[b]Pink:[/b]

Just, hypothetically speaking, what’s the biggest obstacle to getting the Everest mansion? The third of the sisters has it - the one who kept out of the power plays of her siblings. She’s barely upper middle class, the theft will be simple bordering on trivial. 

The mansion though - is it occupied? Abandoned and used for storage? Being used as a reptile sanctuary? 

[b]Fiona:[/b]

She stands at the caution tape. “This isn’t as dangerous as it looks, is it?”

Crystal looks up from her coffee at the kitchen bench. “Hmm? No, of course it isn’t.”

“Right.” Fiona nods. “So it’s way worse than it looks.”

“I’m grateful you understood my little joke before I had to chase after you in a flak vest, I’d have looked ghastly in it.” 

“So what do we… what are we supposed to do about it?”

“Well,” Crystal covers her mouth with her coffee even though Fiona isn’t looking at her. “I thought you might like the practice. It would be nice if you could appreciate how intricate it all is, and tell Pink what you think of it?”

Fiona dipped into the kitchen to grab a knife to cut the caution tape with. “There’s a genuine chance this kills me, isn’t there?” 

“Please, we both know you’re better than that.” 

Fiona stared at the knife with a frown. No, this would not be good enough to cut the cake with - the most explosive cake in at least a several kilometer radius. “You say it’ll make Pink happy?” 

“Ecstatic.” 

That settled it then. “Yet still more than death, I fear a life unlived. Lemme just find my wire cutters.” 

“Jewelry box, second drawer.” 

“Love you.” 


[b]White:[/b]

Okay, so first there’s a question of approach.

There’s three ways to go about this. The first is to try and recruit one of the cyberneticist exhibitors directly. This is going to be a go-hard-or-go-home artist type larger than life personality, this route goes loud. If she goes this route, how does White go in to this showing she’s worthy of their time? 

The second way is to go backstage and look through the technical crews for someone who’s making the exhibition work. This gets you closer to the pre-Mythbusters Adam Savage and Jamie Hynemans of Aevum, someone who might not be as temperamental and have their own things going on but are still going to be cool and useful people to know. In which case, it’s about what White’s doing to move herself backstage to look for someone worth pulling. 

The third is to mingle around the crowds and look for the amateurs and enthusiasts watching the exhibitions, the old guys like Serino who’ve come looking at this event like it’s a trade show. This would be the absolute complete wildcard, backshed inventors, weirdo hobbyists, corporate connections and the untested students still looking for their first industry jobs. 

Even when we decide to let the wind carry us how it may, we must set our sails. 

[b]Black:[/b]

This is just a faultline you’re going to be able to leverage - the question is how you leveraged it. 

One thing becomes immediately obvious just with this casual level of surveillance - pulling Rudy out of their ecosystem has deeply fucked things up. The money guy is not someone who can be trivially replaced, it’s a fulcrum point of absolute trust and absolute talent. Replacing him with someone who only has one or the other is even more disastrous than leaving the system in emergency autopilot. 

It shows in how people are being way more slack about opsec than you’d expect, the way people are when it’s a month of late paycheques and now its their employers problem if they speak openly about it, not theirs. The people lower down the org chart, the mere assistant associate deputy administrators, are getting tetchy. 

They won’t say what they’re tetchy about directly, no, they don’t let things leak. But they will make frustrated and catty comments with each other whose cause is only obvious to those already in the know. You overhear it at lunches, through bugs, through casually being in the right place at the right time following the mailroom trolley (people still order things online in 2080).

There are a lot of loyalties here that stay solid because they were made for free, and a lot of problems caused by loyalties that didn’t need to be bought, but were worth the money when the money was available. Now it’s not. 

Rudy didn’t pay these people directly though. It’s money paid to Moriarty that has to filter down, so if they’re pissed about that, they’re pissed about [i]her[/i]. 

I’m being scarce on the details here because I think it’ll be more interesting to ask Black; Did she learn this in a way she could immediately exploit it in the heat of the moment it happened in? Or is she planning on a longer game with this?