[b]Pink![/b]

She doesn't notice Crystal's tears until the moment has passed. She's sorry for that, for missing things when she was reaching inside herself for something she'd never been able to articulate before. She knows she couldn't have been any other way but... that's another thing she'll need to figure out how to express through art. The expense of time it took. The necessity of the expense.

Because she feels good now, at the end. Buzzed. There's a rhythm to cooking she likes. First you wet the dries, then you dry the wets, then you wet the drys, then you dry the wets. Each transmutation changes the shape, back and forth, over and over on the brink. Like glazing paints, thin layers ever less each time, forming fades and blends, mixing in waters and mediums to make sure the transformation doesn't happen too fast. And then there's the other mixing, where chemicals are mixed with just as much patience and delicacy to ensure that the transformation doesn't happen at all - until it does, when it will all happen way too fast.

She's... blissful. This was what she needed and didn't know she could have. And already, her imagination is figuring out how to make things bigger, how to make things better...

When she steps back from the cake she smiles and falls back into her folded-hand maid posture, eyes demurely down. 

The cake has a message written in chocolate icing, a beautiful calligraphic flourish. It reads "THIS END TOWARDS ENEMY ->" and was directed towards Mrs. Kilimanjaro.

[b]Spearmint![/b]

It is the drums for her, sadly. But drums are a state of mind. A couple of upturned empty cases, pots and kettles and kitchen utensils, even the butt of an unloaded handgun, all of these things can come together to form a percussion section in a pinch. 

She finds she likes the adaptability of that. Drums were... more than other instruments, they were a thing of perception. The saxaphone was dedicated, built for purpose, a blinding statement of intent to create good music. Her improvised rhythm section was the opposite. This was noise, mundane and everyday, the sound of mistakes, the sound of clatter. But with a few repeating patterns built into the core of it, with precise timing, with knowing exactly when to shift tempo it became something more than that. Something to project onto.

It was, too, a thing of force and violence. Hands and heat and hard work. Overcoming an instinctive gentleness to treat things roughly enough to coax the necessary sound out of them. Sometimes nothing she has to hand is loud enough so she uses the wall, or the floor, or the headboard as the night progresses. And into the rhythm she lays, the vocals are coaxed. That's the other thing about the drums; even as a backdrop, even when they fade into the background of the superstar instruments, they still set the pace and the tone. The drummer is an instrument for control; from its position in the back it dictates the flow of the musician. The vocalist can no more override the drummer than override the music itself, no matter how many time the same circuit loops, and loops, and loops, holding that note longer and longer until it's almost too much - and then it [i]is[/i].

Small, glittering brushes that ring out crystal notes. Deep, heavy taiko hammerstrikes. Bells and leather and steel, tribal industry. These sounds could arise from anything. From these sounds could arise anything. Spearmint finds herself for the first time amidst this music and how it gives expression and shape to Chaka's breath.

[b]November![/b]

November's reaction to the news is joy. Dragon is safe. That it only cost injury to her meant that it was cheap at the price. 

She couldn't truly get along with Knightly. She should perceive in him an ally and a peer, a hero who was dedicated to the same goal that she was. Instead she'd seen him as just another person in another kind of danger. He was worth saving even though he was a hero, because he was a hero, and her advice to him had been 'lay low and let me handle this'. Even if it would have been harder without him. Even if the risks of injury to her had gone up. In the collective consensus of November was the deeply rooted idea that paying a price was fine so long as she was the one who paid it. That was just - well, that was just [i]virtue[/i]. Any attempt to discuss or contemplate what she'd given up hit a wall of elation at the idea of what she'd achieved. Same as it ever had.

What she doesn't expect, though, is that the feeling of [i]yearning [/i]was still there. All the colours had privately associated that with Blue, had thought that her grip on the past was the only thing stopping them from embracing the present. But one by one, each of the colours notice that there is still a faint edge of discomfort. An urge to be other than they were. Blue gave that shape, pointed at something specific and said that we should be that - and even if they disagreed it formed a coherent axis around which they could align. But now the clarity of destination was gone even the ones opposing Blue didn't feel content. They just didn't have any way to voice the feeling any more, and so it scratched each of them like an itch. A thought they had no way to work through with the colours they had.

How can one mourn a dream? It's absence means by its nature one doesn't want it any more. One desire has been traded for another and so the opposite path begins to fade into a gentle river of regrets, a path not taken, friends and ambitions left behind. Receipts need to be used, returns made, tools packed away into boxes until they can either be regifted or have accumulated so much dust that it's okay to throw them away. 

There had been no other way with Dragon. The damage was too severe. But Monk could have sacrificed Monkey to the same effect. Monkey had become to Monk what Blue was in the process of becoming to her - a vestige, a memory, an echo of the person she had once been. It might have been easier for Monk, with her hundreds of faces, to give up that part of herself than it was for November to give up one of her colours. It might not have, though. Losing that might have hurt Monk deeply, already traumatized by all her losses. Monk was less compatible with Dragon. Monk couldn't afford to sacrifice specialized hardware in the same way without experiencing a traumatic loss of function - she might lose control over one or more of her arms. The plan was worse than the one she had gone with, but the real point of decision had been that she hadn't wanted to lose her sister. She didn't want to lose anyone. She didn't even want to lose the fucking Governor, for all his bile and cruelty, which was why she had reached out for him in the dark. She wanted to keep them safe. Wanted to keep the whole world safe, everyone from the highest to the lowest enfolded within her wings. She wanted their lives to be magical and meaningful, a place where miracles happened. If that meant she had to [i]become [/i]magic, meaning and miracle - [i]well[/i]. It was only a power fantasy if you didn't act on it.

The story never mentioned who built the Omelas machine.