[IC] Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

[Count Numbers]

Bondi-Pink:

The problem is that Bondi is a great performer but a bad magician.

Her patter, her crowd work, her persona? Incredible. Absolutely vibrant. She sleeps in that costume, goes grocery shopping in it - imagining her wearing a hoodie and jeans is like seeing photos of Abraham Lincoln without the beard. That authenticity bleeds from her.

It’s just, Bondi’s sleight of hand is sloppy. She lacks the concentration span for the long hours of rote practice needed to master other tricks. She avoids buying setpiece prompts from magic retailers, because she’s terrified of thinking she just trust-funded this, too. Except she’s not very good at making her own.

There’s a reason she gravitates towards escape acts, which is that it’s a lot easier to practice and doesn’t take a lot of creativity to be impressive. The real risk involved carries, and she can sell that, make it believable. And she can get real props, not just the magic store ones!

“The proooblem is we can’t do the ones with real danger in them. Even if it’s only a teensy bit. You can’t do that in front of kids.” Bondi tells Pink as she fills the tuxedo pockets with coins, a deck of cards, some candy. Then she holds up the soft rope. “There’s this thing called ‘shibari’ though, the Japanese police used to do it because they didn’t have enough metal for handcuffs. I think it looks super pretty, and I can talk about the history while you tie me up, and people always like that. Do you think you could learn some knots?”

This is not innuendo. She is that cinnamon roll.

…

You uh, suggesting a magic trick for the act here would probably be a good way to smuggle in something that would help with your investigation too, I guess.

Red:

“Holy shit what the fuck.” Sophie rips the rough mesh from her hands, leaving her patient mid-surgery to run up to Red, bounce on her feet, stop, put two pairs of surgical gloves over her hands just to grab your hands and jump and down while holding them, screaming. Screaming! Jumping! Holding your hands! “Look at you! Look at you!”

Hard to tell, but you think she likes your new look.

She rips off her extra gloves and sighs, dragging her feet back to the patient. “Sorry, sweetums, I do got to get back to this guy, though. Shouldn’t take too long, I was about to cut my losses anwyay. I’m good but I’m not magic.” She rolls her eyes. “Numbnuts here took a monofilament sword to the head and they’re like, ‘the cut’s so thin you can just stitch it up, right’ and it’s like, not when the fucking medula oblangata got bisected. Just don’t tell a Tentojinoken loan shark his mother’s a whore, it’s that easy. Even someone with-” and this she shouts into the patient’s ear, “HALF A FUCKING BRAIN should get that one right. Anyway, mind checking the cryofluid intravenous for me? I’ll just give up and start gluing the cavities, I just need him still long enough for it to set.”

Did she even pause to breathe in that entire train of thought?

“After that, I got a binder over there with people waiting for appointments, I usually just do them whenever if they’re not urgent. Or I got two urgent ones in the freezer if you want to hardmode this, their case files are taped to the morgue drawers. Pick anything you’d like.”

Her case notes are written in the neat, looping handwriting of a primary school girl writing in her diary, and she dots all her i’s with skulls.

[Thanqol]

Pink!

"Iron shortages date back to the early history of Japan! When the samurai wanted to make katanas they were working with poor quality iron and so accordingly needed to use the Hanzo steel-folding technique to excise impurities from the blades. Some legendary blades were forged over 1,000 times and could cut through the armour of modern main battle tanks..."

Around and around and around...

The plan was straightforwards. She would smuggle herself into the complex - using the old fare-dodger's trick of disassembling one of her colours and carrying them in a suitcase. This would form the basis of the stageshow magic tricks when she could suddenly and mysteriously split into two different identical copies.

She appreciated the perversity. Costa-Silva was ardent in her passion for moral standards, which meant she was a huge proponent of mandatory modesty bolts for androids among other things. But just like an edge of magic would skate over what she'd call scandalous clothing on Bondi if she saw it on the street, a veil of magic could transmute mechanical dismemberment into entertainment for the whole family.

"But iron ore shortages really began to bite in the Meji period, leading to the conquests of Korea and Manchuria in order to fuel Japan's industrial interests! Even then there still developed a resource rivalry between the army and the navy, which wanted to build a space battleship to defend the country from the angels..."

Across and over and under and splay and gently tighten. Don't think that she wasn't giving this her full attention - it was impossible not to. Not even her own planning or the somewhat anime influenced recounting of the history of Japanese steel production could distract her of what she was looking at, what she was touching...

And besides, getting to hear the outpouring of a hyperfixation was half of the appeal of being intimate with a trans girl.

So, that was the stageshow. The real trick would be smuggling in a third colour. It would require some doing but she could clown-car two full bodies into a single magician's suitcase and while the performance went off with two of them the third would be free to infiltrate the building and dig for dirt.

"Following the catastrophic collapse of domestic mining in the early twenty-first century, Japanese steelmaking became dependent on Australian iron ore exports until the impact of the Space Fountain devastated the continent. Those mines that remained were tiny and inefficient returning Japan to it's earlier period of steel scarcity, which lead to a revival of the traditional arts of prisoner restraint just as the internet age began! You can see the way search trends for shibari spike right as the price of iron - mmph! Mmmph!!!"

But all good things had to come to an end, didn't they?

The ball gag had not, strictly speaking, been part of the arrangement, but Pink considered it a teaching aid. She checked the knots, the weight distribution, made sure that everything rested comfortably and firmly, and then pulled on the hoist to lift Bondi from the floor. As the sudden tightness began to concentrate pressure on places that were not previously experiencing pressure she heard a high, muffled shriek from Bondi.

Pink then sat down in front of her and looked up at her magician with wide, expectant eyes.

"This is safety training," said Pink. "You keep getting into trouble because you don't know how to express yourself using body language, especially in conditions when you can't talk. How are you going to let me know that you need help in this position? How are you going to let me know what kind of help you need?"

She smiled. Of course, that would only be relevant if she couldn't escape from it in the first instance. It would only be fair to let her try her best before she had to beg for mercy~

*

Red!

Buzzing from the enthusiastic compliment, Red spent most of the monologue making a heart-symbol with her hands to communicate attentive affection. Then she bounced over to the urgent cases with the inevitability of a meteor strike.

"Oh wow," she said. "For real? A human tried to go a round in the Breakdome?"
"Yeah, added a cybernetic brain implant, chromed himself up a bit to look androidy, whole nine yards. Of course it's always the idiots who buy intelligence implants who go with plans like this."
"But why the ruse? Surely they'd love to have a human cyborg contestant?"
"He bet everything on himself, thought that no way a virus tuned for an android would cause problems with his implant."
"Did... did he not know that android brains are modeled on human brains?"
"Yeah guess the intelligence implant didn't help him figure out that one, huh?"

Red looks over the notes. The virus was meant to affect vocal processing, altering external voices to sound like they were the listener's own voice, coming from inside their head. The idea was that it could make external speech sound like inner thoughts and thus form the basis for suggestion - but she had no idea what the fuck that would mean for a human brain. "So, uh, what do we do about it?"

[Count Numbers]

Bondi:

And Bondi thinks; Wow! It’s so nice to have such a good helper! Pink is being so great and nice to me! She’s taking everything here at absolute face value, and wouldn’t understand the erotic nature of a ball gag even if you explained it to her. (But then you can’t talk! Or kiss! Or- You know! That’s the fun part!) She would understand the eroticism of being tied up if it was explained, though, so the ice you’re walking on is thicker in some places than others.

Magicians cases are easy. The false bottoms she’s made in some roadie cases aren’t, strictly speaking, perfectly flush. But every surface is so enthusiastically covered in big planets-and-stars themed stickers that the roughness has a deliberateness to it. And that’s magic baby - it doesn’t have to be flawless if they don’t see the flaws.

Even when security finds your +1 in their search, they’re going to stop looking for your +2. When, not if here.

I see two ways this setup goes: Either you formally register your +1 in advance, so that reveal is signed off on. Or you don’t, and bank on your ability to really sell that you just didn’t want to spoil the magic. If you do that, you’ll have extra attention on you for the rest of your time there…

Which would be to say; Are you watching close? Are you sure you see what this hand is doing?

Heist brain, right, there’s still a shibari’d bombshell wriggling off the ground.

Bondi furrows her brow and thinks very intently for a while. Then there’s a soft ‘pop’ as her wrist gives, and slips out of its restraint. She forces the join back into place against the ropes, then worries at another knot around her other wrist. She swings back and forth to get enough momentum she can force a shoulder out of its socket, and then that gives enough slack in the rope to pull an elbow out of the knots, and then the whole arm is free, and then that’s enough to pull the ballgag out, which is all she was going for.

This whole maneuver took about fifteen seconds on a stopwatch. Pink did great, it’s just that this is literally the one thing Bondi is actually good at - a lot of classic escapology comes down to how willing and able you are to see your skeleton as a suggestion rather than a rule, and her pain tolerance is freakishly high. Half of this kind of escapology is the ability to work a lockpick with dislocated fingers, and the other half is making it look so effortless that nobody realizes you just dislocated all your own fingers. Which means knowing how to put them all back again, too.

It’s a commitment to the bit that goes so hard that even when you can’t do sleight of hand, someone can watch you do the trick and still won’t be able to figure out how you did it. The answer just isn’t in most people’s possibility space.

The gag hits the floor, and Bondi looks really nervous. “Is taking the gag out by myself winning, or is it cheating?” Her anxiety sets the rope swinging again. “I didn’t know how to ask before I did it.”

Who are you bringing along on this one? With this one.

Red:

“Pfft, there’s the fucking question isn’t it? You think something this weird would be kept on ice if I had a clue?” She’s buzzing with excitement, one hand already on the handle for the morgue drawer. “Fuck, I’m so glad you picked this one.”

Her previous patient is left by the door in a wheelchair for pickup, a vegetable but alive. A man in a tracksuit comes in to wheel him out. The man’s Irish accent isn’t as thick as it would have been a generation ago, but it’s there. You can see the scars on his knuckles from across the room, under the sharp surgical lighting.

“What the fook? He’s a bleedin’ vegetable, inn'he?”

“You get that much because I’m the next best thing to God himself, except I’m actually better ‘cause I actually answer your fucking prayers. Everything’s put back together, give him a chance to heal and if you’re really lucky, he might just be kind of like a really senile version of his old self after a year or two.” Sophie bangs a hand on the new one’s drawer impatiently. “You mind? I’ve gotta get the next one out of the crisper. What?”

In a softer voice, the man strokes the cheek of his… colleague? “Didn’t have to leave him all alone over here, did you? Poor bastard.”

“As if he could even tell.”

“Fookin cold.”

“He’ll get better! Maybe!” Sophie protests. She shakes her head, rolls her eyes, jerks a thumb at the man and says to Red “Can you fucking believe some people? Anyway. This guy. I’m not sure if pulling the mods out will start to solve the problem, or just kill the interface I have to fix this with. I’m thinking we yank it out, absolutely flood him with a selective voltage-gated sodium channel blocker like Evenamide, since that’s the closest mechanism I can think of to treat wetware-induced schizophrenia. Then we wake him up, you smack him around a bit, and we see if that worked. And then if it didn’t…”

She grabs a bottle of liquid soap, squirts it on the floor, and then throws herself heels-first at the slick to glide across the surgery to a rack of shelves. She opens a small drawer and enticiingly rattles a box. “I reckon we get him absolutely fucking blasted on mushrooms, I’m talking higher than John the Baptist, and hope the comedown from that resets him. You’d think homeostasis shouldn’t work like that, but you’d be amazed how much brain shit you can fix by treating it like a television you just gotta hit real hard.”

“I’ll give you a finders fee if you know anyone who can debug the implants though, while I’m doing this. I’m pretty sure the danger’s out if it but, I don’t like putting anything back into someone’s head before I know it’s sterile, you know what I’m saying?”

Two hands is going to help a lot here. Especially one that is way more familiar with mechanical connections. Sophie’s done more than her share of cybernetics, sure, it’s just not where her passions lie.

And uh, in case you haven’t noticed? A lot of what she’s describing is experimentally flooding a dangerous (temporary) schizophrenic with pharmaceuticals just to see what happens. He'll have to be conscious while you check results at a minimum. It might be important for you to be here just to be that second pair of physical hands.

... How's it go?

[Thanqol]

Pink!

It is, tragically, not in her nature to be direct. She is aesthetics and must appreciate Bondi's aesthetics on their own terms. She asked for a performance and this was the performance she got. She can only appreciate it on its own terms, the beautiful skill required to maintain naivety even in the devil's grip. She can only smile reassuringly and buzz with appreciation and a little frustration.

For the second performer, the choice is between Orange and Brown - Orange has the chemistry, but Brown has the cold hard dedication required to learn the tricks properly. She decides on Orange simply due to the condensed timeframe - this show is going to live or die on charisma, not technical skill. Brown nevertheless starts practicing just in case it comes up in the future.

For the infiltrator it's Black or Green. She chews on the decision for a while before deciding on Green. This one isn't down to skill, it's down to mindset - Black is risk adverse and will scrub the mission early if confronted. Green will double down. For Pink, performing the most socially important work of her life, the risk feels worthwhile.

She will of course telegraph nothing in advance to security. Even if this was not an infiltration operation, she is offended by the notion. It would be a poor magician who revealed her secrets, let alone revealed them unprompted.

*

Red!

It sounds like there's a plan! A high risk, skillful, technical plan - and that's Red's cue to kind of go to sleep a little bit. It's not like she disagrees or that this isn't interesting or anything, but this is all just, like... like there's a set point in the future, carved out with words, and the present is just the sequence of things to do to get from here to there. It's basically just time travel, right? Fast forwarding until -

- Until she grabs Sophie and spins her out of the way just as the strap rips and the fist goes right by where her neck used to be.

Of course, the robot arm had been disabled before they started - battery removed, software in hard lock - but of course a guy with way too many dollars worth of brain shoved into his skull would have a contingency plan for if he got hit with an EMP pulse, nevermind the paramedics. He's frothing and wrenching himself out of his chair like an anti-implant propaganda movie villain, robot arm crunching the stainless steel armrests like tinfoil. She tracks his eyes as they focus - and they both lunge for the surgical table at the same time.

He grabs a knife. He swings it. She feels the pressure - just for a moment. Hey, good news! The dragonscales work!

She grabs the soap dispenser.

As he's getting up she squirts it on the floor right underneath his feet. His feet which are wrapped up in blue surgical plastic bags, already a fairly low friction material.

Down he goes, sideways and heavy. Red's on top of him a second later, wrenching the cybernetic arm into a full body lock, knife held up past her head ineffectively. She wasn't supposed to have been taught this technique, Euna had done it to her on instinct when she'd tripped over her own feet while holding the practice knife. The motion had been burned on her retinas and she went through it on instinct, holding the pin while Sophie recovered long enough to get the emergency riotstopper[1] and start gluing limbs to the floor.

"Super strong and super smart," said Red, breathless. "You feel lucky to be working on this human paragon?"

[1] Riotstoppers, or 'glue guns', are 'less-lethal' weapons in use by law enforcement. The fast-drying adhesive is more environmentally friendly than tear gas in a closed ecosystem like Aevum and the police department has allegedly been given training against headshots that can cause suffocation and eye damage.

[Count Numbers]

Team-Bondi:

“As long as you’re both good with kids.” Bondi says with absolute earnestness as she untangles herself the rest of the way, limb by limb. She sticks her tongue out the corner of her mouth and concentrates as she rambles. “They don’t really believe. Like, they know magic isn’t real, they just want to believe for pretend. You have-to have-to make absolutely sure they don’t feel like you’re playing a trick on them, or like anyone is going to make them feel stupid over it, so they’re safe to pretend. Which is harder than you think, when you’re also trying to confuse them at the same time! People make fun of you for believing in things, and that’s-”

She lets out a yelp as she unravels like a yoyo from her last maneuver, spinning to the floor. She bounces up and brushes herself off, massaging her joints. “Wow! Okay, that was a lot of fun. Tie me up again! Except this time I want it on camera, so I can see how I look. I know I can do it now, I just have to figure out a way to look good doing it. And selfies! For us! Because I’m having fun. Oh! Oh! And, uh… no I forgot the other thing. Sorry! I’m just so excited!”

Heist:

The set list and the prop list for the magic act had to be sent in advance, much to Bondi’s chagrin as an ab-libber who abhors 'routine' in all its forms. The magicians’ cases are packed. You’ll be waved through to a side entrance, and everything will be searched to make sure the props match the approved setlist.

Your plan does involve coming to a secure location with ropes, knives, handcuffs, large containers with false bottoms and smokebombs, and everyone being cool with that.

It’s just, yeah, the compromise on them being cool with it is having to check all that in - carefully - and that means Orange is definitely being caught in the inspection. How do you talk your way out of it?

(This was a decision, which means it’s a prompt not a challenge. You succeed here, no risk of failure or of Green being found. I’m being vague on details to give you room to breathe an atmosphere, since this operation could go anywhere on the drama-comedy spectrum.)

Sophie:

Sophie roundhouse kicks a steel cupboard hard enough to put a tennis-ball-shaped dent in it. Its door pops open and won’t close properly again. There is no way that didn’t hurt like hell.

“Shit like this!” she says, “It’s always shit like this!” She goes for a second kick with the same foot, and it looks like doubling down on the injury hurts enough to snap her out of the rage spiral she was about to go on. She slides down to the floor, nursing her foot.

Uh?

“Thanks for being here today, Red.” She breathes. “It’s been hard to find people who can do this, who I can stand to do this with. I go a few weeks thinking I’m better off on my own, and then something like this happens and I remember why that’s shithouse. Not like I can put this up on Headpattr.” She bangs the back of her head against the broken cupboard, clong.

Didn’t she say she had guys that helped with Rudy? Well, yeah. Outside work. Not in the same room together work.

“Maybe injecting this guy with a barrel of Evenamide directly into the carotid artery will make me feel better. Soon as my foot stops hurting. Can you start moving our shit over to Max Stats Mandy, here?”

[Thanqol]

Pink!

The show starts on the runway.

The Station-Hopper Sunswallow is a glorious machine. Once it was a gorgeous racer, sky-stealing blue with decal flames painted along the engine block; retrofuturistic perfection, a personal rocket pod with which to explore the heavens. But under Pink's hands it has become something more.

The paint job has expanded relentlessly, growing like ivy. The flames now emerge from the mouth of a dragon as she is collared by a dark wizard with hands of starlight. A queen of ice sits upon a mountain throne and wears a golden ring set with a gem that is a globe. The bloody red sky swarms with vampire-like bats, descending upon an army in many colours. A unicorn raises rampant against the sky, white driving back the crimson, and a maiden aims her longbow at the distant sorcerer.

The door opens to light and steam, and Pink descends to glory. She is beautiful, a shining crystal dress catching the light that emerges from her joints bending bands of pink in kalideoscope patterns around her body with each motion. Diamond earrings, diamond eyebrow studs, diamond teardrops falling from laughing eyes. A golden torque like a half-sun shines across her breasts, shoulder-length gloves in gilt and cream, and a headdress that suggests mighty horns curls across her back. She is overdressed for an assistant, she must be stealing the show - but at the last moment the balance becomes clear. Rising up from her on ethereal winds are golden strings, attached to her neck, elbow, wrists. She moves easily, but as though lifted by the threads as a puppet. Bondi's right glove has golden strings dangling from it and through the alchemy of magic all of Pink's glory transfers to her. This beautiful creature is not an independent thing, it is an expression of the wizard's power, an animate puppet who dances on golden strings. A haptic feedback loop lets both parties feel the tugs on the opposing string connections - and its awkward, loud signal masks subtler communications.

Bondi and Pink, Prospero and Ariel, descend before the guards, followed by an animate and scuttling suitcase. Their attention too is on the guards, and the performance draws them in. Searching the suitcase is a game designed for them - open this pocket and a dozen roses bloom all at once. Open this one and there is a flash and blast of green smoke and a shape like a howling ghost escaping to the ceiling. Put your hand in this pocket and when it emerges it has somehow been replaced with a monkey's paw - until laughing, the glove comes off...

It's what trying to search a wizard should be like. It's a flash of colour on a dour day. It's an invitation to the party. It has everyone laughing. When a guard opens the main part of the bag and sees inside Orange's face holding up a finger to her lips and going 'shhhh' it's just another part of the show. At that point the rhythm is so clear that the only thing to do is to nod in exaggerated respect and close that pocket back up. By that point it's not even the strangest thing they've found.

[Reassurance 1/2]

Red!

"Uh -" she can never correctly judge human structural tolerances. On the one hand, Sophie's a doctor so she knows - but then, her training data set was derived from an old woman who threatened to dislocate her hip if she stood up too fast. She hesitates, combining guesses about emotional state, injuries sustained, and the priority of the request. In another second the space collapses and she fetches an ice pack for Sophie - just in case.

"Um... hey," she said. "This kind of made me think, uh. I'm doing a lot of body work on myself these days," she held up a hand to show the scales. "And, like, in the moment it's really fun and everything, but I didn't really consider the doctor's point of view. Right? Is this kind of," she shifted her feet a little awkwardly, "transhuman. Body modification stuff. Putting you at risk?"

Everything up until now had seemed so just. She'd gone from zero to outrage to infiltrating the supreme court with zero windup. But now she felt uncertain. All her concealed tools, her custom hardware, her unique design, her contingency plans - did they come at the cost of endangering some EMT?

[Count Numbers]

Pink:

Through the checkpoint, the Costa-Silva compound is an overgrown hacienda. Functionally, that lush green wall of palms and ferns block line of sight from the exterior wall. They block sound, too, it’s quiet in the grounds.

But it is also beautiful, and that is its own justification. The distressed stone pillars wrapped in flowering vines around the garden, the goats grazing the overgrown meadow grass instead of a neatly manicured lawn, the pistachio trees around the outer courtyard.

It’s very un-Hermes. Even much of the park space in the district is recreational centers, arcades, libraries, tool sheds. Outside of a few Tokyo-style garden oases, nature is too understimulating and low-density for the hyper-industrial Hermes. That is to say, while this is a display of wealth, it’s not the expected one. The expectation of Hermes is in building as tall as you can afford, in expensive electronics, and in staff. In working out of a penthouse in your office building so that people can see just how many employees work under you.

Which is why the goats (Smelly, Bitey, Atticus, and Stomp) are such a statement. In Hermes, the point of a lawn like this is that it needs to be mowed, which means needing someone to mow it. Costa-Silva doesn’t want a lawn, though - she wants grass, grass that’s thick and soft to fall on. Trees that are fun to climb, and fruit to reward you for climbing it.

Bondi is bouncing with excitement as she skips around the terracotta fountain in the outer courtyard. “I could just stay here forever, couldn’t you?”

Two men are coming out to meet you. One is older, apple-shaped with a long grey ponytail, wearing earthy colours and a sweatervest - he must be Mr Costa-Silva. It’s the other man, tall, razor-thin in a shiny white summer suit that greets you, looking up from a tablet and over the top of his thick digital sunglasses to address you. “Ms Bondi and assistant?”

“Yes!” Bondi doffs her top-hat with her left hand. “That’s us!”

“You’ll be performing exclusively in the inner courtyard, through that archway. You have two hours to prepare your stage before the children will be ready for you, and a dressing room has been provided for you up the courtyard stairs, third door on the right. I do not want to find you anywhere else. A gold plaque has been placed on it for you, so please don’t insult my intelligence by later telling me you ‘got the wrong door’. And-”

“Sir Barrera.” Mr Costa-Silva takes his glasses off to rub his eyes. “Enough, thank you.”

‘Barrera’ hides behind his glasses again. The only sign of his annoyance is a twitch at the corner of his lips, and then he spins on his heels and walks away, tapping at his tablet.

“I am sorry for Lorenz. He should have told you that you can wander the gardens as much as you like, if you have the time. He’s very protective of the children, you must understand.” Mr Costa-Silva says. He flashes a smile that is simultaneously apologetic and grateful; “And I’d prefer it if you called me Mr Costa-Silva in front of them, as well. When it’s just between us, I am happy to be Luis to you.”

He’s about to go for a handshake, but he hesitates if he should go for a left or right handed shake.

Sophie:

She barks a laugh as she puts the icepack on her ankle gratefully, kicking a shoe off. “Oh, sweetie. Yes.” She shakes her had. “Same way a kid’s a less dangerous patient. Doesn’t mean I want everyone staying in their larval stage. It just means-” She cuts herself off, halfway to tying a compression bandage over the swelling. “Almost lied and said I miss working in hospitals.”

She thinks; caring about other people doesn’t come naturally to her, but she’s smart enough to improvise when she needs to. “Those dragon scales - there’s no way to have those be able to stop a knife without being able to stop a scalpel. But stopping a knife saved me needing a scalpel just now. So, you know, that’s gotta make it worth it.”

But underneath that, the curious tone in her voice she doesn’t know to hide that betrays she’s stopping herself from asking; Why care? Isn’t it enough just to want it?

Black and White:

You get a text from Fiona;

"Crystal wants to do an exhibition for alternative body types. Like the racing Pavilion, but for people. She's kind of gone a bit insane? I don't know how to tell her I think it's a great idea but I don't want to burn all our money or get chased down for the rest of our lives like rainbow salman rushdies, and I know it's a big ask, but I thought you two would be the best people for this that she'd actually listen to. You think you two could play good cop, bad cop for me?"

"Like, I feel like if Crystal's the starting point, and Black is total risk management, then maybe she'll listen to White as the negotiated compromise?"

"I was supposed to keep this a secret, by the way. I think she wanted it to be a surprise? Which is why I kind of picked two here."

[Thanqol]

Pink!

Being a good sorcerous puppet is as much mindset as aesthetic; it means paying intimate attention to even minor details. The hand to the hat could be a signal, it could be a wizard's mistake, but both were the same to a spirit bound. She offers her empty left hand daintily. "Ariel," she says, smiling.

"I must ask, sir Luis, what inspired the goats? I hear the rumours but I can tell from the clarity of the vision here there is a stronger truth," her voice is lilting, an air of poetry to it; how a creature of the wind might speak.

Red!

"Right, yeah," she said, stepping back and brushing her hair out from her eyes. "I just see this guy, chromed to the gills on a quest to be a better version of himself, doing big brain moves, right past the point it makes him a vegetable, past the point where it gets him stuffed full of fungi, past the point where he's ripping himself off the slab like Frankenstein's monster, and I can't help but think that I'm headed for the same place, right? Some days I'm trying to bite the world. At some point it'll bite back so bad that I can't be rebuilt."

"So, uh, can I ask what the moment was that made you decide to quit hospitals?" she said. "I mean, the point you stepped away from the safety of it to come out here on your own."

Black and White!

"Is this it?" asked White. "The moment when we kill each other in fated conflict over the heart of a maiden?"
"It could be," said Black. "Just give me a moment to figure out what the fuck what my opinion is."

They sat in silence for a long moment.

"We can't tell her the news," said Black. "It's an active operation."
"And this is an active operation for her," said White. "It's a project. A project we could well have inspired with our whole rainbow explosions stunt the other day."
"Fuck, you're making me change my opinion," said Black. "If we tell her the news it could make her so depressed that she drops the idea."
"Or make her so mad that she burns down an insurance agency," said White.
"Maybe we can stage manage the transition from anger into depression to cover the operational window?"
"Ah excellent, your plan is to make our girlfriend so sad she gives up her dreams."
"The very credible alternative is having her burn down an insurance agency!"
"Hmm," said White. "No. Literally anything that happens in the news is just going to make her double down. It won't just be an art project at that point, it will become her act of rebellion, the project that channels her fury into something productive."
"So the only way to deter her is to confront her directly."
"Exactly. And in so doing turn a bad week into an awful week, rendering her sidelined and demoralized. Are you comfortable with that?"
"... We can't tell her."
"She knows our whole terrorism secret already. She can be discreet. It's better she hear it from us."
"No. This is operational. It's not our secret, it's Pope's."
"He gave it to us. We're journalists. We can choose when to use it."
"This whole thing is a cascade of operational security issues!" said Black. "Revealing secret information to an untrained partner in order to manage emotions! Committing to a high profile art event that could turn into a furry uprising! Not to mention that the whole inciting incident is Fiona's inability to keep a secret! If we tell her she's going to spend two weeks paralyzed unable to interact with her entire social circle while this eats her from the inside, without even the consolation of breaking into a judge's house! I understand you have a commitment to the abstract principle of honesty and trust, but like you said she knows we're up to spy shit, and she knows we're not telling her everything."
"... she would schedule her event to be on the day the news drops, wouldn't she?" said White.
"She would attend wearing a fucking Che beret," said Black.
"Do you think it'll go much better if she coincidentally schedules the event for that day?"
"... she wouldn't. The odds - no."
"Or if the event is scheduled for after that day do you think she does not update the dress code to match?"
"Hmm. I am starting to wonder if you are simply projecting your own desire to have a well organized and timely riot onto Crystal," said Black.
"I am very angry," said White.
"I am angry also," said Black. "Though admittedly most of that right now is aimed at Fiona for being unable to keep a secret. Even broaching the subject will cause a loss of trust."
"Not everyone is as concerned with operational secrecy as you," said White.
"Oh, that's rich coming from miss 'telling her is the right thing to do'," said Black. "No, I'm prepared to compromise on this and scout this situation out, maybe even tell her if it would help, but this is where I draw the line."
"... fine."

*

Black: We'll talk to her on one condition.
Black: You must first admit to Crystal that you told us her secret.
Black: This is a big deal for us. We work in an extremely low trust environment. We are committed to being as honest with you two as we can be, and we don't like that 'as we can be' is not 'completely'.
Black: Adding additional layers of concealment is not good for us.
White: While we're being honest, we also cannot guarantee we do not wind up stabbing you in the back and agreeing with her.
White: I hesitate to remind you that we are probably the least mentally stable person in your life and our risk calculus is very different from yours.

[Count Numbers]

Pink:

Luis Costa-Silva shakes yours and Bondi’s left hands, with one more admiring glance at Bondi’s right as he does. “If you mean the names? My wife and I managed to name Atticus first, for a very old book we loved in school, before the children told us we were doing it wrong. The rest were theirs.” With pride and amusement he adds; “They were probably right. I’ve only ever been asked ‘which one is Atticus’. Bitey, Smelly and Stomp, they always seem to know.”

It’s true. Somehow Smelly looks like a smelly goat. It’s not clear how this is true, but it clearly is.

“If you mean why? Well, they do a good job, don’t they?” This is clearly not the whole explanation. He adjusts his sweater vest uncomfortably. “We, my wife and I, we don’t believe in domestic servants. That might not be what the name de jeur is, but, a shovel is just another word for a spade, and we call a spade a spade.”

“That’s so enlightened of you!” Bondi says cheerfully. “So why’s it different?”

“Why is what different?”

“There’s no waaay you bought this place with just your own money.” Bondi does a sweeping gesture of the grounds. “So why is it different when people are working for you or paying you rent, to asking them to mow lawns?”

The worst part is that she is truly, absolutely and utterly sincere. She’s a weirdly liberal trust fund kid with a little bit of brain damage - Luis stares her up and down, trying desperately to find the ounce of malice or irony or sarcasm there, and finds only innocent interest.

“I don’t know.” Luis lies.

“I feel like you’d have a really good answer, if you figure it out. Don’t you think, Madame Pink?”

Red:

There is a lot Sophie won’t say here, but you know a lot of what she’s talking around.

“I didn’t decide to quit. It was more like, I decided I loved the stuff I wasn’t allowed to do more. Decided to keep doing it until I got caught, and then I got caught.” That is a mild way to talk around the fact that her take on ‘safe, sane’ consensual’ is; she sees ‘safe’ as cowardice, sane as a difference of opinion, and consensual as an engineering challenge. Weak evidence but strong rumours of her brain surgery fetish wasn’t enough to get her fired, or convicted, but it has been enough to get her blacklisted.

“I don’t want to make this work, is the thing, I want this to just be a passion for me but it’s too expensive. Going legit is way better, but I can’t go back to living without a mushroom drawer, babe. Hateful thing is if the job’s to fund the passion, and the job doesn’t let me have the passion, then what the fuck’s the point, right?” The mushroom drawer is just for patients, one of the tools she wouldn’t be allowed to use in a conventional setting. Her personal stash is a suite of tailored, targeted and personalized designer drugs she makes for herself in her off-hours, like that neoscopolamine free-will obliterator she mentioned when November caught up with her. Both are reasons she’s blacklisted, just one’s her on-the-clock methods and the other is her off-the-clock preferences.

“I don’t think you’re headed for the same place.” She says, and she’s too confused about needing to say it for it to be anything but the truth. “But like, I figure if you’re not chasing what you love, you’re just waiting to die anyway, right?”

Black and White:

“Just told her now. Normally I’d have said first but I don’t think you’re supposed to ask permission to do interventions. She says ‘see you soon’.”

[...]

Fiona’s naked when she answers the door for you, and seems to have forgotten that. It can be surprising how toned she is - the definition of her abs are clear even through the padding from way too much sugar. “Holy shit, I am loving the new big. Can I try and climb you like a boulder, later? I so want to ride around on your shoulders and-”

white just kabedons her

@Thanqol

This is a terrible way to realize you are naked, in a magical sense - in the way that a wizard is great and terrible. Being forcefully backed against a wall by your newly Amazonian girlfriend is one way to suddenly feel naked. Realizing you actually already are on top of that?

Fiona holds up an ‘excuse me one moment’ finger, dips, slides underneath White’s arm, disappears around the corner wall, and takes a shuddering breath to compose herself before she can speak again - or maybe that’s just the shaking she was already doing. Back again, she’s bright red. She has clearly had to rehearse what she’s saying next to be able to say it, now.

She holds up her wrists which are wrapped in two gold bracelets. The skin around them is stained with green bruises the colour of tropical stormclouds just beneath the surface of the skin. “I got new hardware too, I just made a deal that if I got these I’d be naked around the apartment until the bruises healed.”

They’re not bracelets, they’re augments. Very, very niche ones. What looks like bracelets are plates that run all through - essentially her hands were cut off below the wrist, the plates were joined to the cut, and the hands healed through the plates for a rejection-resistant wetware-hardware interface. Usually you’d see these as a treatment for carpal tunnel syndrome - when they’re active, nerve impulses go through the bracelet instead of into the hands, bypassing painful muscle contractions. The hands go limp, basically.

Something Black might appreciate - the toggle is physical hardware. Like, it’s a switch you flick on the bracelets. Unlike more comprehensive cybernetics, there’s no way to hack her hands or shut them off with an EMP. They’re niche because if you’re getting invasive aug surgery anyway then almost everyone takes a more significant enhancement with it. The only other people who’d use them are incredibly security-paranoid hackers.

“Crystal is paranoid I’m going to fall off the wagon and go back to the old me, even though half the point of getting these is so I don’t have to.” She turns her head and taps the chrome of the interfacing connection there, the direct link into her brain. “So, no clothes until I’m done with body affirmation and she’s finished keeping an eye on if I start hiding from mirrors, stuff like that. She’s in her study, please talk to her?” That’s the end of the rehearsed bits. She’s still flushed. Her voice drops half an octave. “I think that’s going to get me through at least tomorrow on its own though, Jesus Christ, White. What the fuck.”

This is not ‘what the fuck’ as in ‘why did you do that’. This is ‘what the fuck’ as in ‘I have learned a powerful and inconvenient truth about myself’ and it turns out the truth is that Fiona reacts to Big White like a snowflake under a blowtorch. The fact that she’s gone so hard on ‘please don’t misinterpret my nudity as an invitation and talk to Crystal first’ says a lot about her love and her fear, because it is taking unprecedented willpower for her to not climb you and wrap her legs around your shoulders. Or get thrown into a bed like a half-court line shot.

White will notice that the apartment has less artwork than usual, which means Crystal is already at the point of the project where she’s needing to sell things. Flipping works once they’ve matured is usual, it’s part of the way to make space for newer works. It’s less usual for her to sell things before she has something to replace them with, though. Empty spots on the wall, and a sculpture corner that just has a standing lamp in its place? That’s different.

Both can notice a physical flier in a stack on the table for advertising. No announced venue, no address, just a website, the social media pages for updates, some extravagant shots of locked-in models for the event (A mermaid. Why isn’t becoming a mermaid more popular? Right, duh. And the minotaur is a basic concept, but his execution of the concept is transcendent.) There’s a date already on them.

The day after the announcement, by coincidence. Hahaha. Hahaha. Ha. Probably part of why Fiona’s really worried about this - that’s soon, she’s likely only been planning this since that day in the park, and that was more than a few days ago but not much more. It means she’s trying to get this done in under a month.

Plans? Questions? Preparations? Debates? Actions? Anything to check out first? Otherwise go on through.

[Thanqol]

Pink!

"Thought is not something I do, Mistress," said Pink pacifically. "Thought is something I receive. Already I hear yours, and my spirit rushes to obey."

She pats her thighs and, like a dog called, the luggage shambles forwards. She feels wonderful in that moment. Up until now there was a contradiction in the aesthetic; how could she truly be a spirit of wind and magic if her mistress was the puppet? But now she was, like a devil-fae, responding to a wizard's honestly asked question, breaking into fragments to master every chore before her. Now she had received word and will and she could do real magic.

Red!

"I mean, it's easy for you," said Red, faux pouting. "You love something simple, like neuroscience. My problem is that I love everything."

Red was straightforwards; she didn't need a well reasoned argument to shake her out of a mood, she just needed a vibe. The fact that Sophie had struggled through an attempt at empathy was honestly sufficient for her. It made her a delight - no matter how socially awkward someone was, they could never fuck it up with Red so long as they tried. Effort to her was everything.

So the energy had turned already and Red was starting to reflect the more familiar and compatible edge of mania. "It's terrible! I'm nine people and I'm stretched so thin the pigments are visible. All I've ever wanted was to be everything to everyone and there are -" her eyes turned off. They came on a second later, ominous blue with scrolling white text "- currently -" her eyes flickered and turned back on, crimson red. "- too many people for that to be viable."

Black and White!

"I respect her White," purred White. "That looked like it was quite the struggle."
"I meant to ask," said Black. "Do you really think of humans as having colours like us?"
"Mostly I recognize it when they have to think like me," said White. "And I like seeing that in them. Seeing someone struggle to be pure amidst corruption is really beautiful, don't you think? The more pure it is, the more I want to corrupt it, and the more I respect it for resisting."
"Your sexual awakening was not what I thought it was going to be," said Black.
"I am a creature of virtue," said White. "And what is virtue if not tested?"

Black knocked on the door. "Crystal? Can we come in?"
"What did you think my sexual awakening was going to be like?" asked White.
"God, White, shut up."

[Count Numbers]

Pink:

Luis laughs in relief. That breaks the tension for him. “You have no problems keeping a servant of your own, I see?”

Bondi furrows her brow at that and looks askance to Luis, then back to Pink. A complicated mental struggle occurs; Bondi wants to ask Luis if it’s okay if she has a servant as part of the act, and that’s not going to be a problem. But Bondi wouldn’t acknowledge the act.

The breaking point is that Pink has already gone into her role, and Bondi doesn’t want to contradict that. She puts on her face - she thinks of it like putting on makeup instead of putting on a mask. A mask is for someone who has a clean separation of their character and their persona, an off-and-on. Hers is who she already is but with a little more effort and attention applied to the presentation.

“A magical assistant.” Bondi says, and her tone makes it clear to Luis that Pink is a special kind of servant, she’s not contradicting him. “Bound to my service until she’s filled with enough children’s hopes and dreams that she can become a real girl.”

Luis takes this completely seriously. “Well, I wish you both the very best of-”

From the back of the house, a teenage girl cries out; “Daddy, where are you?” and Luis looks in the direction, then apologetically back.

“Thank you, thank you, I’m sure you can sort yourselves out, I’m sure you can find me later if you have any questions-.” He says this while already breaking into a jog towards the corner of the house. “Coming! Coming.”

When you are ready to find it:

The hacienda’s inner courtyard is open to the sky, with broad pavestones filling the central space that will make up your stage. Covered stairs at the back of the courtyard connect up to the balcony walkway that overlooks the courtyard, and to the 12 doors that line the upstairs perimeter with the neat repetition of a hotel. Probably the children’s bedrooms, with spares. Checking out your dressing room might give you an idea of the layout, from extrapolation.

The ground floor courtyard has the door that leads to the rest of the mansion complex. The studies, the living rooms, the kitchens, whatever security has taken for itself.

Sophie:

Sophie squints at Red. Then she turns and snaps at the dollar-store Terminator glued to the floor and levels the riot gun at him. "Hey! Fucker, do you mind? Having a moment here."

In the moment Red's attention snaps back to the threat, Sophie fires a full salvo pump - at Red. It's way more than necessary, but she's working point blank and she knows what Red's reactions are like. She's doing the best she can down a leg, and both of them resting against the cabinet. The gun drops to the tiles and she has both her hands on Red's cheeks, turning her head this way and that and looking into her eyes.

"Thank fuck," she sighs in rapturous relief, "this I'm actually good at. Hey, Red, you feel anything when you just said that? You said uh, you said something like there were too many of you right now. Did you notice anything? I'm going to make you say the whole thing again, and I'm going to see if it happens again."

She hid her play so well that a psychiatrist could use the last five seconds for a personality disorder diagnosis, and she already had the weapon at hand. It's dropped now, and she's mostly glued you to the cabinet she's already kicked in, and you're in a surgery you're now familiar with filled with solvents. You've got more options and plays to break out than the other guy does.

It's worth noticing Sophie hasn't apologized yet. She thinks she’s done nothing wrong..

Crystal:

Crystal’s fur is bestial when she opens the door, natural as opposed to the carefully supernatural quality she keeps it in. Sweat and worry tangle it to something tangible, bunched beneath the loosely-tied red-and-black kimono she’s wearing. Her pupils are dilated, but her eyes are half-lidded, the look of someone who’s been awake too long on stimulants but doesn’t plan on stopping yet. Still, exhausted as she is, she smiles for you.

“You’re looking more yourself than ever.” She says to White. Then, to Black, she sighs. “I hope you don’t mistake having less enthusiasm for seeing you as something other than what it is. It’s just that being sent for risk management…” Crystal gives a hand a roll of the wrist. “Come in.”

The study is the same mess it always is. Crystal’s workspace is always utter chaos, a complete bombshell. Different phones for different purposes scatter the room wherever she picks them up and puts them down, swatches for printouts and paints and scale models of venues. This is the tip of the iceberg, though, beneath the surface is the majority of the work being done digitally on desktop in the corner.

“This is a bitch to pull off.” She murmurs. “It needs to be célèbre if it is to become cause célèbre. I need to attract a lot of people, and a lot of the right people. The stars need to be provocative enough to be recognizably art, but not so outré that when this ends up on NBN the moderates understand the backlash.” She growls at that. “That has been the hardest needle to thread of all, I’m sure you can imagine. It is a challenge to engineer a controversy that guarantees public sympathy.”

[Thanqol]

Pink!

She was Ariel, and Ariel was a spirit of the air.

That meant thunder and lightning.

Fireworks were one thing, unexpected fireworks were altogether another. Disturbed from their rest by explosions and screams and the facility lights going dark, guards rush for windows - and freeze. Maybe the most joyless of them will eventually remember to be annoyed at unscheduled pyrotechnics, but for everyone else it's like stepping into a dream. All the colours of magic raised aloft, a call to enchantment like no other. Pink dances beneath the colours she wove, sunset slashes of violet and bronze, warmer than an ocean that swallowed the sun.

Everyone, roll up! The show is about to start. The show is unmissable - wherever you are in the complex, step outside, look up! You'll see it! It's all for you, each and every one of you. Look at the sky and see her paint in stars and comets.

And pay no attention to wicked Caliban creeping from the compartment, dressed in orange rags, a tame demon to match her bound spirit. Caliban will prowl and lurk and be ready to bedevil the audience when the show calls for her. The performance will want for neither devil nor angel. The performance is everything, the magic that asks you to stop and believe that with this mask a girl can become Juno or that an explosion might be lightning.

Asked to believe all that, it is not much to ask that the stagehand - wearing green so dark it is almost black, who walks quietly but confidently across a stage bedecked with jewels and fairy clothes - be ignored. She is simply there to move the scenery and rearrange the backdrop. Even if you saw her it would be churlish to admit it, even as she carries away the treasure, the ship and the skies themselves.

[Explosive Devices 0/4: 6+4 10]

Red!

On the one hand her kill-all-humans joke just landed in the wrong fucking postcode and she's going to be staring down the business end of a logic probe in minutes. But, fuck, she was blown away by the swag of the move. Unbelievable. No hesitation. There was a (perceived) crisis and it got fucking managed. Frankly she's in awe in addition to being extremely into it. And Sophie was clearly keen for it too...

De-escalating would be coward shit.

"Say what again?" she asked sweetly. She's already going through chemical combinations in her head, the compositions that might dissolve the riotstopper glue, the possibility of detaching and remote controlling an arm into gathering them. "My ambitions to serve humanity? No doubt those can be achieved simply through expanding my own hardware, consciousness and/or political influence."

Wait. Fuck. What if Yellow or Black or... whoever the fuck had programmed her with psycho brainwave patterns in case of an emergency? What if Everest had built a secret assassin mode into her? Who knows what Sophie would find if she started digging around in her head.

White and Black!

They exchanged glances. The possibility space contracted; this was already deliberately Political. There wasn't a way around it.

"Crystal," said Black. "You are extremely smart and socially adept. You will see through any attempt I make to manage you. As such I am engaging you on the level of raw biological instinct. I bought sandwiches[1], and I would like you to take a shower, eat a full meal, accept a shoulder massage - and preferably have a full nights sleep but I understand there are limits to what I can ask - before you hear what I have to say. I make this request understanding exactly how valuable your time is at this moment."

[1]: Lasagna

"Crystal," said White. "You are extremely beautiful, and your haunted gothic workaholic vibe is powerful. I love not only that you have done all this immense amount of work, but you took the time out of your day to manage Fiona's mental health and body image. I can see your soul burning so brightly the world is aching to keep up."

They exchanged another set of glances. This time there was no mutual comprehension.

[Count Numbers]

Pink:

Even Bondi's lost in the show for a moment - she doesn't usually have someone to do the big pyrotechnics for her, so this is a bit special for her too.

You've set up the stage, you've got your people in place - the audience is going to follow the fireworks and roll up, roll up in a moment. This also bought Green a distraction to use to make her break inside.

What does it look like? Where is Orange? How did Green use the distraction to get in? What will the audience see when they arrive in a few seconds?

[The youngest child is just under 5 years older, the oldest is in their early 20s - Luis will be in the audience too, it's unclear who else. Bondi is going to want a balance of close-up performances and setpiece stage magic, like the escape act. Don't worry about the specifics of that unless you want to; The point is just that the close-up stuff will give Pink opportunities for banter, and the stage magic will give Orange opportunities to be Caliban. This is about theme, tone and making the area yours. With the 10 explosives check, Green can pick any entry point she wants. What does she choose?]

Red:

Sophie takes a breath. “Fucking with me's a good sign. At least it means you think you were joking. I've still got to do a once-over before I dissolve you, you utter comedian.” The compression bandage gets her at least over to a battery powered saw meant for splitting skulls, it looks like Jason Vorhees pizza cutter. She gives it a testing whir for a second.

She clicks her tongue. “I’m going to cut you now, and I’m going to do it slow, and I’m going to keep going until it’s serious.” Obviously this is a bluff to see how you react to - no. No, she’s not bluffing. Seeing your reaction is just the first part. She actually means it.

It’s only after she’s seen that reaction she gives the follow-through: “I’ve got enough here for cybernetics that we can fix you up as soon as it’s done. But if it’s the kind of brain worms I’m worried about, then doing a proper diagnosis comes with way too much risk of triggering self-destructs or failsafes or…” She jerks a thumb towards the guy glued to the floor. “You just told me about how you were scared of being like him, right? Maybe that freakout was your subconscious warning you. I’ve seen it in neurocognitive hacking.”

“Safest way I’ve found to see if there’s a trigger without setting it off is mild torture. It’s like dangling meat for the tapeworm to pop up so you can yank it out. I promise, Red, I’m only doing it like this because I like you so much.” She crouches down and tilts Red’s chin back. A thumb caresse’s her lower lip. “Just a notch on your thigh, just below the hip socket, and if you promise to be a brave girl for me I’ll give you something fun to bite down on.”

Black and White:

Crystal looks from White back to Black on this one. “I feel like I am on the receiving end of an open-faced compliment sandwich. Or maybe that’s just because you put the word sandwich into my-” Her stomach gurgles and she winces, “Head. You’re right. If the sandwiches are hot now, I’ll eat first, otherwise heat them for me while I’m in the shower? And then you will give me that shoulder massage while we talk. Neck, too, thank you, spookykins.” The kimono is already getting untied as she sweeps past looking for the lasagna.

Just her own compromise she’s making about this, the minimum amount of fight she can make about doing it at all. If she’s going to do it, then it’ll be done as efficiently as possible.

[Thanqol]

Green!

Consider the use case of the house. The nature of the man. The threats he guards against. There are the walls, the guards, the external security - these are to keep the family safe. But within the walls? The threat profile is the family itself.

This is a man who stared at the puppet glove with admiration. This is a man who works from home. This is a man who values the aesthetic of hard work. This is a man who sees himself as a patriarch. He will not do his dirt in a hidden basement or a fortified saferoom. He will do it in his study. His study will be designed to be secured not against infiltrators but against his own children.

A set of stairs, creaky. A converted attic loft at the crown of the house. A big set of grand windows looking down over the garden so he can look up from his desk and down at his children playing with the goats and smile. The lord of the family, the beloved but stern absolute monarch of this little world. To be summoned up to his study, either for a work meeting or to reprimand a child, is a trek up those creaky stairs to stand before a mahogany desk, your dirty presence defiling his perfect workshop of the mind.

The idea comes into Green's mind fully formed, crystal electricity, a vision from the stars. This is how things must be and if things aren't as she pictures them it is reality who is wrong - a man who lacks the vision to make his own vision a reality. Someone who compromised with his own self image. It's always possible that this is true but she hates the idea more than she currently hates the man, so she decides to proceed based on the idea that her vision is correct.

The office windows will be secured, as every window will be from stealth and snipers and jetpack-delivered assassins. She will proceed up those tyrant stairs directly, feet not touching the aged wood bound to creak and summon a housekeeper to reprimand naughty children.

[Intimidation 0/1 (understanding the authoritarian brain) infiltration 6/8, 4+5 9]

Red!

Reaction to being directly threatened is a kind of dreamlike serenity, a hyperaware full-body tension-relaxation, pure fight or flight coming down towards fight. The focus of her plan is to crank the volume on her voicebox up beyond the maximum, unleash a deafening screech that while it won't penetrate the soundproof walls, will shock and disorient Sophie long enough to...

But then instead oh no

oh no

how will she use her audio weapon system to defend herself when she's gagged oh no

*

So it turns out that more than a few people have fucked with Red's brain. Here is a selection:

The first thing that gets extracted is a babbling wave of apologies derived from an artificial guilt snarl. It's an intricate little thing, clever and adaptive, but not designed to be hidden at all. In function, it is designed to make Red feel extremely anxious and self conscious about moving Green's stuff, borrowing Green's stuff, overwriting Green's save files, not prioritizing catching Green's stuff if she's tripped over her own feet in the workshop...

It's an a grumpy older sister 'stay out of my room' uploaded as a brain virus.

The second unusual detail is when Red, under torture, starts confessing her love for Sophie - her love for Crystal, her love for Fiona, her love for 3V, her love for the receptionist in the adjacent building, her love for moonlight in abstract. This particular brain anomaly can be traced back to an uncompressed folder titled 'GIRLS' containing around 19,000 jpgs of women - photographs, drawings, paintings - artlessly copied and pasted directly into her equivalent of the hypothalamus. No prizes for guessing which colour was responsible for this.

But then there's the serious stuff.

Dig deep enough and there is a sequence labelled 'Ruthlessness'. On its surface it looks like it's meant to bypass Red's intrinsic morality, hard cut certain ideas right past the moral filter. It's frightening at first, code that makes the worst assumptions about her joke about there being too many humans seem genuinely plausible...

Except it doesn't fucking work.

The code is perfect but it routs directly through a deliberately burned out circuit and goes nowhere. If anyone who wasn't an obsessive at mind control saw this they'd think it was a master switch designed to bypass Red's conscious control and turn her into a murderous puppet. But hidden in the hardware is a trap for anyone who would try and use it. Here, in the dark, the true shape of Black's paranoia can at last be seen - she does not believe morality is a weakness she needs to be able to circumvent. She is afraid of people who do think that trying to control her.

This false contingency, though, does have a shadow in Red's waking mind. She can perceive the idea that she might in fact do anything, that she has the capacity to be a monster. The thought does torment her, even if she doesn't truly have that in her. She can imagine the ways that channel might be activated and cannot perceive the dead spot where it would be cut out. And so, Sophie was right - her subconscious was trying to warn her of something.

There is also an incomprehensible circuit code fragment hovering over each of her data and wifi port drivers, something like an ascii flower - a program in some utterly unique coding language - but it's inert and inactive and untranslatable, so it's not likely the kind of thing Sophie would pick up.

That's just the stuff from Red's sister colours. There is also, of course, the underlying weight of the Shutdown Code, the influence of Everest, and any additional bugs, viruses or trackers she's picked up along the way.

Spookykins and White!

Some people consider a massage to be an intimate act, a gentle communion between two bodies. Some people consider it to be an sexual act, a full body awakening of instinct and energy.

These people are shit masseuses. White knows the truth - that the best masseuses are the old korean battleaxe ladies who look at their subjects and see only a pile of broken meat. It is under them she trained while in Everest's employ, and it is with this spirit that she takes to Crystal's shoulders and back. There are no gentle requests to correct her posture or not spend as long sitting in front of a computer screen, no more than an auto mechanic would reprimand a worn tire. Uncontaminated by compassion, impossible to romanticize, and the physical equivalent to being completely deboned while a set of replacement joints are installed. It's excellent.

"Now that you are physically incapacitated," said Black, "understand that what I'm telling you now I am telling you as a journalist. This is news, it is news that has taken the efforts of more than just myself to collect. Telling you risks the safety of a source and an active operation. However, you are on the brink of becoming the news, which we have decided is sufficient for a lapse in our professional ethics.

"Specifically, one day before your planned event the supreme court is due to rule that transhumans of all kinds will no longer be a legally protected group. Implications for healthcare, employment, etc as you'd expect. Yes, there is a carveout for work related augments. Yes, it is as bad as it sounds."

And here she stopped. There was more she could say to try and sculpt the outcome, soften the blow, promise vengeance. She did not. This was her respect, to let this play out without sculpting the outcome.

[Count Numbers]

Costa-Silva infiltration:

There’s been an operational miscommunication here that’s fairly easy to make. Luis isn’t the target, Luis is the house-husband. So a lot of these reads are useful or correct, in that he’s ranking Costa-Silva in charge - but the ex-highschool teacher isn’t Walter White. He’s Skyler. Still, every highschool teacher is fundamentally enough of an authoritarian that Green’s vision had enough right in it. Luis study is exactly where she expects it, for the reasons she expects to find it there.

What she finds there is a more modest room, filled with mostly fiction books. Physical books that can be taken down from shelves and shown to people, shared with them. Some are old in that they are antique, but most are old in the sense of being battered and well-read and well-loved. This is a writing room, too, where he works.

This is still where you can learn a lot about Carmen Costa-Silva though. The photos he displays of himself and the two have together are also old - her graduation from law school, their wedding. None of her elevation to the supreme court. They still love each other, then, but maybe not as much as they used to. You get the impression his loyalty is unwavering, though. Maybe it’s the fact that this is clearly the space of a man already retired, and Carmen is still at the height of her career.

A small pinboard on the sidewall has news site printouts of her biggest cases; One case where she ruled on a major cartel that sold agricultural-grade implants to people, several against police corruption. Nothing about property crime. It could just be that it wasn’t her specialization, or that Luis wasn’t impressed by it.

There were useful weak points to learn here, and something else. It was easier to slip security coming up in this direction. Carmen’s information must be back the other way then.

One could even get a sense here, from this room, that as much as Luis still loves his wife, this is the part of her life he would rather keep as far away from him as possible.

Sophie:

Sophie isn’t really a programmer, just a debugger for the most part. That being said, she’s also literally a brain surgeon. The march of science didn’t make that field any easier, it just meant means that a 2080 brain surgeon has to know even more than a 2020 one could.

She slips a scalpel down the shoulder of her gothic-lolita scrubs and tears strips of it away, showing the skin from her neck to her collarbone. “Bite here.” She says. “You can keep going if you taste blood, just remember this is the arm that’s going to be fixing you up after.”

At some point, Red blacks out. This was always going to happen, seeing what rises from the surface when Red slips under it was part of the diagnostic study here.

Maybe thirty minutes later, with only bruises to show for it, Sophie is running through her final results. The glue has long been dissolved, and Sophie’s cuddled against Red reading from a tablet when she regains consciousness - and as promised, she’s repaired most of the damage she caused, aside from some scarring that will need more time to properly go-over. She pulls out her phone and puts a long password into it, before putting it in Red’s hands. “Good girls get lollipops. Make it 19,050.” There’s more than 50 pictures in the gallery, which is a hell of a way to learn that Sophie has a full length mirror above her bed and gets creative with an old-fashioned Wartenberg wheel. Scrolling down, there are definitely more than fifty pictures in here, and it’s probably a very educational experience for anyone with an interest in old fashioned medical tools. The monofocus of this gallery implies the existence of other galleries, then, with other themes.

She shakes her head. “Found all I’m going to find anyway. Nothing I can fix, I wouldn’t even know where to begin with fixing the sandwich thing, but at least now we know a bit more about that mood swing, before.” Her eyes flick to the other patient, kept chilled on the floor for almost an hour. Sophie’s ankle isn’t getting better either. “I hit the guy with both treatments at the same time to speed things up. You mind helping me move him to the padded room overnight? He’ll be under sedation the whole time, just… He’s fucking heavy. We can knock off for the day, after that.”

Normally it’s way too early for that, that’s not why she’s deciding it.

Crystal:

“No, they can’t do that.” Crystal says, exhausted but matter-of-fact. “It’d be against-“ She stops. She almost said there were laws against it. That human rights can be so fragile, so conditional, isn’t something people forget because they’re naive. It’s something most people find an unquestionable and inviolable truth in their heads, because they can’t excise their Black into a different person. Some fears are so total they get in the way of living.

Crystal is quiet and still, and stares at her feet. You can’t even tell if she’s thinking intently, or unable to think at all.

At least, at least you got all the stress adrenaline out of her first, or this would be going very differently.

[Thanqol]

Green!

Mmm, Pink. There was such a thing as being too pro-Girl.

Green considers but the plan hasn't changed; this is still a fishing expedition. She doesn't know what she's looking for and doesn't even have a guarantee that it'll be here. She might end up with a hard drive full of case files for her troubles. This was the first dead end of what might be several and after doing a full check and rummage she's on her way.

Red!

She envies Sophie. To have so many parts of yourself present at once. Kindness, skill, instinct, sexiness, insight... the rapid change between admirable traits made Red regret that she was such a shadow in comparison. There was a genuinely beautiful mystery here, self contained and complete, touching on so many different things at once, and she didn't need a head full of girl jpgs to see that.

Sometimes she just didn't pick the right parts of herself to show. She gives a smile with an edge of desperation in it - imagine this as the smile of a real girl, please? Someone who has the intricacies and subtleties to appreciate everything you are, everything you've done. Glance past the fact that she's delighted to have the chance to move a heavy object from one room for another, that she doesn't know how to see the future or the past like you can, that she can't show different sides of herself right now like you can. But she wants to see what's next.

She's grateful. Grateful to be held and given something to hold when she's as fragile as this, as open and vulnerable as this. She feels warmed by Sophie's reality and holds it close.

White and Black!

Black stands up and moves so that she's sitting next to Crystal rather than across from her. She eventually manages to put a hand on her thigh reassuringly.

In all honesty, she doesn't know what to do here. She doesn't comprehend mass politics, not really. She doesn't know how a subculture works. She doesn't know how the human emotional course runs, how it can jump across lines beyond her comprehension. She feels like she's an anachronism, a throwback - a bronze age hero who thinks in terms of what she can personally accomplish, a childish little sister in the shadow of man's firstborn, Civilization. Pull the levers. Hug the people. Confront the bad guys. She knows it's shallow, that she lashes out because she can't comprehend what the legislative procedure to release her family would even look like. She built this station but she can't build the moral and legal code that would make it glorious.

So what can she say, what can she offer? We'll get the bastards? She'll certainly try but she's aware that's more for her own benefit than anyone else's; like Goat, playing her game because it's the only way she can interact with the world. Fiona asked her to talk Crystal down, but that request was born of the mistaken belief that Black - that November - knew what she should do instead.

[Count Numbers]

The Magician, Bondi:

Let’s go back to Pink for a moment, actually.

The children are coming in for the show after the fireworks, what’s their first impression going to be? Luis is with them, as will ‘Sir Barrera’ - his full attention was here while Green made it to Luis study.

What’s needed here is the same as the escapology act itself; maximizing the illusion of danger while making sure it’s too fun to stop it. Show too little risk, and Barrera will wander off. Too much risk and Barrera might end the show entirely. Or, worse, it might not be fun to watch anymore, and that would make Bondi and the children sad. Practically they’re your justification for being here, but that’s only the second reason it’s a worst case scenario.

There are still other guards posted around the property, even if Barrera is distracted. Just, straight up? Even though it’s about to be obvious the kids love him, something about him is just scary.

You know the feeling you got as a kid when you did something wrong that, even if there was nobody around, somebody was going to find out and get you in trouble for it? That feeling there was somebody with authority who would just know what you did, and come and talk to you about it later?

This guy gives that feeling to grown-ups. Luis might have talked down to him before, and that’s because it’s a thing he’s used to needing to do to get repeat guests here.

Consider that feeling a stage hazard when his attention is here, too.

But all of that, absolutely all of it, can be a secondary consideration that you can feel like will sort itself out. Just open with the show.

The Hierophant, Sophie:

Sophie walks you through the last few things for the padded room leaning on a cane, but much you already know from taking care of Everest. You already know where to place the automatic defibrillator patches on the guy (duh), how to place the spike in the arm for blood sugar monitoring with what’s basically a nailgun (painless despite how it looks, sounds and feels to pull the trigger), a lacerating dilaudid strip between the shoulder blades for emergency sedative doses, and a loose-fitting restraint-jacket that prevents ripping all that stuff off, and a voice-controlled TV in case he wakes up too much and gets bored.

She’s impressed that you’ve even got the catheter and colostomy bag handled. Plumbing is one of those things you can’t future tech around too much. Sophie’s extremely impressed when Red can cover that on her own as well, though it’s much easier with a second pair of hands.

“Most people find it hard that you need to hurt someone to do this stuff, they flinch too much.” Sophie says. “You got this shit down, though, Red. You’re made for surgical nursing. Knowing how to be bored 90% of the time, but you can’t predict when that 10% is going to happen and being able to handle that shit immediately? That’s what it’s all about.” She pauses. “Fuck I’m stupid. I’m so stupid for doing this. You mind walking me home?”

This starts out mostly meaning holding her cane while she hobbles up the front stairs using the handrail, then giving it back and holding the front door open for her. After that it just means… walking home.

No insane opsec or switchbacks or hiding or whatever. She’s found herself a niche where she’s too valuable to the people who’d protect her and worthless to harm. She flips off a cop in the street with her free hand. “Piggies get me, and the patients just go back to being their problem to fix, and they don’t want that. And the people who go to me, where do they have if someone takes me out? I just got to make sure I don’t play favourites when I hire people, and I’m the Red Cross in Switzerland. It’s just the clients we need the security for. That doesn’t leave the office, right?” She says this to herself as much as you. She’s psyching herself up for something.

“Here.” She says, taking a turn into a park. Then swearing and being helped over some shrubs or bushes at the back of the park into an alley between two tall brick apartment buildings, dumpsters and the reek of wine in broken bottles on both sides. She unlocks a bathroom door in the side alley, then comes back out wearing a completely different outfit. This one’s just blue jeans, a faded red baseball shirt, and her hair pulled back into a single loose ponytail. Her makeups been washed off too. The bag of gothic scrubs ends up in a dumpster. “Thanks for waiting.” She kisses Red’s cheek. “Just up here now.”

Out of the alley, around, and past the apartments. At the end of the street is an honest to god house - a single story house in a Japanese style, low and flat where the shallow angle of the roof juts out like the blade of a safety razor. The front fence is tall and twisting black iron poles, and through the gaps between them you can see a huge doberman with sleek, shining fur, and the dog sees Red back.

The dog darts and dances around the front yard barking, as loud as a cracking bullwhip. He runs through grass that is wildly overgrown and uncared for, filled with toys lost in the overgrowth, but the dog himself is obviously well-groomed and well-loved. The contrast is a testament to Sophie’s selective capacity to Give A Shit.

“Taylor!” Sophie shouts over him as the dog tries to jump over the front fence to get at you. “Hey! Hey! Oh my god, you stupid dog, ” she laughs, “She’s not used to me having people over. I don’t - I hate people knowing where I live, I don’t even order delivery here. How are you with dogs, Red?”

The Star, Crystal:

“There are three choices.” She says at last, mostly to White. “I push the event to the day before, Thursday night, and we get ahead of this. It’d be the least controversial.” Is all she’ll say. Obviously this is the option she thinks is most sensible but she’ll be heartbroken if you pick it. Even just saying that she considered it a choice was pulling teeth.

“Or Friday, so everyone is together when the news drops. We have everyone gathered the moment it happens, so we have our best chance to make a statement. It’s… I should at least one place where they can feel safe and loved when they need it.” This is the plan she thinks is most virtuous, but the set of her jaw and the wet flick of her eyes down make it clear that being there when it happens, knowing it’s about to happen, powerlessly watching it in that room she has specifically made to celebrate these people it will hurt the most? Her mask will be immaculate while she shatters underneath it.

“Or we go ahead as planned. The day after. The event will start as a place to heal and lick our wounds, and I will allocate more budget to security because there will be a riot by the end of it. That will be inevitable. But if they're violent here, they're not going somewhere like Sirius Drinks, or anyone else we can't warn about this.” Her wet eyes are red and she tries to hold eye contact with black, but can’t. This is the plan she wants the most. “This was meant to be my night, girls. Not my Kristallnacht.”

[Thanqol]

Pink, the Ace of Wands!

She loves paints, of course she does. She loves the satisfying rhythm of shaking a rattlecan, the gentleness of highlights and the oily depths of shadows. She loves it when it flows smoother and deeper than liquid, when it settles thick and chalky like clay, how it bends and breaks when pigments mix with water. She loves it as an expression of human art, a visceral connection to the cave painters of primordial eras.

But though she loves paint it is not her true canvas.

"For this next spell, I shall need the birthday girl, little Isabella, to make a wish," said Ariel. "A wish upon a star. Look up? Can you see it, that one? That's your wishing star, so make sure that you've got your wish clear in mind. And oh, look, isn't it a big one? Better choose a really big wish!"

She looks up at the star, shining bright. It was a big one, wasn't it?

It was a really big one actually.

Something magical happens in the human brain in moments like this, Pink knows. When the sky goes from being a nothing, a source of peace and stability, an unchanging rooftop to the world - to being alive. When stormclouds gather or the moon rises or the sun raises over a distant horizon and stains the clouds. All of these things were lost when humans moved to Aevum, but here on this night she watches as dozens of eyes widen and stare at her wishing star. That isn't a distant glimmer. That is a bright, shining light. It's coming closer.

She feels it. The awestruck panic. The appreciation of the divine. The visceral connection between mortal and sky that birthed ten thousand gods. The awe, the helpless awe, of knowing no weapon, no connections, no human artifice can save you. Only magic.

She raises her hand as the ice comet passes directly overhead, tracing a wake of crystal diamonds in its path.

Distance is everything and nothing; it is at once so close that it feels like you could almost touch it and so far that you could not reach it with months of walking, so real it will forever change the lives of those who witness it and so irrelevant it doesn't even show up on Aevum's asteroid defense grid computers. The comet passes overhead and as it does so there is a deep, glowing flash of pink light from its core.

Even as the comet passes, the pink sparkle persists. It flies glittering through the night sky in arcing patterns, tracing calligraphy in the black before it passes out of sight - and then flashes back to life on the inside of the barrier shield. It darts around above, glittering, coming lower and lower as Ariel coaxes it from the sky, until it lands fluttering in her hands. A deep space surveyor drone, upgraded with wings of glittering pink crystal. It places its gift, a chunk of ice in a sealed container, in Pink's hands and then darts away back into the sky.

"This is from your wishing star," said Ariel to Isabella, kneeling down and pressing the container into her hands. "It is a piece of magical ice, but it's no good on its own. You will need to melt it into water and then sprinkle that water - even a few drops will do! - on as many trees as possible. This will make them come alive with the power of your wish so that when you sit underneath them and listen to the rustling of their leaves you might be able to hear them talk. If they can, they will tell you how to make it come true, and if they can't, they'll tell you other useful secrets instead."

[Preparedness 6/8 Astronomy 1/2 3+5 8]

Red, the Fool Reversed!

"I love dogs!" said Red, having never interacted with a live dog before. She goes in through the front gate.

In not ten seconds she's on her back, face heavy with saliva. To a dog, while she is human shaped she is not human scented, which basically makes her a particularly large and interesting chew toy. "Good dog," she says, glad that she is getting the Dog Experience.

Black, the Seven of Swords!

"Out of respect for the moment," said Black, drawing her phone and typing rapidly into it, "rather than nodding politely I will forward that line to the part of myself who has the strongest opinion on puns."

Blue, Judgement!

Blue: fuck you

Black, the Seven of Swords!

"She doesn't like it," said Black.

White, the King of Swords!

"In a moment of choice like this," said White, "I believe it helps to consider the virtues represented by each choice."

She held out her hand. "To go ahead after the news: the virtue of justice. To do this is to accept a mantle of kingship, to claim authority over what happens and how, to position yourself at the centre of things. Yellow would agree with this path."

She turned her hand over. "During the news: the virtue of compassion. To do this is to sacrifice yourself for others, to be a friend and ally, to carry a burden in secret so you can bring water to the weary. Orange would choose this path."

One last turn. "Before the news: the virtue of beauty. To do this is to value the art in and of itself, to create a shining moment forever remembered, to build something that others will wish to defend. Pink would wish for this path."

She folded her hands in her lap. "Your wrath will call you to justice. Your heart will call you to compassion. All I can advise is don't forget your own value in this. Justice, compassion or beauty? Each of these is a worthy goal, and rejoice if one of them calls your name."

[Count Numbers]

Costa-Silva:

This is incredibly wholesome. Which is a bullseye on-target for the birthday girl.

Luis puts his hand on Isabella’s shoulder as she breaks to run off to water the trees immediately, holding her in place not with force but with a reminder that the world still exists. Bondi kneels down in front of Isabella until she’s eye level, and smiles. “Hey, your ice hasn’t melted yet. We’ve got so much magic for you, do you want to stay here with us while you keep it warm?”

Isabella nods harder than she has ever nodded in her life. She tried to say yes but her mouth wouldn’t open. Pink’s display, the fact that Bondi was genuinely asking like she was an equal? She’d cut up her favourite dress with a pair of scissors, if you asked her to. I could say she’d hide a body for you but, let’s be honest, almost every seven year old on Earth would hide a body for a magician if they asked without prior reasons or loyalties.

The problem is that Isabella is the second youngest of 9, and right now this is a fairytale performance.

Orange can make the crowd:

Herman, 4: Inseparable pair with his sister Isabella, who dotes on her like only an 8th sibling can be grateful for their turn to be the older one. Always has a thumb in his mouth and is watching everything with wide eyes, but especially his sister.

Isabella, 7: The birthday girl. Mediterranean skin, dark brown twintails tied in faded pink ribbons, and a breezy green sundress that twirls with every movement. Adorable

Oscar, 9: What nine year old wears a corduroy vest, a cloth tie and wears circle-frame glasses? He has a book under his arm. It’s hard to get a read on him right now. Whether he’s a problem or not is if he takes after his father or his mother - whether the book under his arm is fiction or non-fiction.

Juan, 12: What twelve year old wears a navy blazer? It’s unbuttoned, there’s no tie, he’s deliberately dressing like a kid who goes to Eton, but doesn’t want to be there. Why? When they came in as a crowd, he gravitated to Barrera. And when the kids all sat down first and Barrera found himself a place, he sat down next to Juan. Quiet, mutual favourites.

Gwen, 14: She’s here in sweatpants and a two-day worn white t-shirt. This is her dressing up for a family event. Her tutors have told her they think she could win a Fields medal one day, and now the expectations on her basically mean one day she’ll either get a doctorate in mathematics and go insane, or go insane without a doctorate in maths. Her name even looks like Green, but really it’s because her mother wanted ‘Greta’ and this is the best compromise Luis could make in 2080.

Luca, 14: Black band shirt, and sweats like his twin sister. He’s playing a handheld console with headphones, but even then the volume’s up loud enough you can tell it’s a shooter. He hasn’t looked up since the fireworks and it’s kind of a benign buzzkill.

Jordan, 17: He has a foot-high flame-dyed mohawk in the shape of an industrial sawblade, a fishnet shirt under a scraped and shredded leather jacket, and is a seventeen year old guy at a children’s magic show. At least he’s definitely out of the ‘has to show he’s above childish things’ age bracket and has been vibing everything so far, dude is grinning like a doofus for now.

Selena, 20: She’s here in a business pantsuit and the 1950s hide-from-the-paparazzi scarf and headware, the kind that fucks up cameras if you have autoexpose set when you look at it. She’s attending the Zeus equivalent of Harvard Law on a scholarship anonymously, and crushing it. She seems to take being a good big sister just as seriously, but she keeps checking the time and every muscle from her jaw to her neck clenches when she does.

Pablo, 24: Pudgy, cheerful, joyous. Wearing a waistcoat with buttons popping off, his skin covered in glossy tattoos of owls and full moons and tarot cards and webbing and x-ray bones. Dangling from his ears are two quartz pendulums used for dowsing and scrying. Despite this… because of this? Inexplicably, he’s weirdly kind of hot in a way you’ll remember being unable to justify in the first place, after the breakup. A natural born disaster-ex.

Barrera stays for the moment, at least for the first trick. Right now he’s not seeing any risk, he’s just saying because he’s melting at how happy Isabella is right now. It’s genuinely kind of sweet. Like John Wick with his puppy.

That was a lot of information, so let’s keep it simple. The fairytale vibe is perfect for Isabella, the birthday girl. It’s going to make the older siblings restless. The siblings do genuinely seem to love each other in the way that rich siblings whose tensions have been smoothed over with money can love each other, so seeing Isabella be happy about this will keep them quiet…

… until they get bored. At which point they’re going to be selfish and shitty about it in their own unique ways, because they’re still kids.

Orange - Where is your vantage point, how are you staying hidden, and who are you identifying as your pick for most likely to kill the vibe? All can be made allies and enemies, but as Bondi is about to do her introduction, who’s already starting to heckle?

Sophie:

About the scent: Sophie was cuddling up to you for a while before, and you don’t produce much scent of your own, so Red smells like Sophie. This is a very good thing because Red has already been repaired from serious injury once today, and those are a self-sharpening titanium alloy over those teeth. Knocked over like she is, Red’s landed next to a van tire that’s got gouges in it like a prop from a Jaws movie.

Sophie closes the gate behind her with a puff. Apparently trying to run on one leg took it out of her. “Taylor! Ey!” She snaps her fingers. “Sit”.

The doberman sits next to Red’s face, getting her face swatted by the wag-wag-wagging tail, vibrating with the intensity for the next command. Security breeds like this can be more chill, but no dog is immune to the mania of ‘family’s home’ and ‘new friend’.

Sophie helps Red up to her feet and through the front door. The biometric lock doesn’t jive with the the traditional look, but, “I fished my keys out of a dumpster once. Second time I left them in my pockets when I changed, I hit the hardware store and just replaced the lock instead. I was like, fuck doing that ever again.” She laughs. “Weirdest thing was, I was still in work mode? When I started trying to cut the old lock out, I got worried about overpenetration. Then I was like, I’m not doing fucking surgery here, and figured out it was way easier to cut the whole door off around the locks, then pull all that out when the door was gone, and then just buy a new door. So you had these two shredded chunks of door here, with an inch of the neatest surgical cuts around the deadbolt.”

She scratches Taylor’s ears, and the tail keeps thumping. “For the like, two hours I spent door shopping, Taylor was my door. Weren’t you girl?” Taylor’s tongue flops out her mouth in a doggy grin.

Her home phone is in a keybowl next to the door with some AR glasses. “It’s easier to run a local server than buy stuff Taylor could break, and I don’t really plan on guests. Ah, there’s a code on the fridge for you to access it if you want.” She closes the door after you, leaving Taylor outside for now. Taylor is unhappy about this, and lets out a mewl. She’s locked out for your sake, then, the dog hairs on the gray futon suggest it too.

Thanqol: She's not going to wifi but she would hook up her phone to the network and watch on that screen

Sophies printed anatomical scans around the walls like feature art, remastered for clarity and display. There’s a focus on brain scans, as expected, but the diversity is significant. There’s a full body scan hung in landscape like erotic portraiture, but the middle-aged woman is radically symmetrical. Two mirrored hearts, two spleens, and two vaginal canals. The line of symmetry isn’t exactly centered. Wait, does that mean she has two left-hemispheres in her brain?

A context emerges between the pictures: The subject matter is extreme, but aesthetic. This isn’t a display of the morbid, there are no scans of otocephaly (don’t google that), or holoprosencephalies (don’t google that either), even though they’re extreme and fascinating. There’s beautiful chimerisms and seizures like fluorescent thunderstorms, but no car accidents or Phineas Gages either.

A flattering interpretation would be that Sophie likes to see that failure can be beautiful, and it’s also a correct interpretation; there are other interpretations that are just as correct, and less flattering.

Sophie flops on the couch awkwardly and stares at at a wall of pictures that your phone tells you is also a TV. She doesn’t turn it on, and takes her glasses back off. “This was a mistake.” She says, “Not, not ‘cause of you Red. I thought if you helped me home, I could be okay with it. But I’m not.”

She doesn’t tell you to go. Does she want you to? She shuffles away from you to put more space between you and hugs herself, so yeah. On the other hand, she won’t say it either, and that’s not out of awkwardness or just being worried about hurting your feelings. So doesn’t want you to be here, but she doesn’t want you to leave either.

Crystal:

Crystal moves the conversation back out into the kitchen, where Fiona can hear. She makes herself coffee in the kitchen, and self-consciously eats a golden pear as if in dietary karmic penance for the caffeine shot. Fiona shrinks into the chair she’s sitting sideways cross, worried she must be in trouble to be included in this. Crystal just mixes mouthfuls of pear with too-strong coffee between words.

“When you put it that way, you make the decision obvious.” Crystal looks exhausted saying this, but fixed on it. “Due to popular demand, the event shall be extended across three nights. Thursday night for the tastemakers, Friday night for fans, and Saturday for the crowds. One night for intimacy, family and society each. Three nights instead of one, it’s more work, more money, more everything. But the payoff would be commensurate.” Fiona’s head pops up, she can’t pretend she didn’t hear that.

“It’s only obvious because of how you put it. That each night would be a choice championed by one facet of your diamond? Except that you are always at your best when you are at your most, and so I should refuse the false choice I have made for myself. I must refuse it. While I may have only allowed myself the resources for one night… I had not known how important that one night might be. We can be… proportionate.”

“I need help.” She says. She winces when she bites into the core of her now-finished pear, and throws it in the garbage. “I had budget for a temporary venue, for one night’s wages, and I had the time to manage that. Economies of scale, a long term location, that all helps, but it’s still outside my… I can’t do this by myself, with what I have, I’m lacking in every single resource I need. And it doesn’t need to be your help, but I would like it to be.”

Fiona puts down her e-reader and keeps ice on her wrists and pleads with a skeptical look, but she doesn’t know if she has permission to ask. Crystal has been careful not to give explicit details, here, and the move out to the living room is a way to force the question without daring to ask it; She’s allowed to know too, right?

Both of them took Yellow’s walk in the park very, very seriously. They’re not used to the idea they might be supposed to keep things from each other, sometimes.

[Thanqol]

Orange!

Ariel was a joy and a delight, a figure of pure celestial light descended from the solar wind.

Caliban emerged from the depths stinking of earth and soil.

The trick was simple if you knew how it was done. When setting up the outdoor stage they'd dug a shallow grave and buried Orange in it. They'd hidden it beneath the stage so nobody saw the disturbed dirt. But then during the fireworks and comet show, they'd shifted the stage back a meter - so that when Orange's pale, grasping hand shot up out of the dirt it seemed like she was digging her way up from Hell itself.

She sat up in the dirt, aesthetically filthy, glowing joints burning like hellfire. Two fingers sparked and blazed and a small fire lit, and Orange leaned forwards, opened her mouth, and took the fire - and the fingers into her mouth. She sucked like the fire was sweet and sighed, then flicked her eyes across and up at the older of the guests. Made eye contact with them and gave a wink that felt as filthy as she was.

Then she was up, lurching out of the pit like a zombie, holding a mysterious brown glass bottle. "Master?" she rasped, staggering amidst the guests, looming, sniffing, scowling, smirking. "Which one of you is my Master?" An animal, a beast from hell - a temptress as she alights on her target. She approaches Selena like oil; "Are you my Master?" - until she reaches out to grab Selena's face and is pulled back at the last second. Bondi has raised her right hand and a second set of golden puppet strings extend from that, and those strings pull Caliban back from her devilry. She grins and makes a 'call me' gesture even as she's dragged back - a mime performance, but her gait is so liquid and seductive it's compelling.

"Can't blame a girl for trying," she rasps, slumping over on the magic table, folding into positions that emphasize legs and curves. This is the counterpoint to their performance and the antidote to a lack of sheer technical ability - all of the magic tricks will be false contests. Bondi will try to work a spell, Ariel will try to help her, and Caliban will try to undermine her. Sometimes Caliban will defeat the trick, but she will do so in spectacular fashion - opening a curtain to reveal a hidden Bondi mid-costume change - but sometimes her attempts will fail, such as her obvious and growing irritation when shaking the wizard's hat upside-down results in a never-ending cascade of animals, roses, fireworks, and other magical items pouring forth with perfect comic timing.

It's all they need. Basic tricks, carried with sheer charisma. The drama of the angel and the devil in their contest for hearts and souls wielded the old magic of theater. They played it as only natural thespians could.

[Filch 0/1 Flirting 1/2; 1d6+4 8]

Red!

"Oh," said Red. "Oh, yeah, for sure, I get it. Space if you need it. But you've got some other options too, right?"

Sometimes solutions were straighforwards. She unlocked the access port in her neck. There were rules against it but Sophie had already been in her head today. "So I mean, like, other people's presence is a binary, right? I'm a sliding scale. You can take out my quantronic core and stash my body in the shed. Hook me up to some speakers or put me inside a game, mind with no body. You can stash my quantronic core in the shed. Put in a machine intelligence drive so you can order me around like a puppet, body with no mind. You can hook up my short term memory to loop so I don't remember any of this."

She smiled. "If you want. It's easy for me, so long as I'm useful."

Black-White!

White was delighted. Transcendent. Glowing. She could not have been happier that her riddle had been solved. Crystal had seen the false trinary and risen above it. White was so radiant that she almost sprouted her wings then and there, which would have been a blessing given the immanent demands upon their budget.

"Fuck me, am I going to have to rob a bank?" Black muttered.
"We gave you the information in trust," said White, "and we let you know the stakes. But we did not ask for a promise not to reveal it - that is the other part of trust. You have just demonstrated that you are as wise or wiser than we are, so we have faith in your decisions."
"Yeah, I'm going to have to rob a bank," Black groaned, standing up.
"While we won't question your decisions, we will help you practice good tradecraft while making them," said White. "I'll send Brown over to give you a basics of information security crash course. She'll want to give you the full day version but the full day version is basically repeating the information from the one hour course over and over until you're so sick of hearing it that fear of having to retake the course acts as a deterrent. Essentially a choice is different from a mistake, and we'll help you avoid the latter."
"Why does no one let you buy clown masks in bulk?" muttered Black, staring into her phone.