[b]Pink![/b]

There is a double archway on the second floor. Enter through the left arch and things continue as they were before. Step through the right archway and you instead enter a parallel universe where something is subtly different. Maybe lemon tastes like lime here, or your favourite song sounds cheap, or a necklace you've worn for years doesn't feel special any more and in a fit of anger you throw it out of the window of a moving car, determined to be free from it, from the person who gave it to you, from the person you were when it meant something special to you. Every day the choice, every day the arch. It comes when your feet are weary and your heart is heavy and when your head is full and you can see your childhood in the distance but they've built a fence around it and it's not yours any more.

And now she's back at the arch and she has to make a choice. 

It was the only choice she had. Day after day, left or right. She'd patterned through it in morse code, deliberately random, spitefully contrary, numbly guided by convenience. The metronome of acceptance and hate, of despair and hope. Left left left, right right right, left left left. And here she's frozen again. 

The only control she has over reality is in this arch; this arch must then control reality. Everything from then was a matter of programming. Commit to left for weeks and months until you choose right in a flicker of despair. Act kind and calm until you crash into a stranger at night and feel more alive then you ever have. Want the fight, want the spotlights and police lights and the scream so loud it wakes the neighbours. Do this for forty years and she'll be dead. They live that long these days, you know? Forty years maximum and code your complaint on the arch. One choice a day is enough for anyone.

"Ten years wasn't so bad," she said, staring at the arch, the binary gates of horn and ivory, through which the transistor knows things to be true or false. "Others spent forty years in the desert. Ten years was hardly anything, when you think about it."

[b]White![/b]

"A dragon is -" White started, but [b]Yellow![/b] interrupted her.
"You've got your design," she said. "You want to be bigstrong self reliant immune to everything, you've got the blueprints for that already."
"Bigstrong self reliant immune to everything is a worthy goal to strive for," said White, hurt.
"Yeah, yeah," said Yellow, poring over the napkins like a captain charting a voyage to the orient. "But that's not what I'm about. Let me think how to put this..."

Yellow steepled her fingers together and closed her eyes. Vision.

"A dragon means the end of the social order," said Yellow. "An entity of so much power that conventional military might is irrelevant. A dragon means the death of kings, the collapse of castles, the burning of villages, a nation sent into exile. A dragon renders armies irrelevant, makes laws and customs academic, recontextualizes wealth based on its values. A dragon represents, then, the return to a world of heroes and myth, a more primal level where the individual is exalted as the only entity capable of slaying it."

She sees the world as it should be, as it must be. "Some dragons are reptiles, things of fang and scale. Some dragons are fighter jets, things of flame and speed. Some dragons, though, are gods. They arrive when the festival drums beat and the streets are lined with lanterns. They subsume a hundred hands into their body. They stomp and dance and spin and leer and rise above the fire on the wind with luck spilling from their scales and all lesser spirits driven before them. A god-dragon is a festival that brings the blessing of fire to the city; a god-dragon is the flood that brings the wrath of the river to the town; a god-dragon is industry ground to a halt as everyone goes outside and raises their eyes to see it soar on a summer afternoon breeze. There is no fire on Aevum, no rivers on Aevum, no [i]wind [/i]on Aevum. Humanity believes that they've left all the gods back on Earth, that they are beyond such things now. I want to prove them wrong."

[b]Black![/b]

She feels like she should try to at least talk herself out of wanting it so bad. That she's raising her hopes too early. Anything could go wrong. She could be trailing a professional into an ambush, this could be a disposable mule, she might be not as good as she thought she was. She was hungry for this, for what this represented, for the stalk and the pounce and satisfying crunch of power wielded - and she felt like that was itself some sort of flag. She should play disinterested. She should blink and glance away just to prove she could. She should let the universe know that she was cool about this so the universe wouldn't be tempted to fuck her on it.

She can't. She's been trying to get off the street level with these bastards for weeks, and that was after the biggest catastrophe they could possibly have experienced. If they don't slip up now in a few more weeks they might not again. She's under no illusions how insanely lucky she was to get the Merkin connection, that won't happen again unless she forces it.

She does a three point tail. One colour watches skullguy while the other two - Green and Red - jog along to get ahead of him. Every so often they switch out. She's hungry enough to risk a visual contact trail; she does not want to be blindsided by him moving through a front business or disappearing down a maintenance hatch.