing their values on other people trying to exist in theirs, but you might also think transhumans are just immature kids playing dress-up who just haven’t figured out yet how to fit in to the real world.

And if that’s you, then come here tomorrow and learn what it’s like to want something. Where nothing’s stopping you from having it except people it doesn’t effect making it a problem for you. Learn what it’s like to feel like someone would want to kill you for being the person you wish you could be.

You look at the sheer joy of a dancing snake girl playing tetris on her scales, or of a unicorn pouring her heart out over the love she has for every single one of us deviants and reprobates, and you tell me how anyone who’d want anything else for them isn’t a fucking monster.

That’s the whole thing, right? None of that’s in here, right now, while I’m writing this. This place burns like a searchlight, it’s just that how bright it’s burning makes the shadows outside the walls feel so much darker.

I wish I never had to leave. I only have three days here and how bright everything is makes me realize how sick having to go back outside again is making me feel.

This is the first place that’s ever felt like home and it has to go away soon.

Eli.
[/hider]


[b]November:[/b]

One last, small thing then. 

Just after midnight is when the message arrives to everyone back on Aevum - the girls with Monk have found Dragon, and they’re going to get him. Whether the news came from Singh or from the girls themselves, this is the point in the timeline just before the slingshot launch to get to him, immediately after which that team will lose contact with Aevum and Thrones until they return the morning after the next. 

We can consider Blue’s end as so inevitable at this point that November may already see the symptoms of her disappearance. Telegraphing and foreshadowing always look anachronistic when the outcome is known. 

This should still be happy news here, now though. Dragon is alive, and they’re bringing him home.