[b]Fiona:[/b]

“Stop.” Fiona says, somewhat sharply. “Hold on, a legalistic framework to manipulate someone would make her happy?” 

“We need to put a-” she omits a word after looking at a five year old just across, “[i]pin[/i] in that, for later. I brought it up because games are a good [i]learning [/i]tool, and you have a bunch of kids here without any instruction books also wanting to work out how to be creative, and that’s what you’re figuring out too. I thought it might be a fun way to see if they could help you learn what you needed to learn. Maybe figure out how to make rules based on the same constraints you’re stuck with, and see how the niblets go about them. They’d [i]like [/i]playing with you.” 

“You aren’t going to learn from what they do with a problem if you’re trying to steer them. I meant… experiment! Play?”

It’s not a suggestion she thought of from talking to [i]Yellow[/i] lately. It’s something thought of because she’s been talking to [i]Green[/i]. 

[b]Apostle:[/b]

“[b]Mood[/b].” Apostle nods. “I kind of ruled out cowardice though. It’s a bad aesthetic.” 

There’s a pause. “Personally, I recommend trying to build the perfect god machine. You get to try and seize power, which is pretty based ngl, but still spend most of your time checked out reading as much yuri magical-girl-deconstruction doujin as you want while your code compiles without it being coward shit.” 

He looks at Brown thoughtfully. “You got any [i]good [/i]reccs for me? You just kind of seem like you would.” 

[b]Hazel:[/b]

“Holograms and emitters are tacky,” Hazel winces. “But, sure.” 

Hazel’s opinions of Cyan can be summed up with the words ‘noob tube’. They’ve got their place, like when one of your clients is made of holograms and there’s no getting around it, but the Magic lives and dies on its ability to stand up to scrutiny. This shit? Bridge made of pig-iron brittle. 

But if all you got is pig-iron, and what you need is a bridge…

[b]Crystal:[/b]

“I thought if anyone could appreciate a bit of macabre energy,” she says, finishing the last of the banana quickly as if to destroy the evidence. “You caught that? I was hoping you wouldn’t, I catch myself being a bit distracted, I think. Understandable, but regrettable.”

Crystal sits perched on her upside-down throne, still not righted. It’s a deliberate aesthetic now. “Yellow just strikes me as a bit young I think.” She says. “Every leftist goes through that phase where they think if they just bought a television station they could put out the right kind of shows that would trick people into listening to the right kind of news, the right kind of perspectives.There is a Trotskyist to fascist pipeline for a reason.” 

She gives a wistful, nostalgic, half-remembered smile. “I was never one for politics in university, but I did sleep with a boy who always wore a Jason Ngonde shirt, and saw far too much of it that way.” 

“She is undeniably brilliant though. Brilliance is making this little power play,” she gestures at Red’s phone. 

“Wisdom is knowing that if she did that, she wouldn’t be able to stop Red typing out the sentence, ‘Listen, how about we stop talking about this until 9pm, lock in our ideas then, have an hour to argue about it, and then put it to a final vote at 10pm’.” Crystal stretches her arms over her head in a yawn on her throne. “She might still win the vote in the end, if she chooses to participate. I don’t doubt she has a better idea than mine. But that should be the [i]only[/i] reason she wins, and all she wins for it.” 

Crystal actually does rather admire Yellow, isn’t quite on the same page Fiona’s starting to come to. She’s not above such power plays and flexes herself - Just keep it [i]outside[/i] the polycule, thank you, Yellow? A phrase comes to mind about what one should and should not do where one eats.