[b]Apostle:[/b]

“I wouldn’t count on it, I’ve been in like seven different illuminatis and none of them were worth my time. A lot of the Lutherans have been in a few and say the same. There’s like three kinds - an even shittier MENSA just for cops, the school clubs for future world leaders, and ‘NGO that does something illegal’.” They smile. “The school clubs are the best ones, they’re weird and stupid in a fun way.”

“Mammon - he’s the tall starved looking guy at the meetings - says it’s because illuminatis have a hard upper limit on how powerful they can get before they become absorbed into formal government, because there’s way too much overlap in membership. So whenever there’s a power or resource struggle they get pulled into the bigger - you know, he explains it better, I don’t really care, I just know the ones I was in that didn’t have a secret tie code sucked.” 

“What do you do though if a cop just pulls you over for a frisk and you’re carrying the wrong thing, though?” They ask curiously. “Like impersonate a sergeant in the middle of the arrest, or what?”

The problem with Brown’s chores that get these people acting like journalists instead of members of the public is they’re [i]gonzo[/i] journalists, unwashed, undisciplined mass hordes. That’s fine, they don’t make problems for her yet, but we’ll get back to the consequences of this later. Don’t worry, this isn’t anything Brown did wrong, it’s just the nature of this beast.

[b]Black and Orange:[/b]

So let’s set the scene a bit.

The Castle has its own green space and rolling hills for the effect of it. If the castle is absolute safety, these are your home field lines of skirmish. This is not automatically held, there are no walls here, but the terrain is favourable and the Castle projects force outwards over them. The winding, scenic cobblestone streets through the terrain take about five minutes at a crowd’s pace, two at a brisk walk.

After that it’s twenty-to-thirty minutes to the train station, a game of learning how long a second can be. The two biggest danger areas are the bottlenecks - coming out of the Castle green and coming into the train station itself. The green because it’s the inescapable exit point you must pass through before your alternative routes and options open up, and the station because- have you done any scouting?

This part of Aphrodite is styled like renaissance France, apartment buildings in the shape of baroque castle-mansions, strip malls like gothic churches. It’s got the density of the historical districts of cities like Prague and Munich as much as Paris, but more built up and expensive, more Disney-fairytale than legacy antique. A little bit more intentional, a little more deliberate, a little less real. 

Still, by the end of the day more than one song from Les Mis will have been sung. Beyond the barricades is there a train waiting for me? This is Paris before the reforms, the version of Paris that this tactic was explicitly designed for. Again, scouting will help you here.

Then there is the station itself. From what you remember coming down from it, it’s built for Paris Central Station. Lots of archway entrances, mostly glass, beautiful but indefensible skylights, wide and sweeping concourses.

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This will make it easy for you to break in and keep your people there. It will make a poor place for a siege in its current form.

You’ve got your marching plan, you’ve got your destination and end point, you’ve got the scene. Now it’s just up to - Black? - to assign scouts and Orange to tell the team leaders what the plan is. They’ll be taking their own initiative, so it’s important to give instruction here.

This isn’t Yellow’s moment, but it could be Orange’s - clear, executional, organizational, practical, pragmatic and necessary. This might not be the place for a waving banner, but it desparately needs something like a flight stewardess to give the calm, clear directions for what to do when the plane is about to crash, and out both windows the passengers can see the engines are on fire. 

As above, and so below, the sounds of violence erupt around the cylinder of Aevum, gunshots and grenades like lightning and thunder. You will guide them through the storm. 

[b]Pink:[/b]

Fiona removes it in loving silence and puts the last leg a bit further up the bed, away from you, to make space. Not even as a deliberate gesture, she just needed more room to work. And then she begins again, concentrating utterly on this leg as well. 

There is no guarantee she’ll give either back before going for Pink’s arms as well. In fact it’s starting to look like the plan. Her focus on tending, the firm brush of fingertips in deep and inaccessible places, is so total that it’s hard to tell if it’s on purpose, or just because it’s the natural progression of steps - that putting you all back together is just a sensible last step, even if it leaves you helpless until then.