[b]Black:[/b]

Honestly, reasonable. It’s just an operational hazard with this kind of short shelf-life equipment. It was supposed to last longer than that, you couldn’t know the exact moment you’d need to turn on, sometimes this is just how it goes. 

It wouldn’t have done much better anyway. She stays there for a long time, a very long time, as normal, as if nothing happened. It’s not until her official lunch break she moves again and you can move with her. 

She goes out to lunch at a sushi bar just outside the SES campus. It’s a little bit of sloppiness but also it’s the only 4.95/5 reviewed restaurant for a very long walk, and sometimes it’s the little things that break opsec. Besides, a longer password doesn’t give more protection when it’s still read off the post-it on your monitor. 

It’s a face to face meeting. The man is even older than her. 

His face is visibly shaped by the skull underneath - not in the literally true way it applies to all humans, but rarely do you look at someone’s face and [i]see[/i] the shape of the bone and [i]think[/i] of the bone. The skin and muscle are thick enough to conceal it, just so obviously in the shape of what they’re concealing. Wide, owl-like eye sockets and a narrow jaw where the mouth meets his cheekbones at almost right-angles. 

He’s dressed in a tight blue polo shirt and khakis, with comfortable brown loafers. Despite having to be in his eighties he looks like he’s in better shape than most guys in their thirties. He looks like he’s just finished manning a sailboat. 

No words are exchanged. They eat their lunch together in silence, and when he pays he pays far too much. The correction of several decimal points - oops, grandpa moment - is put back onto Moriarty’s card instead. 

And then they leave in silence. 

Him. Tail him. How?


[b]Hazel:[/b]

“What makes it a dragon to you?” She falls to the ground and folds her wings. She doesn’t want to be in the air for this, she wants two feet planted on the ground, but every landing is another chance to [i]take off[/i] again. “It’s not just the shape, the form. A puppet isn’t worth my time.” She smirks like it’s a secret shared between you that she knows it’s not worth yours either, now. “We’re talking about se-e-erious rocketry to get the power for flight that scale, and you can either disguise or incorporate it. Actually-” 

She leaps into the air like a tossed javelin and aims herself for the fast food stands. It takes a while to catch up to her. She’s almost finished drawing on four napkins when you’re there, all glued together with dabs of ketchup at the edges. It’s a dragon that incorporates the main thruster as the curve of its spine, down and out over the tail. Vents down from the legs and forelimbs give it directed vertical thrust. 

Didn’t Crystal do something like this once? For White?

It’s obviously mechanical, with absolutely no pretense of biology or hiding the nature of its flight. The head is a sleek, spaceship-hull muzzle. Instead of eyes, it has a visor in the shape of a viewing screen. Like the mind inside is a piloting crew looking out. 

The rest is incredibly loose in detail, no specific decisions made for the limbs themselves, or the tail, it’s just these two details she’s focused on for now and shows Yellow. “Like, this is what I mean, if you don’t conceal it. If it doesn’t have to be hidden, then there’s no illusion to spoil and we can go a lot harder on the raw power. With a good enough cut of meat, the only thing you should do when cooking with it is salt it.”

She looks down at the napkin, frustrated. “I wouldn’t use this one, obviously. I ended up liking the face, but it’s just to show you what I mean. I can do better, but I’m just stuck on…” She scratches her wrist like a junkie. “I can’t use visual reference because they’d only tell me what it can’t look like. It needs to be recognizable for the purity of the idea. Tell me what a dragon is, without using a single word that describes what it looks like.”