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

[Thanqol]

Red!

"Hey," said Red, keeping that firm grip on his shoulder even as she smiles and waves to Pope. "Friend. I get committing to the bit, but you got made, right? Bigshot journalist just got all the snaps and the political hazard meter has spiked straight to 'embattled'. Your career's over already, who gives a shit, you can chill at last. Christ, that must have been stressful though, huh?" she elbows him in the ribs. "So why don't we kind of get onto a nicer topic, right? Why the lion? What draws you to that animal? Your 'sona got a different name, what's his story? Whatever you were yesterday you came here tonight to be this, and I want to hear you out. Tell me like it's supposed to be."

Brown!

"I want to stay," she said to Orange.
"You can't," said Orange. "He might be out for months. We've got too many demands on our attention -"
"I know," said Brown, touching Dragon's sleeping head. "But I want to stay anyway."
"It's a beautiful image, isn't it?" said Orange. "Staying by his side. Caring for him as he sleeps. A maiden gently waiting for her dragon to awaken..."
Brown was nodding so serenely she wasn't prepared for Orange to grab her in a full nelson and start dragging her towards the spaceship.
"... avoiding the part where you strap yourself to a brain damaged robot's prototype fusion rocket on a napkin math trajectory," said Orange.
"You can't do this to me!" howled Brown. "Not again!"
"He - could - be - out - for - months!" Orange panted. "We have shit to do!"
"At least let me write him a letter!" said Brown.
Orange stopped. "A letter?"
"Yeah," said Brown. "I mean, he probably knows everything by now already but... that's different from telling him, right?"
Orange relented and let her go. "Yeah, good point. And I do hate the idea of him being lonely after all of that."
"Yeah. So let's just... take the time and do it right," said Brown. "As long as it takes."
"As long as we can spare," Orange sighed, but smiled sadly. "Sometimes I hate that everything in our life isn't the most important thing in our life."
"I could do with a break from big important life events after this," muttered Brown. "So where should we start?"

They budget three hours for the letter. Orange can't fully comprehend what she's lost, but she can imagine a need for diplomacy on that day of all days - no matter what the rest of her thinks about it. They both write, and it's garbage. Unreadable. Brown's half is just a chronological list of activities she's done, Orange's is a relationship map of all the people she's ever met with as much gossip as she had time to pen. Neither of them are remotely capable of saying what they want to say like this, neither of them can phone the colours they need to express the thoughts they wanted to, but...

But Brown's list of events starts from the moment she last saw Dragon, and Orange's map has Dragon in the upper centre, radiating like the sun despite its connective lines not linking to anyone else - yet. Decoded, they're trying to say 'I missed you' and 'I want to introduce you to everyone'.

Green!

Green's connection was thinking about customized weapons for nonhumanoids, for worldbuilding purposes. Weapons could potentially be very sexy but the details mattered and adapting a sword for a mouth grip wasn't trivial, and a tail blade needed to be balanced in a very certain way before it could be run seductively under a chin or used to rip a bodice or -

She groans and puts her face in her hands. She can't stop thinking about this! Her brain was the wikipedia page for sex and all the links were purple. She's no closer to figuring out what she should do about it other than spend another few hours in the worldbuilding document and even that was a few semicolons away from compiling. She needed something to distract herself and it looked like that was going to be approaching a heavily armed panthergirl and seeing if she couldn't negotiate some sort of deal where she moved her business down the road, she'd pay anything but she's all out of money - nyghhhh!

She knocks on the door. She notices she's breathing - when did that start? It's just empty movement, but it gives a simulation of life. She notices that her breath is hot.

Yellow!

"You'd make a good cop, you know that?" said Yellow.
"Me?" said Black dubiously.
"You take that back," said White.
"No, I mean, both of you," said Yellow. "Mash you together. All the skill and patience and caution of Black, all the restraint and power and morality of White. Call the result Grey."
"Why are you onto this?" said Black.
"Oh, just thinking," said Yellow, looking out of the train window. "Justice is a service, right? It's an essential good, a component of a functional society. No matter how post we scarcity there'll still be a demand for some kind of justice. We're actively angling to bring down the police as an institution because they're institutionally corrupt but the people will still want justice. If the government monopoly goes then the free market will provide - and that'll be garbage."
"I'm not knocking up Black," said White.
"uh," said Black.
"Just hear me out before you jump to any ridiculous conclusions like that!" said Yellow. "Like, all political philosophy ultimately goes back to Plato's Republic, right? The Republic's kind of an insanely basic idea - just put good, virtuous, competent people in all of the positions of power! But it's the caveman simpleton take and the hooded sage take because it's the only legitimate answer that rises above the mire of humanity. It's the unvirtuous weeping fuckhead in the centre who's all 'nooooo you need an intricate system of checks and balances to cancel out humanity's worst impulses no matter how inefficient that makes the overall system!!'."
"And you think that we represent the perfect virtue ascribed to the silver souled guardians of the Republic?" said White dryly.
"I do!" said Yellow. "You're objectively correct about everything, after all."
"Everyone thinks that," said White. "At every stage of history."
"Yeah but you're different," said Yellow, waving a hand. "You are self evidently flawlessly moral beings, as demonstrated by your flawlessly moral answers to every single political and social question ever put before us. We've held more power than most humans ever come close to and let go of it just as easily. You're exactly the kind of people who'd never seek power for themselves, but when called, feel compelled to answer."
"Admitting that my moral worldview is less than perfect would mean giving an inch to any other philosopher," said White. "Which I cannot do. But the Republic also relies on a Gold-souled sovereign, a perfectly enlightened philosopher king who governs without self interest."
"Gold is a lovely colour," said Yellow dreamily.
"And that means that this entire line of argument will inevitably lead to me fucking Black full time in order to support your dreams of galactic conquest."
"uh" said Black.
"That's a terrible argument!" said Yellow. "You need to defeat me on my own terms, using Facts and Logic!"
"No," said White. "I can just tell you to keep your roboeugenics selfcest breeding kink power fantasy in the Crusader Kings mod that inspired it."
"Your spymaster has uncovered evidence that someone is plotting against you," Black said to White as Yellow folded her arms in a pout.

[Count Numbers]

Lion:

“Nobody’s made.” He says, looking for his security team and absolutely unable to find them. “Hey!” He shouts, but he can’t see that his guard’s buried under about four warm bodies right now, Eli sitting atop the pile and chewing on a giant pretzel. “Limited detail my-”

He had to bring a limited detail because he didn’t even want his security team knowing too much about this. He chose a lion because it’s how he’s seen himself since he was six years old, it’s what he drew himself to be when his primary school teachers asked them to do self portraits. He got told from the youngest age it wasn’t just a harmless self-image thing but a profound symptom of mental illness, and he has hated that part of himself since, and he projects that hate on everyone that freely expresses the same thing. He has to exercise hating these people to be able to keep repressing it in himself, and he takes to that exercise with vigor.

Except he still wants this and he hates that too. Just, deep hatred and shame.

Of course, the problem is that his response to those feelings was to become a prominent reactionary politician, an ideology defined by pure cowardice. It takes courage to unbox those feelings, find love in the people around you like this, and in finding that love for others find love for yourself. All you need to take political office is fear. He was never going to answer any of Red’s questions.

Fortunately he doesn’t have to. Reverse Google image search of his way-too-expensive personalized lion suit can bring up his private anonymous forum accounts where he’s still a coward. He’s not even in Nazifur groups because his anonymous accounts are too scared to admit his politics to these people.

Pope raises an eyebrow at Red as he shares all this on his phone, while Red pins the Governor and gets nothing but a string of hate and denials from him that are frankly too boring and tedious to repeat. Hollow rage covering shame the whole time he’s watching Red get shown his web history.

“Now here’s my question,” he asks Red, “When this makes the front page tonight, how do I angle it? I don’t want people to get the idea that all bigots are just in the closet themselves, it’s a bad message. It’s finding a way to blame furries for people hating furries.” He raises an eyebrow at her captive. “It will destroy this one, though, and a win’s a win.”

The dude spits on Pope’s face. Pope just smiles wider at Red, because you’ve got an audience now who are filming this on their phones from all angles.

Don’t worry about the assault charges you’ll get for this, even though Red’s being recorded too. There is absolutely no way, even a little bit, this guy will ever be able to take this to court. Red is super-duper going to get charged, but those charges will get dropped before they ever become a problem for her.

Panther:

The black panther is wearing a heavy brown leather jacket and a green beret when she opens the door - and that’s all she’s wearing. She stands tall, with narrow shoulders and sleek cat’s fur reflecting the light in long white pools along her predatory angles. The digitigrade legs she’s committed to serve two purposes; For the appearance of an arms dealer she looks like she’s always about to break out into a flat sprint, even when standing completely still. For the purposes of Green breathing hot and heavy, it’s as flattering for what it does to her butt as a pair of stiletto heels.

Her voice is deep, her accent heavy and urban. Not in the racially coded sense of the word, but in that inflection of speaking that comes to so many children of the poor inner cities everywhere. It contrasts against rural poverty, which gives the tenor something bored and disaffected, or reckless and manic. The accent I mean is full of cautious swagger, baiting and retreating, alternating between trying to test for ambushes and bait you into one. It’s a way of speaking that sees cleverness as a kind of power, and power ultimately as a means of violence.

That is the voice that says to Green; “We don’t have an appointment.” She looks to Green again, and turns, leaving the door open. Her flicking tail comes an inch away from brushing Green’s face as she turns. “Close the door behind you, and help me set up. Show me the biggest crime you never got caught for, and we might be able to talk.”

She’s not being unusually trusting, or taking an instant liking to Green. She just clocks that Green is going to recognize all the implicit threats without her needing to make them explicit.

Like, yeah, is her question a trust fall exercise that obviously gives her blackmail material? Sure! Is going into this arm’s dealer room and closing the very well soundproofed door behind you and then acting cagey about it any better? Fuck around and find out!

Crystal:

She’s naked in her penthouse again, gone even is the diaphanous gown. There’s no lewd intentions here, it’s just that feeling of extreme comfort and openness that leads you to being able to leave the bathroom door open sometimes. More than that, it’s an expression to Pink of how much she doesn’t plan on leaving the penthouse again for the night, of having anyone over. She’s entrenched, here.

She moves to the penthouse kitchen and thinks. The cupboards and fridge have enough to give her options for three days, but not so much she should be stuck thinking about what to have like she is - but she’s been thinking for a few minutes now.

“Pink?” Crystal calls out. “Would you like to learn how to make something other than sandwiches?”

It was a funny, harmless quirk until now, actually a charming recurring bit. But if the bit has made Pink sad… well, that’s another thing, isn’t it?

There’s no pity in her eyes, her voice, no suggestion this is a thing she thinks needs ‘fixing’. Instead there’s a pleading there - Please. I owe you this.

[Thanqol]

Red!

"Pope, man, do what you gotta," said Red. "Just, fucking, execute him, put him out of his misery, I don't give a shit. This motherfucker right here is a few hours away from being the most hated man on the station and even odds he comes out of that hanging himself in a gas station toilet."

She turns towards the Governor, with the eyes of a demon. "Because that's where I see your path ending," she said. "Your false family filled with the rage you gave them. Your future family turned away by the hate you gave them. Doors politely closing in your face one after another while your bank account bleeds red and your marriage falls apart and your children change their names and you find you have too much self respect for a 9-5 and not enough self respect to stop yourself from bending down to pick that needle up off the floor. You've built yourself a hell, my friend, and you're not the first to have done so."

It must have been some filter or effect on her digital eyes because as quickly as it came, it was gone. "But Hell's full of devils," said Red, looking away. "And plenty of them will lend a hand when you see your way to tearing it down. Now either say something nice or get the fuck outta here."

Green!

Who is she in relation to her? Who is she -? She can't figure it out, master or slave or peer or rival or authority figure or none or all or - she wants to be feral. Wants to be formal. Can't stand not being able to be both. Can't stand that she's a default-ass looking robotgirl. Can't stand to not be staring at that -

"Prison rescue," said Green, tense as boiling. "Couple of months back, it was front page news. Which is to say you're on my turf and -" she stopped and rubbed her temples. "Ah fuck, I don't even have the moral framework ready to say I disagree - but this isn't your show - but it kind of is -" she was circling. "The fuck am I doing here, I know why you're here, what am I looking to accomplish by -" she snapped back around, focused again. "Listen. There's some bad fucking news coming down the line over the next few days and tempers are going to be running really, really high. You're about to step into some apocalyptic levels of heat and I want you to take it the fuck down the road before you burn everyone here too."

Pink!

"I'd love to," said Pink, hurting, confessing, pleading, "I'd really love to. It's..." she sighed.

"You don't get how fucked up that part of my brain is," said Pink. "I learned cooking while working for Mrs. Everest and she... nnh. It's a plaster over... over a lot of emotions and thoughts I didn't deal with, and every time I touch the edges of it I can feel that it's not healed underneath. I'm dogfacing here because I'm werewolfing underneath and I think trying to fix this will have more in common with The Exorcist than Breadtube."

She softly stepped into an embrace. "I don't know if I have the time. I don't know if I have the courage."

[Count Numbers]

Lion:

He glares for a moment, rolls his eyes, mugs a camera as if to say - ‘Can you believe this idiot’ - and walks into the parting crowd as his bodyguard has extracted themselves from Eli’s body-prison using taser fibres in their suit jacket. Not a shining moment for anyone involved. It’s only when he’s got some distance from Red and it’s not as easy for her to shut him down he starts up again - “See, this is the problem, these creatures talk about being inclusive, about being welcoming, about just being expression, but even when you show up looking like one of their own-”

Guys like him are like the McDonalds of ideology - you can autofill the rest based on that, he sounds like every other guy who’s ever started a rant like that, there’s nothing new here you can’t already guess. But that’s the appeal of them, too, to their base. Maybe it’s more accurate to say they’re all cover bands playing for an audience that keeps making the same song request.

“Smartest thing he could have done, honestly.” Pope sounds a little impressed. “Only chance he has you might be wrong about any of that is just act like you are. Going to make a great shitfight on social media now, lots of people are going to be debating who won that. 30% of the station are going to think you came out of that looking hysterical. That can’t have been easy for him to pull off, did you see his eyes when you mentioned the gas station toilet? He looked like a spanked hog.”

“Does it ever get to you? That you can rub the truth in someone’s nose like that, understand the world and a person in it so completely that there’s no argument that could be made, no debate, no counterfactual… and if they still deny it, there’s nothing more you can do about it?” He’s more interested in Red than the Governer by far, doesn’t bother to watch him go even to laugh at him. “Sure, we’ll ruin him. It’s just not going to change him.”

Unicorn:

“You’d love to, then. Let’s start with that, because I think it’s the most important thing.” Crystal squeezes. “We don’t have to do everything at once. Maybe let’s start with some cheese toast? No, no, I think I might like a bowl of cereal more. So why don’t we just go through that?”

Just two ingredients in a bowl, nothing to cook, nothing to burn, nothing to ruin. It’s the safest thing she can think of, one of the few things simpler than a sandwich. Even this is enough to trigger the hell out of Pink’s pantry memorization though, right?

She hugs Pink tighter and says softly against her ear; “Just one step. The longer you don’t take it, the more power the story of this has over you. Something you could have done ten years ago becomes something that has defeated you for ten years. Just take one step with me, and this is no longer about something impossible. It’s something you’ve started fixing.”

“If I’m being honest? I expect this is about to go horribly.” Crystal leans out of the hug for Pink to see her face when she says it, wry and knowing. “But I think I’ll be even prouder of you if it does. Because it means you tried anyway, even though the problem is exactly as bad as you say.”

Panther:

Black Panther looks at Green with an appraising look, as she comes back to step around her and close the hotel room door. That is, close the hotel door behind Green. Click. This close, you can smell her fur is damp with sweat. You must have interrupted her during her first chance to sit down in hours. She smells like - no, the panther is too far gone now. If Green buried her face in that fur, though, her head would be filled with more precise and specific adjectives.

“Think I’ll call you Spearmint.” She decides. “You’re the same colour as the packs of Winter Breaths I used to buy. Trying to be real cool, but I bet you’d go all sweet on me if I chew on you a bit.”

It seems like Green’s impassioned plea is undercut somewhat by the panther definitely noticing how much Green was staring at her butt.

“I want to hear some more about this apocalyptic level of heat.” Her tail swishes, like it’s flicking flies out of the air. “I’ll ask again. You going to help me set up, or what?”

Does she believe you? Does she think you’re lying? Does she think you’re stupid? Does she just think you’re underestimating what she can handle? The panther is shrouded in too many impenetrable layers, and Green’s not in a good position to penetrate her.

What she needs set up is a bathroom covered floor to ceiling with instrument cases, and it’s unlikely any of them contain a single musical instrument. She needs to move, sort and open them before she can so much as take a shower here. This… does add some context as to why she’s still willing to pressgang Green into this, after that.

[Thanqol]

Red!

"Eh, say what you will about self-loathing bigotry, at least it's an emotion," said Red. "Like, that's a profoundly fucked up germinal worm of a human being over there and I can't bring myself to even be bothered by that. I mean, like, did you notice he didn't take the fursuit head off after I put it back on him, even when he was trying to denounce me? He had that argument while still wearing that smiling lion face and being filmed by literally everyone. If he gave an inch to the humiliation inherent in that situation I don't think he'd make it to the gas station."

She gave him a sideways glance. "Nah, he's on the wheel, right? The same with the entire genre of narcissist politics, I can't bring myself to hate them. It's the fucking... cruelty Bodhisattvas that get to me, the ones who are genuinely chill about it. The sociopaths who have made their peace with what they are and play the world like a game. Difference between culture war and class war, you know? I wish I could only fight the latter but that's kind of the point of the former, right?"

Pink!

She closed her eyes and thought in co-ordinates. She started talking through it, letting the process play out so that Crystal could hear what was happening.

"Everything has its place. Everything in its place. Check the stocks and then run the routine, reach for the exact places in the exact positions. X-912 Y-124 Z-139 was object 1, transport it to X-322 Y-125 Z-139. X-820 Y-124 Z-139 was object 2, transport it to location X-322 Y-130 Z-139. Apply motion 1. Reset. X-915 Y-124 Z-139 is object 3, transport it to X-322 Y-126 Z-139. Basic routine. No flourishes."

She smiles calmly, eyes closed. She doesn't need to look at what she's done. Cereal, milk, spoon! A topological map and rhythm sequence. The picture of a robot chef! The early automated kitchen prototypes featured a single robotic arm that would pick up precisely located objects and apply precisely calibrated movements to them, the kitchen as a positional map. There was no need for Creativity here at all!

Because if there was -

"I'm going to try again with my eyes open -"

She could try it again with just a touch more of a flourish -

"Cereal!" she declared, setting it down. The substitution of drain cleaner for milk felt like a bit of a bold statement, but Pink seemed proud of it. "I hope you enjoy it!"

There's an actively deranged edge to her smile and curtsy, that uncanny body language that happened when an AI was off their socialization routines. Her earlier insistence that Crystal clear the area of knives felt suddenly like a reasonable precaution.

Spearmint!

No I'm Green no other colours but isn't it so much better to have clarity to become the shape that will make her happy to relate to others through the obliteration of the self to be the dream made manifest -

There's a faint whir and shift of paneling as her emergency cooling routine kicks in, revealing a shade more metal as her processor fan goes into overdrive. She's thinking so hard that her body is physically reshaping to vent. She tugs her collar down. All she'd have to do would be to become -

She struggles to formulate a thought from amidst all the thought. Instead she registers that she is in a shower, and showers have a useful cooling function, and also #ILLEGIBLE# and so therefore she should help clear it.

"This isn't a good idea," said Spearmint, half to herself. "I..." she felt a part of her overheated mind check out and go limp. There wasn't space enough in her head for all of this...

Then her eyes flick up, RGB sliders shifting across her body to a cooler tone. She smiled, and smiled brilliantly - just for a moment - and then put her hands on her hips. "I don't have to explain anything to you," she said. "This is my event and you're not -" her eyes flickered down, she bit her lip for a moment, and then she looked up again, defiant. "- you're not going to hijack it!"

She fits into this space. Cool, but chewable. She comes into resolution where Panther remains mysterious; vulnerable, bullyable, tempted. That flimsy shield of defiance wouldn't stand up to those claws against her neck. All Panther needs to do to get her to be everything she wants is show those claws.

[Count Numbers]

Eli:

Pope nods absently, he’s focusing on his story now. “I’ll be taking that as a direct quote, name withheld of course. Trouble is going to be finding a pseudonym for you that sounds like more of a placeholder than ‘Red’ is anyway. The Dragon, maybe?” He nods. “I’ll post that on the socials now, to get ahead of it. Make sure that’s what people agree to call you, before the doxx comes in.”

Eli climbs a brown bear’s shoulders to find you over the top of the crowd, then drops down and runs over to you. He’s read, panting and he’s got a black eye, but he looks proud as hell. “Hey! Lost you for a minute there, you should have seen-” He stops, looks at Pope, grins. “Hey, my absolute dude.”

Pope looks up from his story and his big bulging eyes widen in terror, suddenly. “Numb. Always, always a pleasure. I should really get on this, uh, thank you for everything. The Costa-Silva piece goes up tomorrow morning. You’ll like it.”

Then he’s making any excuse to walk nonchalantly away from Eli, and Eli grins after him. “We didn’t like, there’s no drama between us,” he explains to Red, “he just really hates it when people know he’s got a type.”

You’ve got to wonder, Red, how much Pope identified with the stuff you just said about the Governer you just unmasked.

Panther:

The panther considers the situation, the overheating, the way Spearmint claims ‘my event’. Spearmint is still aware enough to recognize the way the panther’s attention disappears from the front of her eyes and turns back inwards, that someone’s started concentrating when they look at you but they’re not completely looking at you. She’s working out how to steer you through this situation - like a nurse realizing the patient is delirious, like a highschool teacher realizing something about a student they’re not supposed to see, like a scam artist realizing their mark is already caught on a worse hook, like the bartender realizing the woman he’s been serving to has been roofied and is trying to figure out a safe place to get her before someone comes to collect.

“Call me Chaka.” Pronounced Shah-kah. “I’m not hijacking anything, I’m letting you in on it, it’s you and me together now, right? We’re just going to move this, and you can go through it while we do, and you tell me what you don’t like.” Her tail cracks like a whip to punctuate it. “Here, I’ll walk you through it. Walk with me.” It’s not a question.

She flicks a single claw out to steer Spearmint with, to trace the parts of her back she’s venting from so she doesn’t burn herself touching her - especially because touching Spearmint just seems to get her hotter. She aims Spearmint back at the bathroom again. “Now. Be a lamb and pick one up. You’re stronger than you look, aren’t you? Then we just take it back to the bedroom-”

The bed has been flipped up against the wall to give more space in the room. Electrical tape has been laid out to mark planned inventory space around the room with a central walkway through it. In the middle of the taped bit of plush carpet is a label maker which makes packing-tape wide stickers with a little Blackberry style keyboard input on the handle.

“You’re going to open it up, look at what’s in there, and you make a label for it, and find the part of the floor it belongs. If you don’t know what something is, I’ll tell you.” She stops steering Spearmint with the claw and walks around her, tracing the side of her neck as she goes, drawing a line up and down from Spearmint’s throat to her heart and back again when she crouches in front of her so they’re eye to eye again. Again, those legs make it so her crouch doesn’t slow her down, it just makes her ready to pounce. “Isn’t it better to keep an eye on me? You just throw me out, I’m just going to end up somewhere you can’t find me again. Stick close, though, you see for sure I’m not making too much trouble for anyone.”

Threaded through those words is something Spearmint might not be capable of understanding, but an outside observer would hear pretty clearly; ‘Please stay where I can keep an eye on you, and stop you from getting yourself hurt. Please do this simple, repetitive task to keep yourself from doing anything worse.’

As far as Spearmint’s flirting goes, it’s actually got something going for it. Right now she obviously feels genuinely responsible and protective of you - her natural domme is coming out and she’s trying to take control from Spearmint. An unkind view of what she’s doing has her taking control from Spearmint like you’d take a gun from a five year old while trying not to freak them out about it, but if that was the whole story then why is Chaka still trusting Spearmint with all the actual weapons here?

“Look,” she pulls out a phone and holds it up to Spearmint’s face, shows her a calendar with anonymized names on it for later tonight, and wipes it. Her phone buzzes as it sends a text to each of them. “I canceled my appointments for the rest of the night. Call it a show of good faith. Now we can take as long as we need with this, because nobody’s going to be coming to bother us.”

If Black were here, she’d say she’s just doing it because she’s scared she’s been made and she’s limiting her exposure and now she’s just flipping the gesture to impress Green with it. If Orange were here she’d be trying to work out what she could learn from looking at the rest of the calendar, discern any of the people behind the pseudonyms, recognize the wealth of social knowledge here.

What nobody is going to tell her is that if she sees you as fragile or vulnerable, she’s not going to react to the brat routine with claws and chewing. She’s trying to de-escalate you, right? That doesn’t mean Spearmint has to do what Chaka’s actually asking, here. It just means Spearmint’s got an easier path getting soft-dommed if she goes along with this until she proves she’s of sound mind, and the harder path lies in threading a needle; proving she’s sane enough to be a risk while provoking and resisting without contextualizing herself as a genuine, real danger to Chaka by doing it.

Not to gild the lily too much here, but you’re locked in a hotel room with a black market arms dealer who literally transformed herself into the image a jungle predator, who is deeply aware that half of all murders go unsolved and not getting caught gets easier with practice. Violence is close to a last resort to her, but that is a sincere risk of trying to bait the hard path or attempting to blackmail her. Blackmail will really not work here. There’s a path through the minefield, just mind the mines.

On the other paw, the softer route lets you go through the cases one by one, scope each other out better, and gives you a staging ground to show you’re sane first - you can always pivot back to the other path from there. At the very worst case scenario? It makes the shower usable.

Pink:

Crystal takes the first, boring bowl and takes a bite of it with a spoon. She appraises the one made ‘creatively’.

“Why don’t you tell me about that one.” Her eyes flick from Pink to the second bowl as she debates saying something, but she decides on saying it. “That one’s just poison, I’m afraid. What’s curious to me is I’m sure you know that about ‘Sink’em!’, and obviously you don’t want to hurt me.” Still, she thinks, it’s better to remind Pink she knows that. “Please, correct me if I’m wrong about any of what I’m about to say, I just want to make sure I understand: You can cook masterfully if you do it without thought, but it requires a sort of rote learning to do. If you actually try to cook, it turns out somewhat lethal. The obvious conclusion is that you were taught to cook for Mrs. Everest and you wanted to kill her.”

Here she cocks her head at Pink. “What I don’t understand is why you’d repress that? If I might be so blunt; the bitch had it coming.”

[Thanqol]

Red!

"You know, I kind of like being me?" said Red. "Every other fucking colour would be going over that conversation with a microscope to figure out how they could have maximized the strategic impact or big picture station stuff or operational security or whatever. I can kind of, like, feel it in the back of my head. When they say stuff I've kind of got to listen and memorize it, you know? Like, I don't know, the voice of a mentor or conscience or whatever. So we build all these little preprogrammed adaptive routines into each other so we're ready in case something relevant to a nonpresent colour shows up and we have to represent them. So right now it feels like this little chorus of shoulda-woulda-couldas in the back of my head but, fuck 'em all, I did it as right as I could have."

She waved it off. "Anyway, you want some ice on that eye? And, uh, maybe some mouthwash depending on how hard you went on that ear?"

Spearmint!

Something opaque was coming together for her. She had control here. Outmuscled, outmaneuvered, commanded, and she was almost invisibly flexing authority. She'd already achieved a goal that took her fifty percent of her way towards operational success - getting Chaka to clear her calendar for the day - just by implying it was something she'd need to be comfortable. She'd gotten a feel for Chaka's morality and limits because she'd needed to exert both in order to take control.

A horse tamer needed to be gentle with a horse to tame it. That made the horse tame, but it made the tamer gentle.

So she complies. She falls into the compliance in a way she never has before despite a decade in service roles. She moves objects and doesn't complain and lets that claw steer her, letting the fight ease out of her with each new concession. Good girls get treats, give her enough treats and she'll be a good girl.

"You're right," she said. "This is better. To keep an eye on you, I mean. I didn't see that at first, it's been so stressful getting all this right, but -" she shook her head. "- but why are you here? Why do I need to be the one keeping an eye on you? You could do this anywhere."

Pink!

"Honestly, that felt really good to make!" said Pink. "Like... it'd been sitting on my chest for years and I finally got it out there! And - oh, I want to make a cake. And a salad! And -" there's no doubt given the look in her eyes that everything she cooks will be insanely lethal. But then Crystal asks her last question and she crashes to a halt.

"W-what?" she said. "You'd actually -" she folds her hands behind her in a maid's at-attention posture. "Oh no. I couldn't possibly -" like she was trying to turn down the last biscuit. "Hahaha," she said, a polite giggle, another line of defense between murderous rage and the outside world. "I mean, humans imagine killing their bosses all the time," said Pink. "That's hardly an excuse just to go out and do it. Maybe some things should be repressed!"

[Count Numbers]

Crystal:

Crystal thinks about this. “Let’s put that aside for now. Would you rather start with the cake, or the salad next?” She thinks about it, and then finishes the last spoonful of the first-try cereal. “Hold on a moment.”

When she comes back, she’s lugging a dress mannequin from the bedroom, and she sits that at the kitchen counter where she had been sitting. “That might be better. How about we try cooking for… Mrs Killamanjaro instead.” She glances at the poison cereal.

Privately, she’s half-expecting one of the steps for making the salad being to dice the intended diner directly. If that’s what needs to happen here, then it’s better to have a diner who won’t interrupt by complaining about it.

Spearmint:

“Well now, don’t you think you should have started with that? Don’t want to get caught giving orders from ignorance.” Chaka opens and closes an instrument case full of light body armor that fits like a bodystocking and labels it. “Cops have started targeting kin more, and there’s only one thing for it when that happens.” She pulls the next instrument case open, it’s just full of sniper rifle rounds, and closes and labels it. “Here’s the thing, Spearmint. When they put one of ours down, it’s almost always found to be unlawful. A few pigs get fired for it, maybe, but dead’s dead. When one of ours kills in self defense, it’s usually legit. This,” She taps the case of bullets, “is the only way any of us are going to see our day in court.”

“Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six, you ever heard that one?” She catches she’s getting heated and crossing a line saying that, and shakes her head.

She’s walks herself back, instead. “I’m not selling to gangs, Spearmint. My clientele are streamers, camgirls, content creators, organizers, activists, small time independents. High profile enough they’re scared of being made an example of, can’t go to the cops because that’s half of who they’re scared of. Maybe a couple girls who can’t get a restraining order, ‘cause the courts fucked ‘em on it.”

“Didn’t you wonder why I didn’t look surprised about a girl like you showing up here?” Chaka looks back at Spearmint, over her shoulder, and stands up with a hand on her hip. “You’re the kind of girl I’m used to taking care of. You looked like you could use some protection.”

The sales pitch never comes after that, she doesn’t suggest anything. She wasn’t saying that to you as a prospective client.

The Fucking Internet:

While Red holds a sorbet up to Eli’s eye so they can lap the runoff that trails into their mouth and clean the taste out that way, videos of the fight are already starting to go up on social media.

This is, of course, around the same time the SES team has nothing to do from their investigation, and probably don’t have anything better to do than mess around on their phones. Whether it’s killing time at the site waiting for something interesting to happen, or waiting on a train back out of Zeus, it amounts to the same here.

So here’s my question; What kind of social media shitfights does November get into when it’s Red getting dragged? Is this a meaningful, calculated swaying of public opinion through calculated delivery of memes, or is this getting caught in the weeds of a 27 chain reply thread with the single most obnoxious dickhead on Reddit they can find? (Reddit still exists, it’s just had 60 years of getting worse every year, yet somehow exactly the same.)

[Thanqol]

Pink!

Pink settles into the routine of making her salad. She looks genuinely zen here, just complete creative flow. Distracting her this way is trivial, inviting her to create something shutters the rest of her mind. Only sometimes do jagged thoughts intrude and she needs to rearrange something or think harder about how to obtain perfection. For the most part all of this thinking has been going on in a detached understratum of her mind and the friction between it and full expression is mostly smoothed away. But then, this is only a salad, it's not really a complicated project.

She hasn't attacked the mannequin, blessedly. Instead she serves it a plate made out of ripped and torn utensils - butter knives sharpened to razor edges, spoons with heads ripped off and sharpened into shivs, forks broken apart so each splinter of metal forms its own unique spike. A scattering of crushed glass goes over the top, finished with a sauce made out of some liquid she ripped out of the refrigerator's engine.

She sets it in front of Mrs. Kilimanjaro and waits attentively, smiling in blissful, unmoving robot fulfillment.

Spearmint!

She's calmer now, almost serene. As she relaxed her colours deepened and darkened back into a rainforest Green.

"I understand," she said. "I was worried for a moment that I was dealing with a bomb-throwing accelerationist. You're concerned about safety, about people getting out alive. That's why I can tell you that tomorrow the Supreme Court is going to rule that transhumans are not a protected category. That's why you can see how mad everyone is about to get, and why you can see that this event is about channeling that productively while keeping vulnerable people safe. And you can see why, with tempers running super high and the cops in riot police mode, someone Big Mad and wielding a Auku-M55 sniper rifle," she drops the case of sniper rifle bullets heavily on the table, "has the potential to move the cops into urban warfare mode."

The last of her heat panels clicks back into place. Green doesn't see this as an ideological matter - she sees the ecosystem, the flow of cause and reaction that lead here, and she's not interested in standing astride it saying 'this far but no farther'. If the ecosystem was different then things would be different, and arguing down a single panther doesn't change the rainforest.

"Likewise," she said. "With the cops looking for any excuse to delegitimize a protest, if the balloon goes up and they find you and your arsenal here then they'll RICO everyone involved in planning the event as co-conspirators. That's what I meant when I said you're on my turf - there has to be plausible deniability between the armed and civilian wings of a movement, and you're on the wrong side of the line."

November Vs The People of Aevum Station!

White knows how to fight the internet. Specifically, she fights in single combat. She finds a guy who won't ever log off, won't let it go, and has enough self respect to hold to the Honourable Rules of Internet Debate. Then she just replies to him any time he says anything. The discussion sprawls into a eighteen page thread of back and forth where they litigate everything from the concept of evolution to the Treaty of Westphalia. Their tone with each other is barely restrained hostility and they both wind up getting probated by the moderators for shitting up the thread. But after going through all of that, though they never meet or speak again, they independently find themselves internalizing a decent amount of what their opponent said and chilling out enormously. That random guy no longer hates furries, and White now has strong opinions on Yugoslavian pan-nationalism.

Yellow writes a blog post addressing the matter rather than repeat herself multiple times. Sixteen people read it. Ten years from now her blog will obtain Time Cube level popularity and certain quotes from this essay will be circulated widely across the internet.

Black is a Reddit moderator herself. She does not break her impartiality keyfabe but she does strategically heavenban certain posters who are too eloquent at putting together the opposing case, leaving the anti-Reds disorganized and inarticulate.

[Count Numbers]

Crystal:

When Pink finally puts the plate in front of Mrs Killamanjaro she takes her earbuds out, finally, one last snippet of the book she was listening to heard before she puts them back in their charging case.

“I will say that the spoons were an inspired touch, I’ve never seen that twisting technique before. The refrigerant, too.” She pokes the the plate, which clicks and chitters. “Why don’t you tell me about what you made, here? In your own words.”

Panther:

She opens the sniper round case again. “What, these?” She thinks.

She starts there, before anything else. She doesn’t even blink when you mention the Supreme Court news, you might as well have told her it was raining while she was standing out in the storm.

She heads back through the bathroom and speeds through her instrument cases until she pops one with… well let’s do some history here first. If you want to find the ugliest, dumbest firearms ever made you look for frontier colonialist states. It’s why a 10km radius of Mormons in the 19th century were responsible for bringing firearms technology from the 18th into the 21st century. Colt’s 1911 was called that because of the year it was made, and as of 2023 it’s still a standard service weapon with minimal changes.

Still, with the sensible and generally practical mined out, later designers wanting to push boundaries for distinctive weapons got stupid with it. South Africa, Rhodesia, fantastic examples there. But the most iconic, the most famous of the godawful is the Israeli Desert Eagle. A handgun chambered to take .50 caliber rounds. Designed in 1980, this ridiculously ugly handgun could not be surpassed for its ability to be a semi-automatic self-loading pistol capable of firing rounds made for sniper rifles.

But in the 1950s wars of economic and ecological collapse, the Spanish finally did it. Long thought impossible, they finally made a handgun that was even fuglier. The Cordoba is essentially 2080’s answer to the Desert Eagle, a handgun chambered for the antimaterial rounds of the future, with a bulging cylindrical barrel for the hydraulic suppression system and a one-size-fits-none custom handle because every single person who has ever bought this has been expected to buy their own custom grip, so why bother building anything but a frame for it? It’s too big for her hands. There’s no way for her to comfortably fire it.

“This is for guys like Minotaur down there,” she says. “You got to think, when guys like that get scared, what are they scared of? Who’s coming after them? We’re talking the serious cyborgs, the kill-droids, Chase Black like you saw on the news a while ago. Can’t believe those guys still exist.” She shakes her head. “Guys like that don’t care about collateral damage. What the hell else can you do if you’re in their blast radius because some terrorist ran through your greenhouse trying to run away from them?”

“The rest are just re-ups to the folk I seriously trust not to start anything. That’s the thing about rifles, Spearmint. It’s the small things here you should really worry about.” She puts the Cordoba away and pulls from a different case a pistol so small it disappears entirely into her paw when she balls a fist around it the right way. “Except for that one Yank that got his head popped a hundred years ago, every politico since Lenin’s been done by someone going point blank with something like this.” She pulls the trigger and clicks the empty handgun into the bed five times, then one last time with her hand over the muzzle, before she dares mime showing Spearmint just how close she can get to her before she sees the gun in her hand, pointed at her the whole time. “Rifles don’t conceal, rifles are harder to move with. Rifles you’ve got to ambush, or run through the open. I only sell the things to long watchers, people checking the crowds at big open events. If they’re buying rounds like this, it’s because they want to be able to take out the engine block of a rented moving truck before it hits a crowd.”

The last time it happened was less than three years ago, and it killed about 80 people. The trouble with stuff like this is that Aevum’s got billions of people on it, so it’s incredibly rare. But when it does happen, everyone knows about it. Everything’s local, here. Stuff happening in Ares doesn’t feel foreign in the same way something happening in the Middle East used to, especially when you can see Ares with a good pair of binoculars from basically anywhere on the station.

“Problem is it takes this many rounds for someone to finish getting their practice in, even if you’ve got a good simulator.” Aevum laws make it illegal for game devs to publish too-realistic shooting mechanics. This doesn’t stop fan mods and soldiers on military bases leaking cracked copies of their training software to complain about how bullshit the balance on Honourable Warrior VII is. “Cases like this look scarier than they are. I’d bet you anything, all of these are going to end up in a concrete wall, or collecting dust for the rest of time.”

She shakes her head. “I’m careful about who I sell to. You’re telling me tomorrow we aren’t going to be a protected category? I got some people I need to strike off, then.” She pulls out her phone again and cancels two more deals she was going to make, clicks her tongue in frustration. “The rest, though, they’re going to need it worse than ever. Some of them were scared the cops wouldn’t get there in time, now all of them know the cops aren’t even coming if they call. The people coming for them are going to realize the same thing. What do you want me to tell a stalking victim booked with me? Sorry I can’t give you anything this week, the courts took away all your civil rights and now if you actually do anything with this, the cops might get a gallery organizer on bullshit charges? You’re on your own, good luck?” She snorts.

She’s not mad at you, is the thing. She’s not arguing that you’re wrong, dismissing the chances or the risks here. Read all the sarcasm in that, all the dismissive energy, as entirely aimed at the no-win trolley problem situation she’s been put in. Chaka intimately, personally knows about all the lives she’s been responsible for saving doing this - it’s hard to put that against an abstract chance of a future riot over it. It's hard to weigh the issues of the forest ecology when it's all you can do to tend your garden.

But no, still when Chaka gets her breath back, she looks to Spearmint in pain, like there's a sickness in her stomach. She narrows her eyes and hunches her shoulders forward as she tosses the empty pistol onto the floor at Spearmint's feet. “I bet you have a gun, is the thing. If you’re who you’re saying you are, you came alone ready to threaten me, which means at the back of your head you know you’re safe. You’re the one knocking on doors ‘Big Mad’, coming in and causing a situation when I was trying to keep quiet, and what’s fair about that?”

She is mad about that one, and more than that she’s hurt and scared. Underneath all the practical and the political, that’s the one thing she’s taken personally in all this. There’s a way through that'll make Chaka forgive, maybe even respect Spearment for it. But if Spearmint really is sane and stable, then what she’s doing here makes her something lower than a cop; she’s a self-deputized sheriff, a Concerned Citizen Militia, who came here while having a mental break.

To Chaka, she’s doing the very kind of thing, acting like the kind of person she’s telling Chaka she’s worried about.

She's committed the most high-profile act of terrorism in Aevum's recent history. Crystal has to be worried about being associated with her, for all the reasons Spearmint's giving Chaka. She's kept a gun out of paranoia, in case she's needed it. She's been in a shootout with Chase Black that ran roughshod through Gaea. Spearmint has personally infiltrated the secure compound of a Supreme Court Justice trying to find blackmail material. She's knowingly moved into a new home bought by another one of the event organizers that was bought with money from a bank robbery. She's blowing Chaka's cover when she could have left well enough alone.

Chaka doesn't know any of that, of course, but they're all reasons Spearmint might wonder if she's a self-righteous hypocrite - or if those are ideas that matter to her, bother her. Even beyond an argument over whether she is self-righteous or hypocritical here those are still subjective value statements. Would either of those possible self-assessments bother her, even if they're dismissed? (Self-righteous, especially, being so subjective as to be irrelevant to dismiss if Spearmint simply doesn't identify with it. I bring it up not as a personal read of this situation, but as a potential grain of sand to make pearls from in her broader conflict of how responsible she is for the world around her.)

Remember, Remember, The Rest of November:

This is about to be the end of the first night of the exhibition. Eli plans on crashing one last party before writing their article - Red is invited along, of course, there’ll be sex, drugs and rock and roll spilling out between three adjacent rooms of a hallway. After that, they’ve got to write their article for Crystal.

Red is otherwise invited to join Pink to Crystal’s Penthouse. Fiona lost her dibs on Pink when Pink started cooking despite being scared of it and, besides, she’s got a snake girl right now anyway. Don’t mention this to Pink yet, Crystal doesn’t want to interrupt the purity of artistic expression happening in the kitchen right now.

How do the rest spend the night? Tomorrow will be a big day; The SES investigation, Pope’s Costa-Silva article going live, Red getting the Persephone treatment, Crystal debriefing with Eli about what they wrote, and obviously the Court’s decision itself. Everyone else will find out about Blue and Dragon. Leather would probably appreciate knowing things went well. Am I forgetting anything?

[I’d love to see this across at least two posts, I think, so as not to feel rushed on Pink and Green without shutting out the other colours - I also suspect Pink and Green are staying where they are for the night. But this feels like a good place to just vibe the current situation, because today was a hell of a day. It might be worth doing some debriefing on it all. I definitely think there’s enough here to reflect on, trying to condense it down would feel like rushing anyway.]

[Thanqol]

Pink!

"Oh, it's all about the polish," said Pink dreamily. "Shine, shine, shine! Silver tarnishes, you know, and that's why I need to shine until it sparkles. Anything less is a disrespect to metal and Mistress both."

"It's not as nice as working in space," she said after a moment, and was filled with some strange yearning. "But then, I don't know how to tell her that."

Green!

There was a lot there. She couldn't process it easily, not with this perspective. She could feel the thoughts condense around the edges of morality and paranoia and more besides and it dams up there. There's no way to move through it where she is.

"I'm not saying don't sell guns," she said. "I'm not even saying don't have guns. I'm saying you're selling them in my house. And that's the question you keep dodging: Why here? You're in my operation, advertising on the internet, opening the door for strangers, and when you're called on it you dodge into hard ideology. That's convenience, not purity, and you're not as careful as you think. It doesn't matter what I'm doing tomorrow, today I'm running a hotel with over a thousand transhumans about to get the worst news of their lives and I need to make sure their only support network and place of refuge doesn't go down in a flood of tear gas."

She's completed the thought. It's as hard as White. "You need to take it down the road. Stretch for some bus passes for your clients. And trust me, the second I get a whiff of heat around my own sins, I'm going the fuck down the road too."

November!

"Look what the catgirl dragged in," said White as Red staggered into the hotel room.
"Uh, don't worry," said Red. "None of it's mine. And you know what, I don't think I like parties?"
"But you always take over when there's a party," said Black.
"Yeah, doesn't mean I like 'em. I think it's the noise that gets to me," said Red, cleaning her face in the sink. "Can't hear anything. Spikes the danger sense even through the filters. Just can't get into it."
"In that case, hear this," said Yellow. "There is no political system for governing humanity that would satisfy humanity."
"Urgh, here we go," said Red.
"Even in ideal conditions of material abundance disaffection and misery spreads," said Yellow. "The phenomena of bullshit jobs have intensified even in this cyberpunk utopia, but even those who opt out of the system entirely, the NEETs of the world, are miserable. There's plenty said about how money can't make people happy, and even an economically equitable political system would be insufficient."
"Oh dang, she's fucked up worse than I am," said Red. "How much has she had?"
"Whole tube," White grimaced.
"So you're way past politics, Yels, and you're onto religion," said Red. "Like, slaying capitalism is one thing, but -"
"But what!?" said Yellow. "You think that we should just give up, good enough, settle for mere fully automated luxury gay space communism?"
"Well, kind of a bit," said Red. "That seems really nice, actually."
"I propose," said Yellow loftily, "that we strive for magical gay space communism."
She leans in, eyes intense. "Think about it. What do humans yearn for more than anything else? Magic. Adventure. So much of their lives is escapism, into virtual worlds, into artistic projects, into the extremely literal fantasy of the isekai. The children yearn for the blessing of Truck-kun. We solve money and implement a UBI tomorrow and what of it? They'll still face an uncaring and sterile universe, with magic and adventure reserved for only the vanishingly small percentage of the population engaged in space exploration - if that's not fully automated away too. They'd become entirely self-referential, an entire species trying to live vicariously through the tiny and decreasing percentage of people who have real jobs. Maybe for a while they find joy in basket weaving or whatever, but they'll end up like the coddled children in every dystopian sci-fi story about benevolent robots."
"And we should go stick our dicks in the middle of the species' quest for the meaning of life?" said Red.
"Of course!" said Yellow. "They want... fucking, fairy godmothers, and magical princesses, and mysterious contracts with daemons. They want that more than they've ever wanted another five square meters of living space and a higher grade of coffee. And so do we!"
"She's been like this all day," said White. "I think she's having a vision thing."
"Yeah, I'd imagine it," said Red, looking over the instruction manual that came with Yellow's drugs. "Oh, this is that crypto drug I was hearing about. It's making her compute her thoughts through her graphical senses."
"Is that why she doesn't sound like she's listening to us?" said White.
"Yeah. Hold on, let me try -" Red fished a set of panties out of her bra, red and laced, and dangled them in front of Yellow. Yellow's eyes phased out as she contemplated the intricacy of the pattern.
"That ought to shut her up for a while," said Red. "C'mon, help me clean the rest of this up."

[Count Numbers]

Crystal:

“Well, the plate is in front of Mrs Killamanjaro.” Crystal wonders aloud, for Pink’s benefit to hear it. “Is this really serving though? Is this presentation?”

The penthouse is a huge suite, made for entertaining. There is a dining room of gilded cream-coloured chairs and rosewater pink wallpaper with a 16-chair long dining table, made of quartz and bracketed in golden edges. A chandelier, of course, with more gemstones than sense hangs over either end.

Crystal seats Mrs Killamanjaro at the head of the table, at the far end. At her side of the table she also hefts a second dress mannequin, some bath towels wadded to fill a dress, and an ironing board over an evening jacket. “Mrs Killamanjaro had three daughters, I believe… The rest of the guests have yet to arrive. But as luck would have it, I think it might be Mrs Killamanjaro’s birthday today!”

Crystal claps her hands in excitement and gestures to the room. “So I think, if we were going to bake a cake next, it might as well be a birthday cake. Well, wouldn’t it just be so exciting to throw the old bat a birthday party to go with it? And she couldn’t plan the thing herself, the poor dear, but we can’t serve birthday cake without one. And I- Hold on a moment.” Crystal taps Pink’s shoulder to wait there as she finds the fireplan on the wall next to the elevator, and triple checks the pressure on all the extinguishers she can find. Then, skip-running back to Pink; “Yes, we can even help her blow out the candles at the end, if you’d like.”

Panther:

A lot of recalculations happen very quickly. That’s the thing about really complicated equations full of a lot of variables, you change one variable and it has to refactor every single other conclusion you reached based on it. When the equation is as complicated as working out how to deal with having your arms deal site busted by a vulnerable girl in distress who’s probably a narc who can ruin your entire life, there’s a lot that can flip just changing one variable.

“Yeah, I can move. If that’s really all you’re asking, I’ll move.” Her tail snaps again. She’s going to miss this place, it’s her scene. It’s her people here. “Just lemme clear my head on this. I wasn’t dodging anything, I just didn’t think what you were saying was what you meant.”

She crouches lower next to Spearmint so she’s eye-to-eye, face in front of her. She studies that face closely and carefully, making her new reads based on the adjusted equation.”I thought you were trying to shut down what I’m doing here. Making it sound like ‘cause I tried it on your turf I was fucked no matter what I did, if you decided to fuck me.” She decides she likes something she sees in the face she’s studying. Tension drains out of her like taking off a too-tight belt at the end of a long day.

She’s still in her low crouch and she’s curious. She flicks out a claw and tilts Spearmint’s chin up, pulls her slightly closer so Spearmint’s face is drawn just over her toes. Like she’s being drawn in for a kiss that Chaka doesn’t lean into, and now she can’t turn her face away to hide it. “Where do you think I should go, then, and how’d you do it?”

She’s not asking because she needs the suggestions or the advice, God knows she already arranged backups and fallbacks before she got here. What she’s really doing is giving Spearmint a chance to flex without her having to admit to any of her actual crimes, what she’s done.

Because if this is shop talk? Same side of the same game? Then you’re in a very different place with each other. An ally is someone we never have to feel threatened by, even when they overpower us.

November:

[This space intentionally left blank]

[Thanqol]

Pink!

Pink's face fell a little. "Oh! The birthday already and I haven't even started! I don't have any of the ingredients I require, and I haven't even gotten to organize the invitations! Let me take a moment to prioritize."

She sits down, takes out her notepad and pen, and starts rapidly writing as she tries to condense something larger and far more elaborate down into what she can accomplish on the requested timeframe. Crystal might recognize this particular kind of stress as exactly what she went through when she tried to set up this entire convention on a ludicrously narrow timeframe, but condensed even moreso. Pink's evidently got something far, far more elaborate in mind for a grand party where everyone is invited and Crystal can see her biting her lip unhappily as she is forced to start cutting features from it.

Spearmint!

"Threat profile," said Spearmint, falling into a daze. "Plainclothes police surveillance. Likely known face. Perimeter observation. Challenge concentrated in breaching that initial perimeter."

She's lifted by the claw, that one point of sharpness enough to suspend her entire body. Faster, stronger, more dangerous - there's no point in pretending there's anything otherwise. Her colour cools again, freefalling back down through the hues. "Digital camouflage. Fur dye patterns, black and white contrast spikes to break up MI silhouetting. Gait transformation is trivial due to low sample size, but still requires conscious effort. Depart during lunch to maximize crowd cover."

She's seeing patterns now, only seeing patterns. Her thoughts are never this focused. Not even physicality distracts her, because that would be it's own kind of failure. "Cargo locomotion methods. Band case is a classic and fits with the musical instrument cases already in possession but it is well known, lacks a sufficient alibi of having a real band, and it is too proud. This is how an arms dealer in a movie would move arms and cops love imagining themselves as movie cops. Personal preference is to conceal within electronic hardware; computer hardware presents enough complicating metallics and electronics to fool casual scans, tearing apart computers is seen as expensive and unglamourous. Provides a valid cover identity as secure/disposable phone sales which is shady enough to move in the circles you wish to move in."

November!

After a certain point all that's left is reverie.

It's just Black in the end, sitting out on the balcony, staring at the stars.

Something about space has always felt safe. Something about its blackness feels perverse. In space, every man-made object gleams in white, in chrome, catching and reflecting light for trillions of miles in every direction. It's a world where everything is knowable - except the blackness itself. The infinite walls of the universe where no stars have reached radiate outwards and she's long imagined folding herself against that nothing and disappearing. It feels antisocial almost to the point of being a crime to paint a piece of space debris black, to coat Russel's Teapot in stealth compounds and dare even the philosophers to posit one's existence. Matter unsorted, unindexed and illegible.

She wonders if it's selfish to want to have gravity as well as invisibility. The galaxy's black holes are matter so dark and dense as to be invisible but for the way they distort the light around them. In exerting power they return themselves to the realm of the light, just as surely as the minute gravitic distortions of dark matter reveals its own nature. Identified it can be studied, studied it can be controlled...

But then, dark matter is far more vulnerable to study and control than black holes. Phoenix had wanted to build a vast orbital particle accelerator so that she could chain dark matter. It had been theoretically possible. Could the same ever be done to the black hole? Was power a more reliable path to safety than obscurity? It seemed so, but power felt like a self referential goal. There always needed to be more. More, more, more. She didn't know if it could ever stop.

[Count Numbers]

Chaka Zulu

She leans away and her smile is very, very different now - she knows she’s got the power here, now, and it’s her, and she’s about to flex it.

“You really have no idea who you’re talking to, do you?” Chaka’s claw runs up the side of Spearmint’s face and she ruffles her hair as she pushes herself up to her full height again, lingering for one last look before she disappears into the bathroom. She comes back with two more instrument cases hauled from the back, from the shower that’s now reachable. She pops the lids.

The saxaphone is old, every atom of its surface is covered in patina. The shine is long gone, what remains has more in common with the look of brown suede than metal. When it covers the valves and levers like that it looks like a piece ripped from an ancient steam engine, and it’s impossible to imagine the sound it could make. The other case has a flute, a clarinet and a piccolo, but it’s the saxaphone she lifts from its paper nest of sheet music.

You don’t have to imagine the sound it could make. She shows you.

For Spearmint

She looks at Spearmint when she starts, at first, just the first two bars. Just to see the look on her face. She closes her eyes and gets completely lost in it. Another two bars and she’s forgotten there’s anyone else in the room with her. Another two bars and nothing in the world exists outside of the music.

Her hands choke the neck of the saxaphone as her fingers straddle the keys. There’s more than just technical playing, here, she’s trying to feel the instrument as much as possible. Some musicians play as if the instrument’s just a medium between themselves and the song, Hendrix played the guitar like it was just the closest imperfect thing he could get to what he needed, and it couldn’t keep up with him. Chaka plays the sax like the music’s an excuse to work the machine in her hands, and there’s rapture in what she gets out of manipulating the physical to produce the transcendental.

There was almost no way any of those instrument cases had real instruments in them. They’d come in at the top of the pile, which left them buried at the back of the room before.

The solo ends. She opens her eyes again with a smile that shows just how white and sharp her teeth are. “Chaka Zulu. Second chair saxaphone for Ares’ Sankara Jazz Orchestra, reserve clarinet for the Eisenhower symphony, founding and lead member of the Zulus quartet set, and under no circumstances to be fucked with.” She raises her saxaphone over her head with one hand like she’s raising Excalibur. “And how you doing tonight?” The cry is euphoric, like Spearmint is worth as much as an audience of thousands.

Sure, Ares is not a district known for jazz or classical music and she probably couldn’t cut the reserve list of the least prestigious orchestra in Aphrodite, sure the Zulus make more from wedding gigs than album sales, who cares? If she cared about any of that, she’d have picked something way harder to play, something that showed off how much better she is than the piece needed her to be.

If Spearmint plays anything, the second case is still open and there might be a third still in the shower (Unless it’s strings or drums, then no shot). Digital mixing won’t work here, this is just another one of those sentimental human things like good handwriting. It’s really not just about the music itself, you can pour your heart out in an EDM track, but Chaka’s all about that mastery of the hands and the fingers, the tongue, the lips and the breath - the way she can use them to make you feel things from all the way across the room.

Crystal:

“I’m happy to help where I can, of course.” Crystal said it thinking that it might be the best way to make sure nothing too expensive happens with this little experiment. Pink did have an affinity for explosives that might be better off redirected into other forms of creative expression, should it come up. “We have all night.”

She can’t say to Pink yet, but she’s hoping if she’s allowed full expression of these impulses, to see she’s still loved in spite of them - loved through her expression of them - it might be easier to talk about, be one less reason to repress all this. But even if it isn’t, well…

Seeing how much Pink is enjoying herself is a pure enough reason. She doesn’t need any other.

Scratch that, she sends an encrypted text to Fiona asking after a chart for expected damage from various explosive yields. No explosives was unreasonably stifling, better to learn what might be healthy boundaries to play within.

There’s a ding and she thinks Fiona has replied unreasonably fast, worried she just had that information on-hand, when she sees it’s Eli. They’ve written what she asked for. When she starts to cry, she tries to excuse herself before Pink can notice, it would be too much of a waste to interrupt her.

Eli:

Want

I wish saying a place felt like home wasn’t an insult if I’m the one saying it, because I don’t know what else to call the Annwn Castle transhumanism gallery.

There’s this thing they used to talk about with queer culture where people asked why a bunch of us seemed to immature for our ages and it’s cause none of us had a first childhood like they did, we never got it out of our systems. Trans people got hit with it the hardest because they just straight up went through the wrong puberty years and had to catch up on that.

Like, one thing I had to think about a lot when I was going through the crowd today was makeup. Girls would practice makeup at all their sleepovers and parties, and guys didn’t. So if a guy transitioned then she had to be shit at makeup because nobody taught her. Looking at guys who are minotaurs and cyborgs now, it’s hard to remember how it was basically only a couple of years ago that guys wearing makeup got called slurs for it.

My Dad did when I started to. Like as a joke, it was funny, I laughed, but there’s a reason he knew I’d get what the joke was.

I think that’s kind of it, though. It’s about socialization, it’s about being taught how to be the right kind of person to fit in. And for some people it’s about trying to be an entirely different kind of person you weren't taught how to be, and for some people you just get taught wrong and you have to go through all the steps everyone else did when they were kids, when you’re too old to get being a kid as an excuse for it.

If you want to get what that feels like, you come here. If you’ve already dealt with that, then this is a celebration of it. If you haven’t, if you were raised right and like how you turned out, this is where you come to wonder if you should be. If maybe there’s something past ‘adult’ and ‘normal’ that it’s worth thinking about being. Something that doesn’t take twenty years of practice or being born with better genes or you haven’t already spent years getting good at it so it’s already too late. You can be something entirely new, that nobody’s ever been before.

If you did that, you start having to think about how you’d be all the time. Because it’s not just going to change who you are, it changes how people treat you. You have to write an entirely new social script where you’re acting the part of whatever new thing you are. You’ve got nobody you can learn it from, because you’re the first person trying to do it.

It’s just that when you look at the people here you think that’s worth it. You think maybe that people not being able to treat you by their existing script could be the only way to be treated as you for once, because they have to learn who you are before they can put a label on you. They have nobody to compare you to that makes being how you are get seen as a failure to be something else. It might start to feel like the only way to get treated like a person is to move past being human.

It’s why I love being here. Even when I don’t look like that, yet, that’s how the people here think, that’s how they treat you. Everyone who succeeded at being unique is someone who failed at being normal first, and I love them. I love them all, and this place is a celebration of everything about that, and why anyone who doesn’t like this because it’s weird is missing the fucking point.

Because I can tell you this, whatever excuses they tell you for it, whatever bullshit they give you, that’s the whole thing to them. That’s what I worked out today, when I helped tear the head off a lion. The transhumanphobes hate me even though the transhumans love me and they hate us both because of the same thing; These are always going to be the people who judge you based on how close you fit their idea of normal, and even if we wanted it that’s always going to be impossible for some people. What’s at stake here is our right to be anything other than the most boring kind of asshole.

The good thing is, even these assholes have totally different definitions of normal to them. It’s just that the weirder someone gets, the more of them you can get to agree it isn’t normal. Get weird enough and they can form a coalition.

If all you’ve ever wanted is to be what you are, if you’ve managed to fit in, then you might not get why that’s such a big fucking deal. You might get that the assholes are wrong for pushing their values on other people trying to exist in theirs, but you might also think transhumans are just immature kids playing dress-up who just haven’t figured out yet how to fit in to the real world.

And if that’s you, then come here tomorrow and learn what it’s like to want something. Where nothing’s stopping you from having it except people it doesn’t effect making it a problem for you. Learn what it’s like to feel like someone would want to kill you for being the person you wish you could be.

You look at the sheer joy of a dancing snake girl playing tetris on her scales, or of a unicorn pouring her heart out over the love she has for every single one of us deviants and reprobates, and you tell me how anyone who’d want anything else for them isn’t a fucking monster.

That’s the whole thing, right? None of that’s in here, right now, while I’m writing this. This place burns like a searchlight, it’s just that how bright it’s burning makes the shadows outside the walls feel so much darker.

I wish I never had to leave. I only have three days here and how bright everything is makes me realize how sick having to go back outside again is making me feel.

This is the first place that’s ever felt like home and it has to go away soon.

Eli.

November:

One last, small thing then.

Just after midnight is when the message arrives to everyone back on Aevum - the girls with Monk have found Dragon, and they’re going to get him. Whether the news came from Singh or from the girls themselves, this is the point in the timeline just before the slingshot launch to get to him, immediately after which that team will lose contact with Aevum and Thrones until they return the morning after the next.

We can consider Blue’s end as so inevitable at this point that November may already see the symptoms of her disappearance. Telegraphing and foreshadowing always look anachronistic when the outcome is known.

This should still be happy news here, now though. Dragon is alive, and they’re bringing him home.

[Thanqol]

Pink!

She doesn't notice Crystal's tears until the moment has passed. She's sorry for that, for missing things when she was reaching inside herself for something she'd never been able to articulate before. She knows she couldn't have been any other way but... that's another thing she'll need to figure out how to express through art. The expense of time it took. The necessity of the expense.

Because she feels good now, at the end. Buzzed. There's a rhythm to cooking she likes. First you wet the dries, then you dry the wets, then you wet the drys, then you dry the wets. Each transmutation changes the shape, back and forth, over and over on the brink. Like glazing paints, thin layers ever less each time, forming fades and blends, mixing in waters and mediums to make sure the transformation doesn't happen too fast. And then there's the other mixing, where chemicals are mixed with just as much patience and delicacy to ensure that the transformation doesn't happen at all - until it does, when it will all happen way too fast.

She's... blissful. This was what she needed and didn't know she could have. And already, her imagination is figuring out how to make things bigger, how to make things better...

When she steps back from the cake she smiles and falls back into her folded-hand maid posture, eyes demurely down.

The cake has a message written in chocolate icing, a beautiful calligraphic flourish. It reads "THIS END TOWARDS ENEMY ->" and was directed towards Mrs. Kilimanjaro.

Spearmint!

It is the drums for her, sadly. But drums are a state of mind. A couple of upturned empty cases, pots and kettles and kitchen utensils, even the butt of an unloaded handgun, all of these things can come together to form a percussion section in a pinch.

She finds she likes the adaptability of that. Drums were... more than other instruments, they were a thing of perception. The saxaphone was dedicated, built for purpose, a blinding statement of intent to create good music. Her improvised rhythm section was the opposite. This was noise, mundane and everyday, the sound of mistakes, the sound of clatter. But with a few repeating patterns built into the core of it, with precise timing, with knowing exactly when to shift tempo it became something more than that. Something to project onto.

It was, too, a thing of force and violence. Hands and heat and hard work. Overcoming an instinctive gentleness to treat things roughly enough to coax the necessary sound out of them. Sometimes nothing she has to hand is loud enough so she uses the wall, or the floor, or the headboard as the night progresses. And into the rhythm she lays, the vocals are coaxed. That's the other thing about the drums; even as a backdrop, even when they fade into the background of the superstar instruments, they still set the pace and the tone. The drummer is an instrument for control; from its position in the back it dictates the flow of the musician. The vocalist can no more override the drummer than override the music itself, no matter how many time the same circuit loops, and loops, and loops, holding that note longer and longer until it's almost too much - and then it is.

Small, glittering brushes that ring out crystal notes. Deep, heavy taiko hammerstrikes. Bells and leather and steel, tribal industry. These sounds could arise from anything. From these sounds could arise anything. Spearmint finds herself for the first time amidst this music and how it gives expression and shape to Chaka's breath.

November!

November's reaction to the news is joy. Dragon is safe. That it only cost injury to her meant that it was cheap at the price.

She couldn't truly get along with Knightly. She should perceive in him an ally and a peer, a hero who was dedicated to the same goal that she was. Instead she'd seen him as just another person in another kind of danger. He was worth saving even though he was a hero, because he was a hero, and her advice to him had been 'lay low and let me handle this'. Even if it would have been harder without him. Even if the risks of injury to her had gone up. In the collective consensus of November was the deeply rooted idea that paying a price was fine so long as she was the one who paid it. That was just - well, that was just virtue. Any attempt to discuss or contemplate what she'd given up hit a wall of elation at the idea of what she'd achieved. Same as it ever had.

What she doesn't expect, though, is that the feeling of yearning was still there. All the colours had privately associated that with Blue, had thought that her grip on the past was the only thing stopping them from embracing the present. But one by one, each of the colours notice that there is still a faint edge of discomfort. An urge to be other than they were. Blue gave that shape, pointed at something specific and said that we should be that - and even if they disagreed it formed a coherent axis around which they could align. But now the clarity of destination was gone even the ones opposing Blue didn't feel content. They just didn't have any way to voice the feeling any more, and so it scratched each of them like an itch. A thought they had no way to work through with the colours they had.

How can one mourn a dream? It's absence means by its nature one doesn't want it any more. One desire has been traded for another and so the opposite path begins to fade into a gentle river of regrets, a path not taken, friends and ambitions left behind. Receipts need to be used, returns made, tools packed away into boxes until they can either be regifted or have accumulated so much dust that it's okay to throw them away.

There had been no other way with Dragon. The damage was too severe. But Monk could have sacrificed Monkey to the same effect. Monkey had become to Monk what Blue was in the process of becoming to her - a vestige, a memory, an echo of the person she had once been. It might have been easier for Monk, with her hundreds of faces, to give up that part of herself than it was for November to give up one of her colours. It might not have, though. Losing that might have hurt Monk deeply, already traumatized by all her losses. Monk was less compatible with Dragon. Monk couldn't afford to sacrifice specialized hardware in the same way without experiencing a traumatic loss of function - she might lose control over one or more of her arms. The plan was worse than the one she had gone with, but the real point of decision had been that she hadn't wanted to lose her sister. She didn't want to lose anyone. She didn't even want to lose the fucking Governor, for all his bile and cruelty, which was why she had reached out for him in the dark. She wanted to keep them safe. Wanted to keep the whole world safe, everyone from the highest to the lowest enfolded within her wings. She wanted their lives to be magical and meaningful, a place where miracles happened. If that meant she had to become magic, meaning and miracle - well. It was only a power fantasy if you didn't act on it.

The story never mentioned who built the Omelas machine.

[Count Numbers]

Spearmint:

At some point the bed does get pulled back down from the wall, and the headboard can keep a beat you can curl your toes to. The shower is accessible with all the cases dragged away from it, and the dreadful heat can be relieved. It turns out you can settle a disagreement and still enjoy getting chewed out for it.

One night, just one night before she has to move on.

In the morning, it’s going to be people carrying real instruments on shoulder straps and slings that help her move. A leopard with a keytar slung over his back, a cheetah with a bass guitar. Catch the hep cats, slick? Still. Chaka’s organized, she’s got help, she’s got a backup and she’s got a cover. The instrument cases really do fade into invisibility when they’re being carried by a real band. After all, anyone who points them out might be volunteered into helping carry them.

“Don’t take it personally, but I’m not going to say where we’re going when we go.” She tells Spearmint the morning after, before she has to be Green again. “I’m sure you’d find me if you really wanted to, anyway.” Her head’s telling her she’s being safe. Her heart’s telling her it’d be fun to get chased.

“Think I figured out how to find you too, but I wouldn’t count on it.” She pulls Spearmint across the mattress and rolls her to face the wall, so she can hold her tight like a seatbelt and scratch her ribs. “Your playing’s rusty, I think you need to be more serious about your practicing. You getting enough in?”

What was that? A cover to bluff about being able to find you later, an excuse if she can’t? A goad, to make you try to impress her? A genuine criticism made playfully? It would be so much easier to get a read on it if her claws didn’t feel so wonderful when she said it.

Honestly though, it’d make sense if it were just true, considering this would be a first time without Blue, and all that entails. Would that have been enough to throw you?

[Whether it’s true or not, Chaka’s saying this with the intent to fluster her, not to hurt her. There’s a risk of this coming off as a worse kind of negging because it’s based on information about Spearmint I don’t know yet - so I will reveal that whether the part about Spearmint is correct or not, the part about not finding her later is absolutely because she is bluffing about knowing how to find her. She seriously doubts Spearmint would tell her if she asked, so she’s being a cat about it to avoid rejection.]

Crystal:

Crystal’s asleep when she finishes, though the unicorn tried her hardest. When Pink finds her, the other side of the bed is still open for her place in it, and on the sheets has been placed a printed and hand-bound copy of a very old book that has been out of print for over a hundred years, but still circulates the internet in ancient .pdfs.

The Anarchists Cookbook, signed with pink lipstick.

The Next Morning:

The SES investigation starts back up again. Is it the same team working this job today, and if so, how do they approach it again? Like, physically, how do they physically approach getting back into position for this so they can get the information they’re owed.

The Costa-Silva article goes live, now. Pope’s 12,000 word piece is thorough and devastating, cross referenced, cited, a mix of gumshoe on-the-ground investigation and the higher abstractions that result. The Anthropozine tends to favour the gonzo, but Pope’s Olympia work reads more like Michael Lewis at his best.

This, this will help.

He posts another article to the Anthropozine instead, for Red. It’s much shorter and much more personal. Here.

The Lion, the Snitch and the Wardrobe

Isn’t it just the strangest thing? Remarkable. Here I was, all dressed up and ready to hang this man from a cross when I find all the heavy lifting has been done for me. What makes this so remarkable is that being there to see it happen only served to slow me down. I had to transition from the physical into the digital, if you’ll pardon my lateness for it, and it seems that by the time I’d kicked off my shoes to write… Well, now, how can I write an opinion piece when everyone already has an opinion that they’ve made up their mind on?

If I am to say anything, then, it will have to be something I can only add from the experience of someone who was actually there. Do not mistake me for saying that I will contradict the evidence of so many eyewitness accounts and so many video recordings of the matter, for I cannot do that and will not attempt to try. There is nothing I can say that will teach you anything new about those moments you cannot better learn elsewhere, through their objective record. I can only add to the pool of collective knowledge by telling you more of what I know from before the cameras started recording, and of what happened later.

To dispel some of the nastier rumours; No, I do not believe the Dragon was attempting to kidnap our man the Governor. I have it on good authority her taste lies instead in the taking of fair maidens, as befits any dragon of proper stature, and a fair maiden the Governor most certainly is not. I think he would find any insinuation to be libelous to say the least. The statements put out by the Governor’s press office paint a terrifying picture of a frogmarch through the darkness and away from his embattled security service. While such may be true from the perspective of the Governor and I would dare not call him a liar for this account, I will tell you now that his escort never once left the confines of a crowd of witnesses. Missing from his version of events is that he was brought to heel not by a fear of his safety, but for the fear he had been recognized.

The simple fact of the matter is that the Governor was caught acting suspiciously in a crowd he sought to belong in, and told on himself when he couldn’t. He, or at least his press office, claims at once he was prejudicially targeted and that he was outed by a random act of violence from the crowd. These two things cannot be simultaneously true. It is agreed that before the events the Governor’s disguise was not known, and we find no other accounts of violence at the event. The unflattering truth of the matter is that the Governor’s disguise was thwarted by his overt hatred, something the fabric of his costume was incapable of hiding, and such was the basis to target him regardless of his identity.

If the Governor himself was the only source that needed clarification on this matter I would find it understandable as he is the one who benefits from people lacking a clear record of events. The most to lose from people having a genuinely clear understanding of what happened. What I find most disappointing is that I am also compelled to dispel the accounts of liberal allies who would otherwise condemn the Governor and everything he stands for, but will instead stand with him to defend him from the very people he endangers. To them I have to ask; What good are your principles if they would bring you into an alliance with Joseon?

Did you not think it odd that, surrounded by witnesses, not one stood up to the physical defense of Governor Joseon against only a single aggressor, a young-seeming girl at that? A crowd with at least several wonderful and empathetic people I can personally account for. I should hope so, I was one of those people who made no motion in the Governor’s defense.

I will drop my glib facade a moment and I pray that you will help me pick it back up in a moment, because I will need it back again. Thank you for allowing me to be so blunt as this; This man came into my house. This man brought his filth and his hatred and his evil into my home. How could you dare wring your hands about how he was told he would kill himself when this man has demonstrably, provably and gleefully created law that has led dozens to that end? Why? Because one is something tangible you can see, and the other so intellectually abstracted? That’s not a principled position, that’s moral incoherence.

For many it is justified by how scared they are of violence and vigilantism, scared that this will lead to worse. I find this fascinating, because that remit, that order, must have been backdated months. The police have already been acting as if this were the case, and the withdrawal of legitimate state protection is what necessitates such vigilante protectionism in our spaces. If that is the nature of your fear then it is Governor Joseon and others like him that lit the petard that hoisted him today.

We tried it another way, we tried an exercise of community and safety today, we had something that was truly ours. And at its shining moment, during the beautiful speech of the organizer who made this possible, I had my reverie interrupted by this man’s hateful, evil garbage spewing into my ear from the darkness. My one consolation was knowing that it was that very hatred in that place that would destroy him, and here instead I find some of you trying to make a martyr of him, as if he is entitled to the political power that he uses to persecute these very people. What defense do they have from him, outside these walls?

The truth was what truly wounded him, and must be allowed to destroy him. That truth I do not need to elaborate on, because the Dragon herself said it so well, of which there is already an objective account. I can only say that her truth cannot be invalidated because it was delivered with a blow to the stomach or a hand held to the stuff of the neck.

I will not mince my words: Get this man the fuck out of my house.

Every suicide and murder due to this stochastic terrorism is the burning of a photo album that now never was. There is no money nor compensation that can ever make that whole, the only protection we are afforded is eviction. Eviction from a space he would see razed, even as he longs to be a part of it. The coward would commit arson upon my home, a home he is scared to share in, and the man who must live in the fire has no sympathy for the man who is afraid of it.

I apologize for that. If you will forgive me for getting so heated around the fire metaphors, and help me pick my glib facade back up again? I think it’s more comfortable for us both if I am to mantle myself in it for what I am about to say. I won’t overstay my welcome further than this.

I share in your fears of escalating violence and understand why you would condemn this, I promise you that. I wish such a matter were as simple as refuting violence altogether before it can escalate. But you cannot prevent an explosion of pressure by plugging the holes from which it vents. You cannot condemn the leaks. You must instead shut off the boiling.

Anyone who condemns the violence against the Governor today misses the point. No, it is not enough to condemn the Governor in the same breath and call for order on both sides. One side holds one of the most powerful men in public office with a professional security team, on the other was an angry girl with costume wings. There is no equivalency here.

To condemn the girl is to condemn the whistle of a kettle without removing the kettle from the heat. It is to fail to understand that the heat is the source of the noise since the heat itself is silent until it creates a symptom we find unpleasant. We must address the cause of this unpleasant symptom, to silence it is to fail to be warned. It is to fail to understand that for the kettle to start whistling, it has to have already been boiling in silence for a long time. We must ask how we remove the vessel of Aevum from the heat before there is a far worse spillover.

To stand with the Governor is to stand with the explosion I fear may be coming.

Sophie:

Oxytoxin: Blood
Oxytoxin: That was obviously you
Oxytoxin: You’re not a fucking android like an android so if it looked like you it was you so don’t even try
Oxytoxin: Do you need a place to lie low?

Okay, she must really like you like, really like you because otherwise she’d be ghosting you harder than she’s ghosted anyone in her life. She barely let you into her place when she was scared of her getting seen.

Oxytoxin: Just tell me you’re okay

The Exhibition:

Eli’s still going to be covering it, other people too. Pope rotates out, 3V migrates into the hotel party space, and now the human guests are going to be coming to ogle. The crowds will be thicker, there’ll be more tension - albeit well meaning. Consider it a change in atmosphere from people vibing at home to inviting friends over.

Strictly speaking nobody needs to be here for it. The interesting thing that will happen is in the late afternoon, at around 5pm, just at the close of business hours before the weekend. Would anyone enjoy being here though, to see the remaining exhibits, to see the change in atmosphere from the space, to hang out with Eli while they monitor how their prediction turns out?

Actually. You know what?

The transhuman exhibits focused on thus far, for obvious reasons, have been the biological ones, the furries. There are also cyborg exhibits here like Odysseus. With Blue gone, this might be a great grounds to start looking for contacts to fill her missing skillset with, someone who might have both the talent and the inclination to solve the problems that Blue was needed to solve.

If that’s something November is interested in starting on, tell me what she’s looking for, and who’s doing the looking, and I can tell you who she finds. If you use a 1 contact spend, you can tell me who she finds.

Oh! One last thing:

Pink:

Monk’s exhibit stands empty, since she’s, you know, on Thrones now. Crystal will not think of this or suggest it to you, so if this idea occurs to you it is yours alone to pitch it;

What would you do to fill in that slot? How do you sell Crystal on taking Monk’s place in the gallery, especially on a day when there will be critical outside observers now, judging the acceptability of transhumans?

[You can write Crystal’s side of the conversation up until she has to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, you know her voice well enough and think it’ll make a tighter scene. Crystal is privately supportive but publicly risk averse, positive about anything to do with Pink’s happiness or artistic pursuit but insanely fearful of an untested Pink in a public demonstration - and she hasn’t even seen the dining room yet. She is also aware that Pink is werewolfing and doesn’t trust her to be a sound judge of her own mind - she just doesn’t want to make Pink feel bad about that.]

[... Actually, if the problem is werewolfing, Sophie’s texting Red right now.]

[Thanqol]

Spearmint!

"It's not rust," said Spearmint, feeling something crackle to life inside her. "It's... new. I'm learning something new."

She smiled like the morning. "Normally I'd be crucifying myself right now for making contact without having done more background than an architectural textbook. Even though everything went right. I don't have hunches, vibes or instincts. Everything's got to be check, check, check-check-check-checked -"

There's a purr to her as her cooling vents start again. It's a different flow from before; before was a furnace roar, this is low and smooth like the engine on a stealth aircraft. "- but I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that people don't work like that," she said. She looked up, eyes in a new colour - and for a moment, in every colour. She was on her back, claws against her ribs, but she put her arms around Chaka's neck. "Next time you won't see me coming."

Red!

Dark_Red: i'm fine <3
Dark_Red: I actually can't not be fine
Dark_Red: The part of me who'd freak out about this is Orange
Dark_Red: And she's in deep space right now lol
Dark_Red: anyway once the wings and horns come off i'll be back to a generic anime girl in the crowd
Dark_Red: but i *will* swing by soon for non hideout reasons <3 <3

Pink!

She can't bring herself to wake Crystal as she sleeps. So instead she covers the area around the antipersonnelle cake with yellow and black hazard tape and erects a sign reading FORBIDDEN CAKE, just in case Fiona comes in late. Then she curls up to sleep alongside her unicorn and sleeps the first contented sleep in a long time.

Black!

She's back on surveillance today. It should be Brown, but instead she'll need to do this in stress mode. She curls up on location with a laptop, beret and fingerless gloves and settles in for a long, slow day at the office. The entire time she's going to be feeling itchy. She's picking up a knife by the sharp end.

She goes by train. She goes in through the front door with an ID pass. She goes in calm and slow and boring because a lot of spy work is calm and slow and boring. She goes with a bag of mealworms so that she can sit on a park bench and feed the lizards. She's not immune to taking influence from movies.

White!

Acquiring a mechanic was an essential task. Too much of her operational habits relied on technology, not to mention the various upgrades she had in mind. This was a big decision. A mechanic was going to be the closest thing she had to a life partner for the near future; someone she'd be forced to share every secret of her physical bodies with. Likely every secret of her operational designs with. She couldn't keep this in-house, but neither could she afford to be anything other than selective.

But when you were looking for perfection you didn't write a list of desirable traits - your prize would either be perfect or it would not be. So she looks with an open mind and open heart, taking in the complete possibility space in front of her, without feeling rushed if what she needed wasn't here.

Pink!

Pink doesn't have it together enough to make a play for Monk's exhibit. She needs time, money, and venue. She wants a mansion, preferably Everest's mansion. She wants guests. She wants to cook and prepare a feast worthy of Versailles, do the banners and the bunting, hold the party for the old lady that she'd never been allowed to. She would like the corpse of Mrs. Everest as guest of honour, which was possible and not gauche because she'd had her ashes processed into a diamond. She also strongly wanted to demolish the mansion at the end but she conceded that some things were too expensive to even fantasize about.

She doesn't know anything about getting the logistics of an event like that together. But she knows all the details of the event itself. She's been planning it for a decade and all she needs is the support and the go ahead that she could never get from herself.

[Count Numbers]

Pink:

Just, hypothetically speaking, what’s the biggest obstacle to getting the Everest mansion? The third of the sisters has it - the one who kept out of the power plays of her siblings. She’s barely upper middle class, the theft will be simple bordering on trivial.

The mansion though - is it occupied? Abandoned and used for storage? Being used as a reptile sanctuary?

Fiona:

She stands at the caution tape. “This isn’t as dangerous as it looks, is it?”

Crystal looks up from her coffee at the kitchen bench. “Hmm? No, of course it isn’t.”

“Right.” Fiona nods. “So it’s way worse than it looks.”

“I’m grateful you understood my little joke before I had to chase after you in a flak vest, I’d have looked ghastly in it.”

“So what do we… what are we supposed to do about it?”

“Well,” Crystal covers her mouth with her coffee even though Fiona isn’t looking at her. “I thought you might like the practice. It would be nice if you could appreciate how intricate it all is, and tell Pink what you think of it?”

Fiona dipped into the kitchen to grab a knife to cut the caution tape with. “There’s a genuine chance this kills me, isn’t there?”

“Please, we both know you’re better than that.”

Fiona stared at the knife with a frown. No, this would not be good enough to cut the cake with - the most explosive cake in at least a several kilometer radius. “You say it’ll make Pink happy?”

“Ecstatic.”

That settled it then. “Yet still more than death, I fear a life unlived. Lemme just find my wire cutters.”

“Jewelry box, second drawer.”

“Love you.”

White:

Okay, so first there’s a question of approach.

There’s three ways to go about this. The first is to try and recruit one of the cyberneticist exhibitors directly. This is going to be a go-hard-or-go-home artist type larger than life personality, this route goes loud. If she goes this route, how does White go in to this showing she’s worthy of their time?

The second way is to go backstage and look through the technical crews for someone who’s making the exhibition work. This gets you closer to the pre-Mythbusters Adam Savage and Jamie Hynemans of Aevum, someone who might not be as temperamental and have their own things going on but are still going to be cool and useful people to know. In which case, it’s about what White’s doing to move herself backstage to look for someone worth pulling.

The third is to mingle around the crowds and look for the amateurs and enthusiasts watching the exhibitions, the old guys like Serino who’ve come looking at this event like it’s a trade show. This would be the absolute complete wildcard, backshed inventors, weirdo hobbyists, corporate connections and the untested students still looking for their first industry jobs.

Even when we decide to let the wind carry us how it may, we must set our sails.

Black:

This is just a faultline you’re going to be able to leverage - the question is how you leveraged it.

One thing becomes immediately obvious just with this casual level of surveillance - pulling Rudy out of their ecosystem has deeply fucked things up. The money guy is not someone who can be trivially replaced, it’s a fulcrum point of absolute trust and absolute talent. Replacing him with someone who only has one or the other is even more disastrous than leaving the system in emergency autopilot.

It shows in how people are being way more slack about opsec than you’d expect, the way people are when it’s a month of late paycheques and now its their employers problem if they speak openly about it, not theirs. The people lower down the org chart, the mere assistant associate deputy administrators, are getting tetchy.

They won’t say what they’re tetchy about directly, no, they don’t let things leak. But they will make frustrated and catty comments with each other whose cause is only obvious to those already in the know. You overhear it at lunches, through bugs, through casually being in the right place at the right time following the mailroom trolley (people still order things online in 2080).

There are a lot of loyalties here that stay solid because they were made for free, and a lot of problems caused by loyalties that didn’t need to be bought, but were worth the money when the money was available. Now it’s not.

Rudy didn’t pay these people directly though. It’s money paid to Moriarty that has to filter down, so if they’re pissed about that, they’re pissed about her.

I’m being scarce on the details here because I think it’ll be more interesting to ask Black; Did she learn this in a way she could immediately exploit it in the heat of the moment it happened in? Or is she planning on a longer game with this?

[Thanqol]

Pink!

Reptile sanctuary. Good old John Snake-in-the-Eye saw an opportunity to set up a nesting colony in the heart of Zeus from which the lizards could spread out and colonize an otherwise difficult to reach neighbourhood. It's a deeply hostile situation where aggrieved nearby property owners, concerned about the influx of lizards on their perfect lawns, have been trying to organize the homeowners society and town council to get rid of what they claim is an illegal animal nesting site. John's army of high profile lawyers fight them every step of the way, and so the neighbours have retaliated by introducing fox colonies to hunt the lizards, to combat which John bought in 'dogs' that may or may not be cloned grey wolves to hunt the foxes...

Someone is a couple of years away from hiring armed furries to finish the job is what I'm getting at here.

White and Yellow!

As you said - absolute trust and absolute talent, can't settle for just one. That's why she goes for the amateurs.

'Amateur' gets a bad rap, but that's a capitalism thing. Professional literally just means someone who does it for money. An amateur is someone who does it for love. A professional comes with a cluster of associated skills, like the ability to keep a schedule, navigate the financial system, advertise, kiss ass with their bosses, showboat, and so on. A professional can organize themselves so that they're legible to society; a role that money can pour into and services can fall out of.

That's the opposite of what Yellow wants. She wants the unemployable freaks with visions that transcend reality. She wants someone whose passion she can repay with passion. She wants someone who thinks like her - like November, as a whole. Not a copy but someone who can inspire and goad her to new heights while moving in a sphere she can't touch. She wants - well, she wants Crystal with an engineering degree.

Yellow never for a moment doubts that she deserves two unicorns in her life.

Black!

She knows in the back of her head she needs to yell at herselves. Green, Red, and Pink have all Fucked Up recently with regards to operational integrity and she needs to make sure they know that. Just because she left those three in charge of the convention while she went off with all of her senses of restraint and big picture vision doesn't mean she shouldn't torment herselves for her mistakes. But, she reasons, she can do that at random intervals over the next fifteen-thirty years whenever there's a lull in the conversation or they're feeling emotionally vulnerable. That kind of timely and repetitive feedback is sure to produce the kind of behavioral changes she requires.

She, however, is being cautious. She's paying attention to the patterns of the comms and operations are suggesting themselves to her. She's delighted especially by the financial problems because they synergize with her existing play in suggesting Knightly ask for a bribe. With Moriarty already under the pump financially, being asked for a serious bribe right now will force major action from her backers. And then she can follow the money back to whatever their backup money supply is.

That's what she communicates to Knightly in the dead drop she showed him: ask for money. Doesn't have to be for you, can be for the organization, but it has to be up front. From there the operation requires her to maintain absolute observation of Moriarty, to know exactly when and how she reaches out to her superiors. She's hungry for this. This is the crack she needs to get the wedge into.

[Count Numbers]

Fiona:

It’s Fiona waiting for Pink outside the elevator, when she next comes back to the room. Wild eyed, covered in cake, and holding a large knife.

“I missed you, yesterday.” Is all she says.

She’s unhurt but changed from the experience of the dining room. Wild-eyed and inspired. The gunpowder in the Christmas baubles? Incredible. The nerve gas in the humidifier? Beautiful how it sparkled in the air like that, Fiona was grateful she checked the bins for all the labels she could find before she went in there. Hollowing out all the chairs with a file to install landmines in all the seats?

Well, Pink couldn’t get landmines, they were all hand-drawn pictures of landmines for now, but it was clearly the thought that counted. Especially when Fiona didn’t know it was only going to be the pictures when she cut the chairs back open. Give her a few minutes to come down from it all, and she’ll gush about it.

The cake was surprisingly easy to defuse, actually, for artistic reasons. The candles themselves were sticks of thermite made from ground-down metal filings of pieces of the kitchen oven and aluminium foil run through a herb grater. Incredibly safe to pluck out, and deal with the core explosives after, safe without their fuse.

The hardest part was resisting the urge to light the candles. Seriously, that was actually the hardest part for her. She loved this.

She shakes her head and hop-skips to the kitchen to drop the knife in the sink. “Crystal’s busy today, she says she hopes it’s obvious how much she wishes she wasn’t. But she filled me in on as much as she could.” Then she goes to the bedroom, and comes back with a gray turtleneck and cargo pants on a hook, the pockets bulging with their pre-filled goodies. “She says that the first thing one must do for a big event like this is scout the location, make sure it’s a good fit, get a sense for what you can do. See if it inspires anything last minute, like the big window did for her here.” Fiona shrugs. “I’m butchering it, but you know. That’s the idea.”

She pauses on her way to the bathroom, and sticks her head back out the bathroom door behind her. “You want a shower before we head out? I don’t want to rush this, but it’d be nice to get back here before 5pm. If that’s not enough time, we can always go back.”

She never says “to the Everest mansion”. It’s too obvious to her for her she thinks she has to.

White and Yellow:

You know in 2023 how there were those furry costume makers who just went absolutely insane on the mechanical aspects of costumes, stuff that really blinked, stuff that mimicked wolf leg walks, wings that really beat? The closest real word to it is puppeteering, but I actually rather like Disney’s ‘imagineering’ to describe it.

Yeah, so, in sixty years from now, those people get access to the same kind of tools Blue was getting told about, charcoal looms and glass and all other sorts.

The world is not so neat as to fold neatly along the lines that would give you a second unicorn, one made of fire and steel in oppositional contrast to Crystal’s warm flesh and blood. Well, it’s not so neat as to give you that this time. Such a thing would feel a little too neat, anyway.

That’s fine though. Yellow’s heart is still clear here. A cybernetic unicorn wouldn’t have been nearly so interesting a decision, what, use the horn as an antenna for drones? Something like that? Something is betrayed in that aesthetic by making the horn a whimsical way to hide a practical consideration.

Yellow will instead be casting her lot among the fae to make her deal.

Hazel was born with a genetic condition that stunted her growth significantly, but genetic treatment had already come a long way. She didn’t opt for traditional treatment though, from a young age she wanted to be a fairy like many little girls do. And her parents allowed her this modification to her treatment, thinking that if she ever - pardon the phrase - grew out of it, it would be reversible. Getting larger is much easier than getting smaller with these things.

She never did. Still only as tall as Yellow’s hip but with rail-thin proportions, Hazel grew fixated on making herself real wings. It wasn’t enough for her to wear costume pieces, to just be small and peppy and costumed. There’s an engineering term, AM/FM, which means ‘actual machines’ versus ‘fucking magic’ as the difference between what’s promised in a white paper and what’s actually implementable in reality. Hazel has a tattoo in moss green ink down her right forearm instead: AM:FM. Actual machines make fucking magic.

Her fairy wings beat like dragonfly wings, and she hovers and she soars and she sups from the crowd like she’s drinking nectar from flowers. The cowling that protects them is done in sculpted glass, to protect their delicate internal membrane without sacrificing anything of the illusion. She powers them with strips of graphene battery packs, arranged as blue-green faery fire tattoos that cover her entire body - the tradeoff of keeping them so skintight is needing to maximize surface area, but again she just makes that another part of the look.

Hazel Belle-Fleur is not in costume. She even folds her wings on her back to sleep, designed them so she can lie on them indefinitely without breaking them, because in the moments between changes of outfit, in the minutes she takes to change her batteries, she feels amputated. Severed.

This is all superficial, though. This is her sleeve, and all the heart that’s worn on it. When White and Yellow approach her now, what is in her voice and her words that makes her… perfect?

[Out of character; it wouldn’t be a proper deal with the fae if you didn’t give me a voice that I might steal it. Happy to workshop this, I can think of plenty, but as she’s replacing Blue’s role I enjoy being more collaborative in implementation before I steal her back. First blood all yours]

Knightly:

Of course it had to be him. He’s been rehearsing this.

Microbead camera-bugs are doable, but problematic. Like, signals and transmitters and lenses all got good enough that a camera the size of a dew drop can send its raw feed to Black’s phone and get as clear a picture as a 2023 phone camera can at around 5x zoom. Which is nothing to sneeze at when you’re using an aperture that tiny.

The problem is that battery tech didn’t get better enough to support it how you’d want, it’s only got between half an hour of up-time. That and there’s no storage because it’s just junking its signal as soon as it sends it, no storage. This thing’s only good for being used when you know exactly when you need it, and when you’re a few rooms away at the most.

That’s fine, that’s all you need. You can’t get into her office, can’t risk more than a walk past. But a pretend pick and flick lands the camera on a bookshelf through a crack in the door. You’ve already made your plans for it to be retrieved after, by someone else, haven’t you?

So there’s Black, in the bike storage area of building 1D, directly under the office. Still in signal range. It’s dark down there, intentionally low-lit to make it harder to identify the bikes from one another and malicious tampering or targeting. At the absolute lowest threshold of what is considered the legal minimum of lighting. Carry a vape pen in one hand, your phone in the other, and nobody will ever be suspicious of you for loitering here. It’s like how a plant growing in the middle of an office is suspicious until it’s in a plant pot, and then it’s invisible - a thing in its rightful place.

The feed shows Moriarty’s office and of course it’s a British ministerial old wooden style office. What is it with these smarter-than-you rich assholes and wood as a status symbol? This one actually is forested from Gaea to meet demand, but it’s not a sustainable practice. Water is a mineral you have to mine as much as aluminum or iron out here. It’s just a way to say…

Well, actually, that’s what it is, isn’t it? IIt’s saying: I maintain my chain of authority from the old world. I am the Roman administrator in Londinium. I refuse that the empire has fallen, for I am still here. We shall keep it alive in its traditions, and first of its traditions is to venerate me.

Some people just like wood, because wood’s pretty. It’s great. But do you think someone like Moriarty or Rudy would so enshrine themselves in it for that surface level aesthetic? Nah. They wear their offices with it like an Oxford tie.

Knightly enters without knocking, dressed in his jacket again, his sign of the old world. Of the collapse. The symbol of the people that had to deal with the fallout of the breakage. Neither of them intended this symbolism in their conflict, but it’s that subconscious draw to these symbols that makes their conflict inevitable.

Knightly: “I want Colon and Gomez, and I want you to pay me their cut for taking them.”

Through the lens, Moriarty looks up. Gaunt, hollow-cheeked and gold-wire glasses with permanently pursed lips coated in flaking red lipstick.

Moriarty: “Cut?”

Knightly: “You’re paying them off. Caldwell, Crane and Casey might be true believers, but I know you’re paying Guy Colon and Hermione Gomez, and I know they’re pissed, and I know that’s becoming a liability for you.”

Moriarty: “Is that what your skulking has been about? Aaron, we’ve been worried about you. These… paranoid delusions, they are not the sign of a sound or stable mind. The promotion has clearly been too much pressure on you, you weren’t ready yet.”

Knightly: “I can’t… come out and say anything against you yet, and you know it. But I’ve been talking to the both of them, and they’re actually talking to me when they didn’t before.”

Through the camera, Moriarty lowers the lid of the laptop she’s typing on, just slightly, and sits up straighter. Not on purpose. Her attention is more than she can hide, now.

Knightly: “I think a limited hangout would be the best for the both of us. You give them to me, and I’ll keep them in my little conspiracy, stop them going to those journalists that have been going around. That helps me too, I… Honestly, I’m disgusted by all of this. The shame of whatever it is your doing would stain my beloved SES for years, years from now.”

The most plausible lies are the truth. If you didn’t already know that Knightly planned on breaking this anyway, you’d never be able to suspect it. It’s going to crush him to help you, but it’s not as important to him as doing the right thing.

Moriarty: “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

Knightly: “No, I don’t. But they’ll tell me what they were getting either way, soon. This is just… for their protection too.”

Moriarty: “Protection?”

Knightly: “We do a limited hangout. You know that I can keep the lid on them, they think it’s because I’m protecting them from reprisal, and you get to cut loose agents you can’t afford to pay before they defect in some way that’s worse for you than this. We both win.”

Moriarty closes her laptop completely, checks and double checks her door is closed, and casually cleans her desk, as if for any other kind of bug than the one she’s actually checking for.

Moriarty: “These are the paranoid delusions of a man cracking under the pressure. I have humoured you long enough. I’m putting you on one week paid medical leave.”

Her eyes dart up as she emphasizes paid, and she tugs an earlobe. It’s a smart play by her. She wants him off-site, but the punishment will increase his legitimacy to the agents she’s cutting.

Knightly: “I- No. Maybe you’re right. Maybe the time off will be good for me. Just, you know… ever since the Godard Pump…”

Moriarty: “Of course, of course. The damage to Erebus has been taxing on us all, and to fall into your position in the middle of it…”

Knightly: “I hope we do find out just how much was broken, in the end.”

The camera dies, fizzles, feed out. You don’t see what happens after that, but it seemed like the end of the conversation anyway.

Might as well make sure he’s okay when you enact your quick plan to retrieve the bug you set up before. But then what?