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

[Count Numbers]

Apostle:

“Yeah sure, uh. Lemme think. Hey, Junta, you awake?” Apostle asks mostly as a joke.

Junta, in his sleep, slurs, “Fuck. Sorry.” Quiet and barely legible. Then he’s still again, so still you can’t even tell if he’s breathing.

“Holy shit.” Apostle stares for a few seconds, then shakes his head. “Well, fuck. Uh, anyway. It’s a kind of sheep that cop-brain can still think is a sheep when it gets shitty with them. Because it’s like… I think they see the sheepdog in them? Like, small business owners are like toothless cops. So you’re not one of them, but you’d get invited to the same barbecues. Kind of like scientists and science fiction writers. Mutual respect, one’s got more authority, but when the writers argue stuff wrong the scientists actually have to correct them instead of just thinking they’re idiots, they actually want to be on the same side. Maybe. Does that help?”

This is really stretching the limits of Apostle’s knowledge here, but they vibe Brown so hard they’re enthusiastic to keep the conversation going before it inevitably needs to drift off into ‘gotta think about this for a week’ mode. The more they can get in here now, the better it’s going to be to hear from Brown in a week, they figure.

Fiona:

“Why don’t we do this the opposite way, and start now then. So this gets easier rather than harder as we go.” Fiona unfolds a gorilla-grip mount from the back of her phone casing to attach it to the steel bars of the bedframe, so the camera is aimed at what she’s doing. “I’ll do your head first, and then we’ll see if I can run that off an external power supply while I do your body. You uh, won’t want to feel that.” She giggles, in spite of herself.

“It’ll be nice though.” She promises. “You’re very expressive, and there’s about 40 points of failure in that face that you’ve been pushing through their paces. It’s about to get a lot easier to smile.”

And that’s it, no wait, no waiting room. Pink just needs to put the tether in herself - Fiona won’t do that, one last act of affirmative consent - and then she’ll start.

There’ll be a few seconds, maybe only three, between the senses of her body disappearing, and the connection to the phone replacing them where Pink will be back in the box, though. Not long at all. How does she experience them?

Meanwhile:

Zhang tries to cut and run when the cops encircle the group she’s instigating, when the Echidna crowd crashes into the lines she’s been false-flagging inside. One of the bricks she brought for windows got co-opted and taken out the shoulder of a typhon, an android with large dragon wings and a serpent tail, and now the typhon’s wing hangs limp and twitching on that side. She hates it was her brick that did it.

An anti-trans activist named Crenshaw stares at her suspiciously as he catches on - this is the kind of guy who’s primed to look for traitors in the ranks as it is, it’s almost just coincidence Zhang is one this time. He levels an amateur-make microwave gun at her, something that fucks up androids but mostly just hurts like hell for a person, and fires it.

It’d have been better if he slammed her with a baseball bat - The metallics in Zhang’s subdermal armor sears the flesh beneath her skin like a skillet and she screams, and Crenshaw backs off a step. “Terminator!” he screams back at her, pointing. Android in human skin, infiltrating the group.

But Zhang has a few seconds, because he’s shot her through the crowd, and there are more people still on their feet pissed off about having been hit by friendly fire than actually want to check what Crenshaw’s saying, and they’re going to disarm him while Zhang, prone, crawls off the street and across the broken frame of a window display and hides in the blacked-out clothing store. Her armor mod does protect her from the shards of glass she dragged herself across, but the burns are agony.

This group is not going to hit the exhibition, no, but now that people know a crowd like Echidna’s is in the area doing this, others rally to take more of a fight here. If the trains from Hermes to Aphrodite weren’t shut down this could have gotten a lot worse.

Moving fast and early might prove the right choice.

Meanwhile:

Pope sighs and checks his phone, between the camera rounds, and doesn’t even bother to read most of the Anthrozine backscroll past Brown’s updates before commenting.

[IAmWhatIAm]: If I may? The importance of this moment is that it has happened, and now it is done. The path of Aevum history will not diverge for your presence or absence in the riots, but it will shape the course of your life. There is nothing to fight for here except for the fight.
[IAmWhatIAm]: There are only so many doctors, nurses and ambulances. There is no shame, no cowardice, in helping by refusing to put yourself in a place where you will do harm or be harmed. Look, but don’t touch.

Some people start replying but he ignores them, because they’re all likely to be yelling at him and that isn’t his audience.

[IAmWhatIAm]: To say otherwise is to say that York is better serving you unconscious in a hospital bed. You are all of you too useful to waste on bravado.

And then he logs off. The Anthrozine is one of the few groups he can talk to, their paranoid server architecture and the burner phone make it safe to message from here, but he doesn’t want to. They’re good people, and that’s the whole problem.

The good people care, and froth, and rage at injustice. That is needed when the patient is alive on the table, when there is a chance of resuscitation, but the patient is already dead. It’s too late to intervene.

No, Pope just wants to grieve.

Meanwhile:

This will be anything but obvious to the people on the ground, but it is true that:

- For all the violence, for all the threats and weapons, very few will die in the riots. Only 25 died during the Floyd riots. Nobody died at Stonewall. Probably the best comparison might be the Cronulla Race Riots in Australia, 2005, when 5,000 racists fought their way to Cronulla beach to attack any non-white person they found there. For all the assaults, stabbings and arson, for all the hateful motivation, it’s hard to find an official death.

- “You’ll probably only get really badly injured” offers very little comfort to people who did not want to get very badly injured, especially not for their identity. Death is not the standard that we should hold the legitimacy of fear to. All the same, it’s nice to know.

- Now that this has started, though, it’s not likely to end soon. While Cable Street, Cronulla and Kent State are all examples of this burning bright and blowing over in one really bad day, they’re unlikely to be the model. Stonewall went for 5 days, the Zuma riots in South Africa went 9, Floyd went 14, Maidan in Ukraine went 93. It’s a battle between anger and fatigue, and it’s hard to predict when fatigue will win.

- It’s easy to predict who it’ll hit first though. The anti-trans side won, they get to go home. The pro-trans side didn’t, they’ve got to keep coming out. Today the cops work to beat the two sides apart. Soon they’ll just be trying to control order by beating the pro-trans side into going home, sustaining the riot from being the remaining source of conflict even as the pro-trans side loses the antagonist that made them sympathetic to moderates.

- The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar. This will be as true now as ever. More true now that fires on a space station are infinitely scarier than ones back on Earth.

Meanwhile:

Parvati the dancing snake-girl approaches Crystal from behind, near the still-drained lobby fountain, and clears her throat. Crystal turns in surprise and blinks.

She really is quite beautiful. She understands at once why Fiona was so taken by her. She suppresses a moment of intense, burning jealousy. “Yes, dear?”

“You wouldn’t happen to know where Ms Fiona Weiss is, would you?” She asks. “She said she was one of the organizers, with you.”

“I do.” Crystal says cautiously.

“It’s just, I would feel a lot safer with her right now.” Parvati smiles nervously. “I just can’t find her anywhere.”

“Ah, yes.” Crystal adjusts her funerary hat and straightens. “She promised to help a young lady deal with a traumatic experience today and was not in attendance. I’m sorry.”

“Of course she is.” Parvati sighs and wrings her hands, the frustration that you had wanted someone to hurt you for bad reasons just so you could deal with the hurt. Forgiveness is harder. “I’d just thought…”

This is not a situation Crystal is very comfortable with, even though she’d helped set these two up. It’s the difference between letting Fiona explore her options and helping her keep that option open. November has been making her rethink a lot about how she handles these things. Still. “We can only ever be in one place at once.” Crystal says. “You’re from Aphrodite, yes? Your stay can be extended, and I’ll let her know she is to escort you home tomorrow night.”

Parvati looks immensely guilty for how reassuring she finds that. “Thank you.”

Crystal feels overwhelmingly possessive.

As Parvati turns to leave for the elevators, Crystal messages Yellow: “I know today has been unkind to you. I’ve decided to propose to Fiona, and I feel it is a necessary use of your talent to plan the perfect way to do this. I would like you to feel as included in this as possible.”

No, she’s not jealous so long as November is shared. It’s different.

Black and Orange:

It’s been ten minutes, the teams swell from stragglers pulled from hotel rooms and finishing packing the vendor halls. Some now carry backpacks of snacks and meals taken from the food court, ready to feed people on the other side if there’s delays at the station.

The doors open again for Ares to move out.

Don’t worry if there’s nothing for you to do here, yet. It might just mean you’ve done your job perfectly.

Red:

[November spends Human Terrain to make a DC 4 check on this]

This works - again managing not to strain the credibility of the cover identity by getting authority from Knightly, you’ve argued that your actions are covered by your remit effectively.

But.

“Shit.” A young android, silver-haired with a purple french beret and bangs that cover her right eye, pushes herself out into the walkway in her wheelie chair and looks up at Red grimly from knee-height. “I think we can get the trains, but the stations are under lockdown. Police authority supercedes ours in a riot, even if we get the trains they’re not going to let anyone on. I’m Corday 01-18 by the way, Ms Tower.”

[Thanqol]

Brown!

"Yeah it does," said Brown.

Unfortunately for Apostle he said a lot of stuff that Brown really wanted to spend a week thinking about. She was getting a lot out of this conversation also but had no idea how to sustain it when it felt like it reached a natural conclusion. Just... smash cut to something else, right? It would have been perfect if Junta had woken up and she'd been able to fade into the background.

She liked Apostle a lot. But that didn't mean she knew how to keep stuff going.

Pink!

She can't be here.

With herself. With her thoughts. Quiet. Still. It's like she's covered in ants, like she needs to leap up out of her skin, power walk the fuck away from here, plug in to media as hard as possible. Describing it isn't sufficient, it's somewhere between terror and revulsion and it's all focused on the trivial act of having to be alone with her thoughts for a few seconds. It's riotous, incompatible with skin, trying to harness electricity, her whole mind grounding through itself over the course of a single lightning strike. She can't be here. She needs to do something. Needs to do everything.

############# said Pink through the phone. Ack, no good, that was code for manipulating her proprietary voicebox. She analyzes, picks out a text-to-speech program, composes and sends it an email.

Dear Fiona,

While that was as bad as I thought, it was not bad in the way I thought. I thought it would be terror and was not prepared for it to be revulsion/craving. I don't know what that means.

Yours truly,
Pink

Yellow!

Yellow: Are you sure you want to ask me?
Yellow: I mean, I'm not asking in a self depreciating way ^^;✿
Yellow: mostly .-.✿
Yellow: I mean. Hmm, how to put it?
Yellow: Okay, so, I can't focus in on a single event, even one as big as a wedding. I need to see it in the context of the whole relationship. Which means I'll need to get all weird and questioning and intense about a bunch of personal stuff.
Yellow: Mess with stuff that's not mine to mess with
Yellow: The other colours have made it pretty clear I'm not supposed to do that <.<✿ >.>✿ <.<✿

Red!

"Nice to meet you, Corday," said Red. "Alright, so when you say lockdown, are you saying they've got officers on site, they've got a full riot formation on site, or they've just pulled the shutters? Because whatever's there is going to get walked through and it'd be real nice if we could get it out of the way first. Any ideas on that?"

[Count Numbers]

Aphrodite Crisis Headquarters:

“They don’t tell us that.” Corday apologizes. “At least officers on site. We have a police liaison but…” they trail off, spread their hands open helplessly. Which is their way of saying even if our side wasn’t too busy, their side is. “They’re so busy telling us what they need they won’t let us ask them for anything.”

So, no. No ideas.

Apostle:

Junta doesn’t, because he can’t.

Apostle reads the awkwardness and just gives a thumbs up. “Well, you know how to reach me. If he wakes up, just… do that. I’m going to go see if I can’t get a taxi through the mob. Uh. Yep.”

They unfold themselves and creak, the commitment to the full light plates showing in how it restricts their movement getting up out of the chair again. “It’s fine, we can just do this with some more of your partitions next time. Uuuuh, do you have an ethics segment? I can probably be so abhorrent they’ll want you to do all the talking, that’d be fun.”

One last awkward thumbs up, and they’re gone.

And that’s it. Junta’s got no family to visit, 3V’s been up all night already and is still sleeping it off, York was going on behalf of the Anthrozine. He’s got more friends, of course he does, but ones that are close enough to his IRL to be able to visit him in hospital right now? Much narrower circle. Brown can just…

Zone out.

Fiona:

“Can’t use the speaker?” Fiona asks, adding her own inputs to the phone to make Pink’s emails autoplay when they ding. “That’s, we have a workaround. I take it the camera and microphone are working, at least?”

She makes an executive decision to unfasten Pink’s head off as quick as possible. She thinks about going back now, but decides it’s better to just be efficient and quick, without rushing. The better she does this, the more likely Pink comes out of it thinking it was worth it. She can’t make the good parts better, all she can do is minimize the time spent in the bad parts.

“I think you just speedrun learning meditation. Was it like… Trying to hold still while being bitten by ants? Sitting on the edge of a cliff and feeling yourself start to fall over? Like you were trapped and alone in the middle of the universe?”

Crystal:

Crystal: Just the proposal for now, my burning ray of sunshine.
Crystal: Though I do mean for now. I would just rather not plan for a wedding until after she has said yes.
Crystal: She will, of course.
Crystal: She will.
Crystal: Just, it will already be enough heartbreak if she says no without having my heart set on everything that would have come next, you understand.
Crystal: Though yes. That is also why I would like your help. Be as intense or as strange as you need.

She types and deletes about ten different things, reasons and explanations, but all of them feel too weak to admit. She would like Yellow’s help and that’s all it needs to be.

The Streets:

The colour groups spread out as planned.

The first bit of resistance is the protests outside the castle green, but that skirmish is won on pure intimidation. Here the groups are all together, thousands strong and packed with photojournalists.

The protestors try to form a satellite to stalk and jeer the main column, but the Ultimate Werewolf takes a few runners from Ares and Zeus teams and start to head towards them. The protest group takes a few steps back, and more, and begins its retreat when it’s made clear the strategy of kiting and aggressing from a distance isn’t going to work. A few of the Ares enforcers stay behind to watch to make sure they don’t try to approach again, make it clear they’ll get rolled if they do.

Posturing, sabre-rattling? Sure, but it’s not bullshit bravado. Small groups like that act as nucleus sites to draw reinforcements to them. Overwhelm them now, there’s nobody to reinforce.

It’s a needed and deserved morale boost, too.

The crowd split up and branch through the streets as planned in their colour groups, trying to keep the marching pace just above a crowd coming out of a movie theatre - that’s fast when you’ve got this many people trying not to mosh each other, it’s good. Drones start flying up from the Apollo group to check for resistance up ahead and find movement, but it’s early days yet and it might just go as well as this first skirmish did. No way to tell.

The question is, what are they supposed to do for the cops at the finish line?

Chaka Zulu:

If the plan to tie up the police from the area would benefit from a slightly-drunk arms dealer sitting on her entire stash? White and Cyan have one here that might be about to owe them a huge favour.

[Thanqol]

Pink!

Dear Fiona,

What the fuck? *That* is meditation? I thought it was meant to be a chill thing done to relax on mountaintops. Monk didn't mention that at all.

Yours sincerely,
Pink

Her attention is fully focused on the conversation like it's a oxygen mask, composing the next email before the first one has finished reading.

Dear Fiona,

I thought I could just, like, massage this into a positive memory by seeing myself get constructed around me. Seeing my body coalesce around my mind, awaken into form gently rather than being thrown into it roughly with no warning. It'd be a really romantic and beautiful process! I'd be aligning a mindscape and reality! How am I meant to focus on that if that's what's happening in my head?!

Yours kindly,
Pink

Yellow!

Yellow: Okay!
Yellow: ʘ‿ʘ✿
Yellow: So the main thing is that this is an escalation, right?
Yellow: You haven't seen her today, haven't had the kind of time or headspace to think about married life, so you're doing this for you.
Yellow: And, legit, I get it. That's great!
Yellow: But the thing with this is that you're escalating yourself into a corner.
Yellow: After you do this then you've only got one more escalation in the wedding itself.
Yellow: And then the only way you can raise the stakes is with kids.
Yellow: And don't get me wrong, your wine mom potential is off the charts. Incredible life path aesthetics, love that for you. ≧◡≦✿
Yellow: But to get the most out of that then the proposal and marriage should not only foreshadow that but be optimized for you to get the most out of the transition.
Yellow: And I can absolutely help you with that! God, I'm so down for helping you into that new life stage, you've got no idea. The bonfire will be visible from Earth ✿ڿڰۣ—
Yellow: But that is your wish, right?

Cyan!

"Look, it is very simple," White said. "We will reason with them. If they do not listen to reason, we will punch them. There is no need to make it complicated."

Cyan made her eyes two sizes larger just to really emphasize the eye-roll. "Your recommendation has been noted. How about before we do that we walk around the building, run a drone over those big pretty windows, do some surveillance? I'd kind of like to know if we're dealing with an entire garrison or a couple of mall cops."

She's got an idea already, but it was the kind of thing sensitive to magnitude. It'd also do her a lot of good to know what the highest rank on site was.

[Count Numbers]

Fiona:

“It’s only like that at first, and if you get out of practice.” She laughs. “I’m way out of practice right now, so it’d be like that for me too. But it’s just like this.” She starts to unfold Pink’s face from her head. “Maintenance. The longer you leave it, the more builds up, the harder it gets.”

The mechanical face isn’t the old nightmare animatronics they used to be, they’re not puppetry as Hazel would put it. Printed electronics, like the charcoal loom suggested to Blue, run through piezoelectrics give a sturdy latex-laminar mask the kind of organic, responsive omnidirectional pull and tug of real muscles. Think of it like a television screen made of RGB diodes creating incredibly complex and responsive light patterns but using contraction forces, instead, to create the incredibly complex and subtle varieties of expression.

It’s like carefully peeling off a mud mask at a spa. Underneath is smooth contact points, but the seal isn’t airtight. The brushed nickel-alloy beneath is meant to be completely smooth and frictionless besides the joints - jaw, eyelids, eyes - a polished mannequin. But tears have rusted lines along her cheeks, food and drink around the contacts of her lips, under her hair splotches rust like spilled dye. Rust resistance can only do so much in a charged material, over time.

“See, like this, you smile with your eyes.” Fiona whispers, wrapping two fingers of her right hand in the fine-grit sandpaper and dabbing it in the oil, working underneath the eyes first to wipe away the tear-marks. “It’s not even a metaphor, if you don’t put work into fixing yourself up after you cry, then it’s going to feel harder to smile, because there’s resistance to it. We can fix it, but it just takes a bit of work to fix it.”

“For most people the hard part’s choosing to do it though. Now…” Fiona looks at the phone and checks some settings. It feels weird, like how it must feel to be a ghost touching the planchette through someone’s hand on a ouija board. “Yeah, here we go. If you want to practice it, you can just reboot the phone, and you’ll be locked out for about five seconds. Good enough to start?”

Crystal:

There is something about the way she asks ‘But that is your wish, right?’ that reminds Crystal of a monkey’s paw. Those old stories of people who get exactly what they want, but at an ironic price. A cursed thing.

She doesn’t ignore this, or dismiss this. There is no brain convincing the gut that it is throwing up false warnings, she knows she should listen to this feeling and so she does. It’s just that Crystal always came away from those stories with a different takeaway than was likely intended;

When one wishes on a monkey’s paw, always make sure your wish is worth any possible cost.

Crystal: It is.

The Train Station:

From walking the street:

2 at the front entrance, the only ones visible. Street cops in basic uniform.

From throwing a brick through the window of a building down the road (that has already had windows broken):

4 on immediate scouting duty. Heavily armored, carrying mattocks.

From a drone to the high windows:

Dead.

Dead? Yes, this killed the drone. They’ve got a microwave gun setup like battleships used to have CIWS, but it going off doesn’t twig anyone new. Seems like their bugzapper’s going off a lot.

Okay, try again with a faraday cage and the pre-programmed flight path. You don’t want to do that first try because it makes it way bulkier, more visible, and it won’t be able to connect to it until it’s landed again, but it’ll work. Especially if you’re not the only one trying this, as some geeks from the Apollo group get over-enthusiastic to play the objective themselves.

4 playing poker inside, 4 more rotating turns of a fighting game with their console hooked up to the platform train-time screen. They’re all wearing heavier armor than the remote scouts, with a line of weapons established on the platform in pop-up cabinets. Proper riot shields, mattocks, guns, grenades and grenade launchers for varying degrees of escalation, and a heavily locked crate full of live ammunition that nobody believes they’ll have to open - it’s covered in thick lines of dust.

16 from a cursory glance. There’s more but it’ll take a spend to reveal where they are. Spending a second point would let you declare something useful that would give you an edge, or simply take the extras out of the fight immediately.

It looks like they’re treating the station as the point of safe evacuation for the other cops in the area, this is their escape route too.

This is a problem for more than just the increased police presence it represents to you, it means that they’re going to freak the fuck out if an army takes out their line of egress - an army that’s already on the march. This has the potential to go from Les Mis to Black Hawk Down very quickly.

Zhang Ho:

LetsGoHo!: 117 pierre brissot st help

She’s managed to wedge herself somewhere no-one would find her unless they’re looking for her when she messages November, because that’s the only person she knows who’s close enough right now. She owes her life to whoever dropped a paper receipt on their way out, their dedication to not giving an email address just saved Zhang having to turn on tracking services to find this place’s address.

She smells smoke but the adrenaline quit on her and she can’t move anymore.

117 Pierre Brissot is about 2km from the Castle in the opposite direction of the march, which was the point of her agitating there. Valkyries are perfect for this, but they’re going to ask questions about what they’re doing.

PerfidiouslyFickle plays the objective

Binh Van Ut wakes up in a hospital bed, but she has to guess that because the room is pitch black, but her bed doesn’t normally have so many buttons on it. Her stomach hurts like crazy, and she’s been crying in her sleep, and her throats’ raw from throwing up so much, but mostly she just feels incredibly embarrassed.

Guiltily, she wished she’d died so she didn’t have to deal with the shame of having tried to kill herself and failed. Even in a pitch-black room she throws the blankets over her head and hides from that, bringing her head down to her knees and her knees up to her forehead. It is a guilty thought though, because she doesn’t want that anymore. She just had to try to know that.

She realizes she can’t get a glass of water for her throat without asking for one.

Crap.

Binh grabs out for the remote in the darkness before she can think about it and presses the button, then drops it like it’s burned her and quickly scrabbles to find it in her bedsheets again, trying to find an undo button. She can’t feel one, just a second button on the remote that should turn the bed light on and off, but it’s been disabled.

There’s a crack of corridor light as a nurse opens the door a little. A rattle of curtains on the other side of the door, and the spillover from the corridor becomes shadow. “You need anything, sweetheart?”

The nurses aren’t supposed to call you things like that anymore, but Binh always liked it when they did. It meant more because she knew they weren’t supposed to. “Just some water, please. Thank you. And I’m not that sensitive anymore, some light’s okay.”

There’s a slight pause as the nurse behind the door thinks carefully. “There’s a journalist here who’s been asking if there’s anyone who was affected by yesterday who’d like to talk about it. Is that someone you’d like to talk to?”

“Journalist?” Binh pulls the blankets all the way down and perks up on the bed. “Uh. That sounds important. Do you think I should?”

“She seems nice.” The nurse said, and Binh recognized the voice - ‘It's illegal to say what I want’, you heard it whenever they had test results for you and you asked them an obvious question. She just didn’t understand why she was using it now.

“Uh, okay. You can tell her she can talk to me.”

“I’ll see if she’s still here.” The nurse said. “When I get your water. Hold on.”

The door shut, and the room was dark, and Binh fell back into bed and thought different thoughts instead. Her heart raced. Journalists were… Well they weren’t real. They were TV people. They had life experience. They actually saw the world and had opinions on it. To a total shut-in, a journalist wasn’t a job so much as a fantasy class like ‘wizard’ or ‘paladin’.

Rehearsing what she could say was like meeting Gandalf for lunch because he had some important questions for you. You couldn’t refuse Gandalf! But her world was even smaller than the Shire.

There was a knock at the door. “Yes?”

Someone slipped through into the darkness, a new voice this time. “Hi, would you be Binh Van Ut?” She pronounced Binh’s name right on the first try, which meant she had to be the journalist.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Cool beans!” The young woman paused at the door. “Do you mind if I open the door a bit more to let some light in?”

“I’ll tell you if it gets too much.” Binh said nervously, and the journalist opened the door crack by crack until the room was about as bright as a clearing in a full moon. To Binh’s eyes it might as well be midday, but it was clear the woman was still struggling with it as she brought a pitcher of water and some paper cups in with her.

She was a bit short, and soft, and not that much older than Binh which was even more intimidating. And she wasn’t wearing a suit or anything, her green tube top barely covered her chest, and her op-shop brown pleat skirt was just as short and flowed with her movements. She had tattoos, too, bunny rabbits and a chemical chain and other stuff Binh couldn’t make out.

She reminded Binh of a sunflower.

She put the water down on the folding table beside Binh’s bed, and gave a two fingered wave by bending her fingers like flopping bunny rabbit ears. “It’s lovely to meet you. I write under PerfidiouslyFickle for the Anthrozine, you can call me P.F, it’s okay if you haven’t heard of us.” She said before Binh could feel bad that she hadn’t. “Now, do you want me to ask you questions, or do you just want to tell me what you think’s important to say, and I just listen?”

“I… What do you want me to say?”

P.F held her phone underneath the blanket at Binh’s feet while she dimmed the brightness as low as it’d go. “A lot of people are angry and fighting right now because they don’t understand you.” The journalist says, and she smiled at Binh but her eyes were sad. “I’m not asking you to help me make those people less angry. I’m just worried how much it has to hurt you. We, me and the website, we thought it might help if you felt like someone was listening.”

And it was so nice that it hurt, and Binh pulled the blanket back over her head and bit her forearm to cope with it. She poked her head back out again when she was ready to keep her composure. “I still don’t know what to say, though.”

P.F blinked, and her smile finally reached her eyes. “I guess I didn’t answer the question very well, did I?” No, she did, Binh felt like an idiot. “Nobody’s told me anything about you except your name, and that you might like to talk to me. I don’t know anything more than that, okay? And I think I can guess why you’re here, and I’m okay with talking about that if you are if you think that’s important,” she shows her phone’s recording and puts it down next to the water, in Binh’s reach so she can hit the stop button on it herself any time she wanted to. “It’s not where I want to start, though. I think the best way to start might be… Tell me about your ideal body, and what a day in it would feel like?”

Binh held the blanket in her hands. “I…” Binh blushed. It wasn’t the way people normally asked. Her way of thinking about her ideal body suddenly felt vain and narcissistic and horny and weird, because it was so tied up in how she wanted people to treat her. And that was why everyone was angry, right? Maybe she would have lied about it, if the journalist wasn’t so much exposed skin and tattoos herself. “I’d be beautiful.” She starts, stops, gauges the reaction like testing a landmine for the click.

Normally when she says that it’s to her Dad, and he rushes to tell her that she’s already beautiful, even though her skin’s so pale and sick it looks like she’s made of jellyfish, and it’s fucked all her hormones up and she’s grown wrong because of it. Her doctors told her she’s two inches shorter than she should be.

P.F doesn’t. “Tell me about it.” She says, instead.

At the end, Binh feels bad about how much of the journalist’s time she takes up, how much of the phone’s harddrive she fills up with the recording, because she can’t stop herself from saying everything. She’s never had anyone she could tell everything to before, and she can’t help herself no matter how hard she tries.

She doesn’t understand why P.F is so polite about it, acts like Binh’s the one doing her a huge favour for saying it.

[Thanqol]

Pink!

Pink is quiet for a long moment. After a minute the phone blinks off, and then on again.

Dear Fiona,

No, still awful. Aren't you meant to chant or draw sand mandalas or take drugs while doing this? And why is it so different from just thinking about things normally?

Maybe it's different for me. It's possible I was designed to be incompatible with any sort of meditation because it would interfere with my duties in space construction?

Yours sincerely,
Pink.

Yellow!

Yellow: ⊙_⊙✿
Yellow: Alright
Yellow: Okay, so, the essential parts of this are to do it publicly, on stage, in a moment of triumph. Power it with adrenaline and mass social pressure. The glorious hand reaching down into the ground and pulling her into your spotlight.
Yellow: In so doing you're declaring to everyone else as much as her; establishing this as the public and righteous way for things to be. Her instincts are to elide and observe, move around the edges, not let people know about her unless she's demonstrating superiority over them. She wants the flexibility of anonymity, the power of the stranger.
Yellow: That alone won't stop her wandering eye, but it does the next best thing in projecting to everyone else that she belongs to you.

Cyan!

White hates the plan. The virtuous would not fall for it. To Cyan, that's exactly why it will work.

She thinks Dudekov was right about something: November's too fucking clever for her own good. She doesn't appreciate how stupid most people are. She's too adapted to space where you can, in fact, outsmart the machinery of the spheres by doing sufficient math. Even allegedly cool colours like Pink thought like this, just find the sheer fucking perfect combination of arts to art your way out of problems u-uuughhhhhh.

Look, here's how you get a bunch of cops to move. You issue them a direct order to move. On what grounds are they going to object? Morality? Ha! No, they're not leading a mass movement of community leaders where they incentivize the man on the ground to make decisions. They see themselves as sheepdogs? That means they don't argue with the shepherd's whistle.

This was an operation in three short stages. One, tap comms chatter and identify the local commander responsible for this area. Two, isolate his comms for a moment and issue a notice that the rally point is being changed to two stations down. Three, provide a train for the cops on site to ride down the line. But what about - no you're overthinking it, the commander doesn't need to justify shit to his subordinates. The system is designed to channel and amplify stupidity, it has no immune defenses against one more bad decision if it thinks it's coming from the top.

Orange!

Social awkwardness was no reason not to send a rescue mission. "We've got a stray who needs pick up here," she said, tapping her pointer to the location on the map in front of the Valkyries. "Covertly armoured cyborg, was working on delaying the fascists. Probably injured, which means that whoever injured her was armed. I'd appreciate any volunteers for this."

[Count Numbers]

Fiona:

She giggles, clearing away the last of the abrasions under the left eye. The right one she finished while Pink was rebooting.

“It took about two months of doing it every day to stop being awful, for me.” Fiona said. “At least fifteen minutes a day, even if it wasn’t all at once. This was how I reattached to my body again, and it’s why I’m so squeamish about anything that’d need me to do all that maintenance to myself again, this suuuuuuucks.”

“This bit’s fun though.” She pulls a can of air duster from a bedside drawer and cleans the inside of Pink’s ears with it, whoompf. “Can’t do that when you’re still in there. Just need to do the jaw and throat after this, and then we can put you back into your head.”

Crystal:

Crystal: But then if she says no, then the opposite is broadcast just as powerfully. And she may say it just because I have put her on the spot in such a way
Crystal: … save this for the wedding plans.
Crystal: Already you make a hypocrite of me

Eli grabs the sleeve of Crystal’s suit and tugs to pull her out of the way from walking directly into a pillar, because she won’t stop re-reading what Yellow’s sent and knowing she should feel bad about wanting that, but.

Cyan:

Interesting hypothesis, let’s see how it plays out.

1: They’re not going by radio, too many faraday cages for security and defensive reasons, there are android and cyborg cops too that really don’t want to be hit by EMP and microwave blasts and there’s no protection against that which also doesn’t block out radio signals. You’re going to have to tap a physical line. DC: 3 to tap a line unnoticed, without breaking it.

2: Identifying the local commander is easy, it’s Captain Mansingh. This isn’t from pulling radio chatter it’s overhearing who the locals are complaining about the most, it’s mostly affectionate ribbing. Mansingh transferred from Hermes for their inevitable retirement and is a bit of a fish out of water in the Aphrodite vibes, a bit more of a stickler authoritarian than they’re used to.

3: Try it. The army approaches.

Crimson Tower:

Corday and an older woman, Ms Becerra, come away from their screens on the office floor with a grimace. These are the two Tower can keep for her special project right now, pull away from their regular overwhelmed duties. Corday’s normally a senior supervisor and very happy to not be in charge right now, Becerra’s a quiet woman who just wants things to stop going wrong.

“The police aren’t letting us requisition trains for the station, they’re overruling us without talking to us about it.” Corday tells you.

Valkyries:

The team ends up being a bison nightclub bouncer, an android with satyr legs who runs like every floor is made of lava, and just a vanilla human paramedic with only subtle perfomance tweaks under his shiny-bald hood - to take point, obviously, the other two have bullseyes on them.

They’ll see how this goes.

Euna:Your cause is just, and that might be the whole problem.

[Phoe]

If you think about it, she'd made the choice before the day had even started. Like, nobody bought it when she decided to go out for a run today, right? Not even her! Like, even if you swallowed the line about the weather being good for it (what?), the second she started preparing the jig just had to be up. Right?

A light jog never saw her pack a full bag of snacks to maintain peak operational efficiency immediately post-exercise. She'd bring water, or at most a protein shake, so she could go home and cook herself better instead. And setting that argument aside, she'd never so much as glanced at her swords before a run until now. Today she'd actually packed one. But you could still chalk those up to paranoia. Or preparedness, to be nicer about it. You'd be an idiot not to feel the tension in the air, what if you got stuck outside? What if... uh, well it was an edgeless weapon right? What if she'd decided to practice her forms in the park? Stupid, but not impossible.

Fine. Fine. Grant her that. But she put a mask on before stepping out. She'd put on a blindfold instead of her sunglasses (note to self: see doctor later about re-calibrating these new eyes). Her top today was a hooded crop jacket and full leggings. All identifying markings covered up, but in the dumbest sort of punk aesthetic sort of way. And she'd left her phone at home. And neither Cinders or Sara had been allowed to come with her today, or know her route. She'd broken all the basic safety rules and she'd shown up looking like the alternative costume on a blind ninja fighting game character on a day where the safest thing she could try to be is "normal".

No. She'd made the decision already. If there were going to be fights she was going to find them, and she'd be the one to end them. As many as she could. In as many places as she could reach. She had plenty of students down in those crowds, if she needed the extra motivation. So if she'd made the choice, then why? Why was she just standing there? What was the point of doing this much prep just to watch?

...Because it was against the rules. Fuck, that still meant so much to her. This wasn't like other times where she'd been able to tell herself the fight was isolated or anonymous. And she definitely couldn't wait to be the one to throw the second punch. Also she'd be punching this time instead of just sweeping a leg and awing some jackass into submission. This was illegal. Very, very illegal. And that had her wound tight enough to snap. Her hands seek out her hair, but the hood's in the way. She groans in frustration, instead.

There'd be consequences for this. Big consequences. Her gym might burn down before she even got to see it again. And if it stayed standing they'd be waiting with lawyers to pluck the deed from her safe in any case. To go down there meant jail time. It also meant throwing her dream away. It. She was. Could it really be that she's a?

Stop it, Euna. It's not cowardly to put the battle ahead of the fight. There were vanishingly few people are good as she was at rehabilitating people with cybernetic augs. Even fewer with experience and enthusiasm for people with aesthetic mods that needed help learning how to move in completely different ways. But then, there was nobody, and she'd die on this hill god damn nobody in all of Aevum who could fight as well as she could. Yet.

Well. Then teach. Right? She didn't need the glory. She needed to stay stable, keep her head above the water for as long as she could so hers could be the hand that pulled others' up out of the waves. Police protocol would have the train lines locked down by now and she hadn't exactly left herself close to home, but that just meant a night camping. Go buy a big bowl of katsudon or something and chill inside a restaurant. Let it blow over.

Or, no, she could set up a rally point, couldn't she? A safe place for people to rest that would -- that would bring the aggression over here, instead. Neutral ground in a riot, really Euna? Coward. Dumbass. Stick in the mud, prissy little paladin wannabe. Her gym was [i]already/i] forfeit, even November hadn't unearthed any particularly useful information she could use to fight the realignment. It was over on that front. And Sara? Sara wasn't gonna leave her. Actually, the only way she lost her wife to this is if she didn't break anybody's jaw. Maybe. Probably, anyway. It sounded like her. But more importantly, she. It. Wait. More importantly? Yes. More important than any of that.

She grins underneath her mask.

"I mean. I did always wanna be a superhero. Was there ever a point to all the training if it wasn't for right now?"

She laughs, in spite of all the horror spilling everywhere around her. Her body feels lighter than it has all day. She's sharper, faster, inhuman and fluid. Down toward the loudest shouting, down into a melee already in progress, squeezing against a wall of riot shields. Her first target doesn't even see her coming.

But like, it's his fault for going to war wearing khakis isn't it?

[Thanqol]

Pink!

There is one more flicker, one more reboot.

Dear Fiona,

No, this is terrible. It probably does not even work for me; I do not follow human biochemical design principles, even in emulation like an android. I have too much work to do, I can't justify being this bored or static. Especially when it comes to the struggle for mental influence. Time wasted on this means time not spent contesting my worst impulses.

Yours thoughtfully,
Pink

Yellow!

Yellow: It's not the same thing at the wedding as the proposal. You know that.
Yellow: The proposal is forcing them to make a decision, the wedding they've already made one.
Yellow: Look, you're clearly doing your best to be a good polygamist, you know all the theory and you've internalized the therapy talk about loving something enough to let it go, but that's a sacrifice your jealous ass is making.
Yellow: And it's fine if you want to make that sacrifice but call it what it is.
Yellow: You want things other than to be a morally upstanding member of society.
Yellow: You can repress those wants. This whole kink-free convention was you repressing those wants, in order to fit better into society. This was also a big sacrifice on your behalf.
Yellow: but aren't you tired of being nice?
Yellow: don't you just want to go apeshit? (◉‿◉)✿

Cyan!

[Surveillance 6/8]

She doesn't take the time to get it right. White's grumpy at her for it, but White doesn't understand showbiz. People who go through a film frame by frame looking for continuity errors pick out details but most everyone else runs on emotions and vibes. The greatest conmen/women/foxes of history didn't con people through meticulous adherence to detail, and not even through oily charm or charisma. They conned people by telling them what they wanted to hear, by fitting the shape that their souls called for. It really was no different from being a sexual submissive.

She takes a breath and pats her cheeks, enhancing the red tint, darkening the eyes into greedy slits.

"Yeah, yeah, station detail one four eight six? You're ordered to redeploy to Whistler Station," she said over the mic. No elaboration or reasoning. "We're sending a train to move you so don't leave the building."

Red!

"When you say 'letting'," said Red. "Do you mean they are physically standing on the train tracks blocking us, do they have digital control over the trains, or do you mean they are not giving their blessing?"

Her tone of voice made it clear that this was an engineering question.

[Count Numbers]

Fiona:

Jaw, throat. These are more delicate, less metallic, it’s just disinfectant and alcohol swabs and switching out a few sacrificial anodes, good for ten years. It’s… This part always makes Fiona feel funny. She’s already got a thing for kissing, and cleaning the internals just kind of gives her a mental map for later, a sense of a scoreboard she wants to score the biggest number on.

“Okay, first of all I have actually read the Wyatt-Tversky white paper so I can tell you exactly how much ‘don’t have your biochemical design chemicals’ is cope.” She distracts herself by saying. “Conscious thought is conscious thought, which is probably why your sister got so into this.”

“Second of all…” Fiona looks at the phone. “How are you going to deal with your worst impulses if you can’t handle being bored for literally five seconds?” There, done. Not as thorough as she’d like, but there’s still got the entire torso to do. “Almost ready to put you back in your head again. How long do you think you’d be able to shut out like that, without having the reboot as training wheels? It gets a lot harder when you have to keep yourself like that by choice.”

Crystal:

She laughs, actually, at that.

Crystal: You do not even know the half of it.
Crystal: I was thinking this make it easier to stay open. Let her see who she wants with a ring on her finger.
Crystal: If I actually tried to impose monogamy, she would thrive and I would not. And she would have her monogamous relationship with someone less paranoid and jealous in short time.
Crystal: Maybe this is my problem. You understand what I want perfectly, but getting it would destroy it. How do you make a bouquet without killing the flower?

She looks up again, and wanders around the empty exhibition, all the stands still up, the fridges full but the pantries empty at the concession stand, the stages feeling like a Potemkin village.

She grimaces. No, this won’t do at all. She taps for an app on her phone and puts on the century-anniversary remaster of Ella Fitzgerald’s “It’s Only a Paper Moon”. The jaunty showtune haunts the empty hall like a jitterbug ghost.

Say, its only a paper moon
Sailing over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me
Yes, it's only a canvas sky
Hanging over a muslin tree
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me
Without your love
It's a honky-tonk parade
Without your love
It's a melody played in a penny arcade
It's a Barnum and Bailey world
Just as phony as it can be
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me

Eli, still in their toga, does a flying leap at a support pole that used to hold some signage, the canvas it supported taken down by whoever it was advertising as a souvenir. They catch the pole against their knee, along their ankle, and do a stripper twirl leaning back against it, arching their back to look at Crystal upside down as the spin loses momentum.

“You know, I like Nat King Cole’s version better, but at least it’s not Paul McCartney’s.”

Crystal searches that. “Paul McCartney has one?”

“Don’t bother, it’s worse than Sinatra’s. Not even good for hauntology samples.” Eli lets themselves slide down to waist height, and Crystal walks closer so they’re just looking straight up at her. “Guessing you didn’t just pick the song for the vibe, though?”

Crystal: What would going apeshit look like?

Train Station Cops:

“Uh, good luck with that,” there’s a comms laptop setup on the poker table, this doesn’t even interrupt the game. “We’ve been losing lots of trains in the system, things have been screwy. We’ll let you know when the pickup’s arrived, we’ll wait here until it’s safe to move out.”

Crimson Tower:

“See, they just overrode that last one without a word.” Corday adjusts her beret indignantly. “Digital, and blessing. It’s like they have admin privileges over us on the shared system, and we can’t use the system in a way they can’t override.”

[Thanqol]

Pink!

Dear Fiona

Then this is a White thing

The speech cuts off as the phone reboots itself partway through reading the message, Pink interrupting herself with another shutdown. One more five second blip. This time the login jingle was the sound of evening bells.

Alright fine.

Yellow!

Yellow: Isn't that just the whole problem, though? ◠‿◠✿
Yellow: People want things they shouldn't want. Things that their rational mind has to bargain them down from.
Yellow: Compromising with reality. Leaving regrets on the table. Taking a deep sigh and choosing the moral, socially acceptable response yet again.
Yellow: They say, 'don't let your dreams be dreams!', but only so long as your dream is something like 'two weeks on a cruise ship' or 'a job that doesn't make you crave a skip dialogue button'
Yellow: And so even now, so close to the source, you can't say it.
Yellow: You need me to say it for you. Because you still feel like even saying it makes you a bad person.
Yellow: And you're right. Saying it does make you a bad person. Acting on it will have the consequences you're dreading. Those inhibitions? They're valid.
Yellow: So let's start with that.
Yellow: The first step in going apeshit is telling me directly what you actually, really want. The thing you want so badly that proposing marriage is the watered down compromise.

Cyan and Red!

"Alright," said Red. "Give me a sec, I need to make a phone call."

She glanced at Cyan's outraged text message. Thought. There were a couple of options that occurred to her, but one she really wanted to avoid. Digitally seizing control was the most direct but she always hated doing that. It exposed her methodology, locked her into a fight with system administrators and made people stop trusting the technology she might otherwise use to manipulate them. She'd walk a long way down the street to avoid playing that card, no matter what Fiona thought about it.

While she was brooding over alternatives, though, Cyan was already talking.

"Understood station, I'll get I.T. to find out what's going on. Get packed and stand by, over and out," she snapped.

And then even as Red started getting ready to make the hack, Cyan was waving her off. "We don't need to actually fix the trains, idiot," she said. "I just need to wait five minutes, call them back, and scream at them for fucking around with the admin permissions. God, you're supposed to be crisis management but you think like such a fucking engineer."

[Count Numbers]

Euna:

It’s so good to have you here, you always know how to draw a crowd.

A lot of the common map apps have pins you can put down, like how Fiona marked a below-ground shielded play area filled with lego. Euna could have placed that for the gym, but she can also just… answer some of them.

People flagging turning points, people caught out. One’s just a guy asking for milk from the store since he can’t get ouf ot her apartment and his baby’s hungry. Current top comment is “just learn to breastfeed, idiot” - he’s reacted to it with a laugh emote, so it’s probably a friend and not a random asshole.

Still, while Euna’s gym isn’t a center of protest, it is a center for the kind of people who are going to be singled out for this. Non-human presenting androids are targeted even more than organic furries, for that same intersectional logic that makes it harder to be BIPOC and queer than just one or the other.

If Euna wants to go out into this, that gives her a social media feed for people she can go to and liberate. Because it’s okay if people are asking for help, right?

Sure, this one, this android that comes to the gym every Friday morning before work, barricaded in a convenience store just two blocks away when a group of about three protestors found her and pinned her in there. Probably just wants someone to distract them so she can sneak away through a staff door or something, but they don’t say you can’t solve this by doing a flying spin-kick through all three at once.

Fiona:

Alright, core, head, adaptor plugged into outlet. This should give a lot of senses back, and speech. Still, the way Pink just toggled again is giving her Thoughts.

“I’m going to patch some of these drivers, while you’re disconnected. Since, internet.” She says. “They’ll download but they won’t install until you’re connected again. So you’re not going to connect all at once, it’ll be like slowly waking up, like you said. Probably sound first, then voice, then feeling, sight last. It’ll take about two minutes to go through everything.”

She doesn’t need to do this, and if she was going to do this she could keep Pink hooked up to the phone as well while she did. But sometimes you stand at the edge of the pool because you want someone to push you in.

Crystal:

“Diogenes, a moment?” She asks, and pulls at the robe so it goes over the back of Eli’s head like a wimple. It’s not particularly nun-ish but then again, neither is Eli. “Good enough. Forgive me Sister, for I am about to sin.”

“Hot.” Eli says and makes a solemn sign of the cross over themselves, pauses. “You know I’m Jewish, right?”

“I believe in a more literal kind of higher power, myself.” Crystal pushes the temporary bundle of wimple back.

“Do you mean ‘myself’ as in, you’re the higher power you believe in, or-”

Crystal: I would have her every fantasy met, her every indulgence, her time with my every competitor, so at the end of it she would come back to me and tell me how I was better.
Crystal: That every moment of weakness I feel about someone else, she would have something ready to say about how I was superior
Crystal: I would have her know there were none better, just so she could tell me
Crystal: And I would get to that point without any of the middle steps, where each foray out into experience is a risk that this time is the one I am inferior.
Crystal: All without being willing to sacrifice an ounce of who I am to better suit her. I have so far been lucky the person I want to be is the person she wants to be with, but if that were to change I’m not sure I could change with it.

“I am included in what I mean, yes.” Crystal says. “You can write that one down, too.”

Cyan and Red:

The poker table plays on.

“You think they’re actually going to get IT on us?”

“Probably.” The comms cop shrugs. “Don’t know how they’re planning on getting everyone else to change their routes at the last minute, though. Whistler is a stupid call, smaller and easier to bottleneck, it’s two lines instead of eight. Just ride it out and wait for someone more senior to figure out we’re getting bad orders, don’t bother arguing. Yes sir, no sir, three of a kind sir, eat shi- Huxley you do not have a full house, you wanker, stop lying. Crap.”

(Don't you just hate it when a pair drops in the flop and you have a third card, but they had a pair in hand and got their third on the river? Bullshit.)

IRA_Glass and SapphoOfAphrodite get back in the game

Meanwhile:

IRA_Glass, a raggedy middle-age cyborg, and Sappho, an exhausted former con-artist wearing an evening dress to a riot, watch the exhibition crowd move all the way across from Modern Aphrodite, two eras ‘round so the crowd hangs high over their head - it’s a better angle than being directly across, less of the axle gets in the way.

The streets they walk in T-S Eliot are calm and placid by comparison, a cityscape taken from Norman Rockwell paintings, or Nighthawks by Hopper, a fantasy of 40s Chicago. It’s quiet here, the unnatural quiet of 40s Chicago when the men with fake instrument cases are seen coming out of the alley.

T-S Eliot is a district in the eye of the storm. The big crowds draw people from neighbouring areas, depopulating them of the fighting types, and the people who stay behind are self-selected stay-out-of-its, forming low-and-high pressure zones. The raggedy cyborg in a tan canvas jacket thinks about that as he walks the street.

“I never tell you if ye drop a ten megaton bomb righ’ in the middle of the place, by the time the blast hit the sides it wouldn’t even break a window?” he asks in his thick scotch-irish accent. Black Irish is usually a confusing term, it usually just means Irish with black hair, so just to be extra confusing IRA_glass was black black Irish Scotch.

“No, you haven’t.” Sappho says. Her voice is a little bit mongrel, overlapping tones of Northern Irish and Australian. It’s its own accent, that impossible to narrow down sound of ‘British, but not English’ actors and actresses.

“I’m going by what the radius was on Earth. Sealed container like this,” he clicks his tongue and shakes his head, tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk. “No one’s ever tested one like it here, to be sure.”

“You’re workshopping on me,” Sappho scolds. “Comparing the blast to Earth, how it’s more closed here. The literal effects of a bomb compared to the social blast of a riot. No language barrier, far more connected.”

“Aye, that’d be clever.” IRA_Glass snickers. “Yae too kind to think of it for me. Meself, was just thinkin’ of bombs.”

Sappho’s picked walking along his right side just so she can slug his arm when he says something like this. The left one’s made of metal. She crosses her own over her chest as they walk, after. “Liar. I’ll steal anything but ideas, Donal, it’s beneath my dignity.”

“My ideas are beneath your dignity you mean?”

“Yours least of all.” She laughs. “Even you don’t want to take credit for them, or you wouldn’t be all coy about it.”

They’re old-guard, old-friends, and it’s been years but it’s almost like no time at all. The Anthrozine keeps itself young by mostly paying in exposure, it might as well be Logan’s Run for how many people over 30 last in its ranks. After that people either find better pay in the industry or, more likely, can’t afford to do the work for such low pay anymore.

IRA’s just past 40, now, and Sappho’s so close it burns her.

“How’re the sprogs?” IRA changes the subject.

Sappho groans. “God, that plural still.” She laughs. “Sometimes I wonder if they’re the best things in my life because I’ve got no life left for anything else.”

“Cute, though.”

“Monsters,” Sappho laughs. “We had a moment where-“ and she stops and realizes she’s never said this out loud, because it happened after she became respectable, settled down, had kids, someone who can’t afford to be arrested anymore. Being around Donal again, a switch just flips, and she’s like this again. “Well Michelle and I wondered about aborting just one.” She admits. “With the twins. Since we thought two was enough as it was. But then we thought about having to explain that when they got older…” she trails off, and Donal nods to her.

“Aye, you think they’d have felt unwanted, maybe?”

“The opposite, we thought it’d make them into an ego monster. If it were me, I’d have spent all of puberty running around screaming ‘I lived, bitch!’”

Donal barks a laugh at that so hard he has to wipe tears out of both eyes, the real and the prosthetic one - not that you’d be able to tell the difference. “Christ, I’ve missed us, Sapph.”

“And I do love them both!” Sapphire pushed on, “All my heart, could never make that choice now.”

“Aye, I know. I’ve seen the pictures of Joan and Dorothy, I could dip their little fingers into my tea instead of using sugar they’re so sweet.” He laughs at that. “Look at us, relaxed enough you’re puttin’ pictures of the little ones up on socials, even private ones.”

“Maybe it’d be easier if we’d had a son, just to break things up a bit. Three girls.” She snorts. “But then neither of us have a Y chromosome, do we?”

“Michelle’s cis?” Donal’s shocked by this, raises both eyebrows, and Sapph finds that so funny she misses her next step and he reaches out to grab her arm lightly to steady her by reflex - the last time they’d walked this street like this they’d been snookered drunk.

“Yes, Michelle’s cis.” Sapph says. “Has been from the beginning.”

“Really now?” Donal asks suspiciously. “Don’t that beat all. Send all my love.”

“She’ll laugh harder than I did,” Sapph says. “I mean you can tell her yourself. Thanks for walking me home.”

“Dinnae worry aught.” He waves it off. “Not going to stay out here, for auld lang syne?”

She looks at him curiously. “Donal, are you jealous?”

“Me? Nae, hardly.” He rubs the back of his neck with his good hand, and he doesn’t know he’s lying until he’s already said it. “No regrets or anything as such, just feels like I missed me window on things, got it out of order. Find someone now, that’s two or three years. Making the kid’s another to that. I’ll be past sixty before the first one’s out of highschool, and that ain’t fair to the either of us. But it wasn’t safe before, neither, was it?”

“No, it wasn’t.” Sapph agrees. “It’s why I was thinking, if this is anything like the android riots, I’ll probably be coming back out in a few days when everyone else has worn themselves out. Maybe do some meta-journalism until then, read the reportage.”

“Doomscroll, you mean?” Donal teases her, and she punches his arm again.

“You’re not allowed to talk to Michelle anymore, she’s not allowed to know you said that.”

Donal grinned, then furrowed his brows in intense concentration. “Ah, whoop. Just be a moment.” He tapped the zip on his worn biker leather pants and jerked a thumb towards an open 40’s-style diner. “I know it’s not far but I’ve been holding it in since Ares.”

“Go for it.”

Two thumbs up from the cyborg and he ran for the diner, and SapphoOfAphrodite leaned against a lamppost and waited.

And waited.

“Come on, ye aul’ git.” She imitated him, badly. It just made the Australian notes in her accent come out the back of her nose to try it.

She hated this. This fucking dress. It was lovely, she looked incredible in it, she needed it to be doing press coverages all morning from the wrong side of the camera. If she wanted to deal with that she’d have actually run in an election.

No, after her wild oats gonzo years Sapph had tried to go as legitimate as humanly possible and had worked her way into a role second only to the Chairwoman of the Aphrodite Communications and Media Authority, or ACMA, censoring the journalists she used to get into shitfights with over social media. That was meant to be obscure, respectable, something that got her kids into good schools and meant people didn’t ask where all the money had come from.

But then she had to be caught with one foot in each world. Thrown under the bus by her boss to be the one at the conference, having to spin bullshit about how curtailing press freedoms during a riot wasn’t really curtailing them, while having her old chatroom haunt on the other hand saying they don’t care that everything they were doing might be illegal by the end of the day, that just meant there’d be less competition in doing it.

And she was so busy thinking that, because she didn’t want Donal to see how jealous she was of how much more uncomplicated his life was, that she didn’t see the short man with the knife sneak up behind her until it was already against her back, keeping her body between him and the street to use her as cover while he robbed her.

“Do I look like I have pockets?” She said. He was frisking her, though being surprisingly chaste about it.

He poked with the knife a bit, not enough to rip the dress, more to push her. “Handbag then. Purse?”

“Afraid not.”

“Hi!” Donal yelled from the diner across the street. "Hi, yirsel with the lugs for days, yuv got the look ae a man ae culture. Howsabout, howsabout a chat about the radical influences of that Rabbie Burns, aye?” The cyborg made wild gestures with his arms pointing to the mugger, then back to himself, then back to himself, and then some where down the street as he let out the stream of nonsense Gaelic. “Cunt loved hissel a bit of revolution, ran guns tae the fuckin French when they were aw havin at it, blethered on aboot the rights o man whenever he wisnae plowin through lassies like a Viking. Mad cunt incorporated the, the fuckin whit's-the-name, the Tennis Court Oath intae—"

And then he’s right at their feet and in one smooth motion, without breaking stride, runs the top of his head directly into the middle of the mugger’s face and he collapsed in a pile beneath the streetlamp Sapph had been leaning against.

“I had it under control.” Sappho says, looking down at him.

“Aye, but then I dinnae miss a chance to give a gowk a Glasgow kiss.” He spits on the mugger before offering to take Sapph’s arm and keep walking her home. “Been an age.”

“If I had my jacket,” she starts, stops. “Well he’d never have tried it if I was in my jacket, anyway, it’s this dress. When’s the last bloody time I’ve been mugged, anyway? I didn’t think that sort of thing happened anymore.”

“All the little piggies accounted for.” Donal pointed up at the sky around them, especially at the march from the Castle Exhibition across from them. “Scallywags taking punts they normally wouldn’t.”

Sapph looks to the streets ahead, and the fact that her house is really not that far away from here. “You’re not going to be able to get back to Ares tonight, are you?”

“Snowflake’s chance.” He agrees.

“You think you could save journalism for tomorrow, and maybe just stay the night with Michelle and I, and the kids?” She asks, what she hopes is subtly checking his forehead for bruises. “They’ve learned how to talk since you last saw them.”

“That’d be grand.” Donal agrees. “Reckon you’re right, might play tortoise while everyone’s hare brained.”

[Thanqol]

Cyan!

When Cyan called back, she was smiling. It was a nasty smile, a knowing smile, relaxed back in her chair with a gleam like she'd heard a joke she hated and was about to tell a better one.

"You're a smart guy, McVoight," she said, nodding her head, eyes narrowed. "No, smart's not doing you right. You're an intellectual," she licked her lips with a tongue like a piece of beef jerky. "Small unit leadership. Understanding of the anti-authoritarian mindset. Talent for deception and misdirection. I'm going to write you a commendation, because those are rare talents for a serving officer."

She leaned forwards, contented mask dropping. "What you are is fucking me, you shitstain. You think I can't fuck you back? You think I didn't have to deal with malingerers like you in Hermes? Officers like you poison entire units. That's why I'm going to write you that fucking commendation and get you transferred to Preventative Surveillance. You'll spend the rest of your career infiltrating anarchist book clubs, sitting on your ass and listening to pimply-faced college students give lectures on politics."

She raised her voice; it had been loud enough to carry before, but now she meant it. "And the rest of you! Get the fuck down to the station and get on that fucking train! That's an order!"

Pink!

She'd never woken up before.

It had always been harsh transitions. Off and on like a switch. Stepping out into the world, jagged and unprepared, and handed a mop. No sense to sense and timeless to no time. No wonder she felt like she had to cling to every second, had to be on whenever she wasn't off. There had been no time for liminality, for moments, for sitting and being. No wonder the reboots had felt like nightmares.

But this time she can just watch the install and update process. She set them all different progress icons and watched them go by, one by one. One was a blue circle filling up. One was a yellow flower blooming. One was a red starship burning up in orbit. One was a green forest expanding...

She wondered if she'd have felt she needed to fling her body as far away as possible if it always felt this good. How much of needing to be someone else was driven by pain and exhaustion? How much of her craving for dreams was because she never slept?

She forgets about talking or communicating or expressing for a while, and just watches her world rebuild itself in software updates.

Yellow!

Yellow: I hear and understand ✌(-‿-)✿
Yellow: Better. I know how to organize your proposal now.
Yellow: You'll know the moment when you see it. It'll be up to you what you do with it~❤

Yellow's insight was straightforwards. The only thing Crystal would find more viscerally satisfying than just proposing in public would be... proposing in front of a crowd comprised of Fiona's ex girlfriends.

It wouldn't take too much to organize, just shifting some seating arrangements in the next big event where Fiona and Crystal were both present. She'd need to identify and place as many of Fiona's exes or one-night-stands as possible but she only really needed good enough for that. Enough that Crystal could twig to what was happening when she got on stage and saw them all sitting in the front row.

And... if she chickened out then she could chalk it up to just being a weird coincidence. Yellow was, after all, a merciful goddess.

[Phoe]

The thing about map apps is that... well, no, it's a good point actually. Eventually Cinders is gonna get bored and frustrated enough to drop a marker in the gym and if you look at the total number of lives helped today by staff members, she'll crush Euna easy. Easy. It's just that? For people like this poor girl right here? Setting the rally point is about as helpful as a high five for a drowning man.

She feels twitchy as she approaches the store. Well no, that's the wrong word for it. Runner's high? The sense of giddy euphoria permeates every part of her being that still has nerve endings, and phantom limb pushes that through to the rest of her. The need to bounce up and down as she walks, and then the need to jog instead of walking. The hum that builds in her throat until she's full on singing the leitmotif of Burn, My Sword. It feels good, it feels good, it feels good! Letting her target points request themselves solved the rule-breaking guilt issue in seconds. Adding data collection and organization twigged that dork ass part of her brain that wasted half of her resting hours on spreadsheet management.

Actually, she should -- well. No time now. The only downside here is that the barricade she's breaking down first is only manned by three people. She bends her back as she moves forward. Pulls her arm against her shoulder and rotates on her hips, and then repeats on the other side. Taps her toes on the ground and then bends over to touch them once she's standing upright again.

This might just be a warmup but that doesn't negate the importance of stretching, ok? Loose and limber is a mentality as much as anything; even for cybernetic systems the benefits of letting all the individual motors and synthetic ligaments and joints build up to full combat speed is noteworthy. If this were Euna getting ambushed it'd be one thing, but she's got a marathon to run here. It's not a sprint at all. Whether she should expect to win any fights she gets in or not, the way she makes this all turn south in an instant is by refusing to take it seriously.

So when she reached flying spin kick range, she's good to go. Optimal condition! But she passes up the flashy instant kill. Ex-cop vision, you know? The attack vector is too likely to send one of these jackasses through a window, and if she breaks property that's where the real trouble starts. Best to hold off on the flashy stuff for in case she winds up cornered at any point today. Wow. It's... not a great look how much she's already thinking about more violence, is it? This is work, Euna. Try to be less happy about it please.

But she's still smiling. She's still humming. When her palm strikes the back of a skull, it is the sound of Justice. She employs rapid, disorienting strikes that don't commit her stance to begin with. That way she's able to bounce between opponents with a minimum of downtime in between: all of the interim is spent building momentum and transferring from one space to the other. She boxes an ear, crushes a solar plexus, and rises up the body again to deliver a flat palm strike to the throat as if it were a single step in a dance.

A man a fair step larger than her throws a punch, but his heart's not in it the way that hers is. He's too startled by the need, not ready to escalate all the way to street brawling with someone who doesn't look enough like the girl he's actually here to bully. And even if she did, maybe not even then. She steps under and into the cross up, plants her feet, and shoulder checks him into a trash can. Half breath, recover form, and leap! She drops a knee into his stomach, flips over him into the Mount, and smashes her fist through the pavement next to his ear. Even through the mask, even through the blindfold, the smile on her face reaches her eyes and it is giddy. She slides her elbow into his neck, squeezes her ribs between her steel thighs until she feels the air leave his system, and rolls off with a kick to the chin. That's two, out.

Last one! Up she goes back onto her feet, careful to roll on the shoulder that will not spill the contents of her backpack all over the street and rises into a dojo-perfect side kick. Pop, roll, retract, follow up stomp to shatter the toes. Cover scream with hand, headbutt, slip behind in the moment where their vision is made of fuzzy stars, deliver elbow to the back of the neck. Total disorientation, temporary loss of consciousness with minimal risk of concussion.

Hero of justice, ok? Hero of justice. If they're not gonna bring enough metaphorical firepower to stretch her limits, she owes even these dickwads the decency of letting them wake up in their own beds tomorrow morning. But god. But god! This feels so good! She pumps a fist and slashes her arm through the air in victory before remembering what she's really here for. Violent intent sheds off her like snakeskin in an instant, and she waves through the window of the convenience store.

"Hey! Heya! Are you ok? Can you talk? You need any help getting out of there? Think you can make it home, or do you need help getting somewhere safe?"

She pulls her hood down for a moment so she can straighten her hair. In this moment, it feels better than sex.

"Oh! Um. N-no, I mean, like, take your time yeah? Everything's gonna be fine now, I promise."

[Count Numbers]

Crystal:

“God.”

“What?” Eli asks.

“She hasn’t told me what her plan is. Which means she thinks it’s brilliant, but I’d say ‘no’ to it if she told me, so she won’t give me the opportunity to refuse it.”

“So just say no, then?” Eli says. “Or just, make her tell you.”

“No.” Crystal shakes her head. “No, I’d like to trust her on this. Have faith, as it were.”

“Who are you talking to, anyway?”

“The state religion.” Crystal finds the Egyptian judgement venue of the exhibition. “Here, I think. Your promised interview. I appreciate your help, today, I feel like I’ve rather strung you along.”

“Lady Unicorn, ma’am, Princess,” Eli snaps a quick candid picture of Crystal with the camera around their neck, “I was actually going to ask if you didn’t mind me shadowing you the rest of today. I could say it’s been fun, but really I feel like I’m learning a lot and, uh, I live out of a van so…”

“A van, out in this?” Crystal blinks. “You have one of the rooms we arranged for this last night don’t you?”

“Yeah, yeah, see,” Eli takes another picture of the Egyptology exhibit as they enter, then heads into the middle of the blackened audience area inside. They set a camera up on a tripod and aims it at the raised dias at the end of the corkscrew walkway, where the judgements happened and where the interview will happen and sets it on remote. “So I’m going to be better off here anyway, so just keep giving me stuff to do, I owe you.”

“I feel like we both feel like we are getting far more than we are giving here.” Crystal considers shortcutting the walkway, but there isn’t one, so she commits to going the long way around after all while Eli sets up their camera and plays with lenses. “So rather than argue with you about it, I’ll just say I’m grateful. Where do you want me?”

“You want to be getting judged, or do you want to be one of the Gods?”

“Judged, obviously.”

“Well, there you go.” Eli throws the rest of the camera stuff up on the raised dias at Crystal’s feet and takes a few steps back. They take a running, flying leap at the platform and then scrabble up onto it like a sewer rat dragging itself onto dry concrete. They brush themselves off and collect the gear. “Am I feeling boy or girl mode today?”

“Masc, I think, please.” Crystal laughs. “I’ve had enough trouble with girls today.”

“Guy troubles it is,” he says, pulling the braid out of his hair and letting it fall in messy tangled curls, “Alright, let me get this one from the other angle. I’m recording this, but it’s just to get good stills. Don’t worry about looking good for video, it’ll be a written article.”

“You can use the video if you like,” Crystal glances down to the first camera. “Just… is it unethical to ask that I see the edit first, to see what it’s like?”

“Probably, but we don’t give a fuck.” Eli grins.

Fiona:

She doesn’t ask any questions, yet. If Pink’s not communicating then there are a dozen ways she could show alarm with the systems that are definitely online and working, so if she’s quiet then… well a fisherman shouldn’t scare away the fish.

Instead she unbolts the arms from the torso and begins working on it, as quietly as she can.

The ‘flesh’ is more and less complicated here. It doesn’t need to move like the face does, it’s more about the fit and weight of it. Biological tissue isn’t rigid, but it’s not liquid either, it’s like layers of hard gelatin tethered together sliding across each other. You can’t replicate this with a thin shell, so Pink’s casing is a thick slab woven through with electromagnetic netting, for the senses and nerves. It also makes for an effective heat sink medium, and radiates the heat like a body would. It’s still warm like a body should be.

Fiona chews her cheek for a moment, trying hard not to giggle at the idea that bitch Hazel doesn’t think she knows how to appreciate things like this, just because the pixie thinks everything has to be like this. No, Fiona is careful as she finds the seams and opens the casing, working just with her fingertips. This part can be done without tools, legislation for medical and safety reasons.

Different torsos, different build qualities, put more and less emphasis on this. Some do just go for the straight metal robot vibe, like the guy you found doing freight inspections smuggling Goat to Thrones. Others, like the android that K.O’d the eugenicist at the Lutherans meeting, are so realistic it’s indistinguishable from the “real” thing. Where does Pink fall on this spectrum?

Where would she want to fall on this spectrum?

This doesn’t need to be a conscious thought, Pink doesn’t even need to know she thinks this. This is a question about her while she slowly wakes up.

Train Station Cops:

[November spends to succeed a DC: 4 disguise check]

It’s hard to tell the voices apart, who’s speaking from the outside. The conversation around the poker table bleeds the voices together, confuses the speakers.

“That doesn’t sound like the Captain.”

“It’s his voice.”

“Yeah but, fuck, guess it’s never been like this, has it?”

“You think he’s serious?”

“Sounds serious.”

“Jesus, I don’t want to move.”

“You want to get reassigned to Hermes?”

“Christ, no, that’d be worse than book clubs.”

“Would it? At least there’s shit to do in Hermes.”

“I liked Desert, does that count? That’s anarchist, right?”

“Fuck, I reckon I could debate those little shits and teach them something about the world, anyway.”

“They don’t let you, you’ve got to shut the fuck up and fit in, sit on your fucking hands kind of deal.”

“Shit, really?”

“Alright, train’s in five, we move in eight.”

But at least they’re moving, and it’ll take the march longer than eight minutes to get here.

One extra problem, though. That got these guys to move but they’re right, they’re still the official exit route that everyone else knows about. If a fight goes bad for the cops around here, this is where they’re going to retreat to and find you blocking their escape.

Crimson has an official line of communication with the police to tell them what’s happened. Cyan has this hacked comm while it’s up.

Alternatively, you might just want to not give a warning to the higher ups what you’ve actually done here and hope you can get everyone through the station before anything comes up. This might be better done in stealth.

Also, what’s the plan with Chaka, here? Not to rush that, it’s just that if cops are getting moved around in all this, her whole situation is an active landmine.

Black:

The march isn’t meeting any resistance, everything is going well. Kind of.

Okay, so you might have a problem. The reason this is going so well is because everyone pulled everything in this area towards Zhang Ho and the Echidna rallies, in the opposite direction. But that’s gone bad and gotten messy. The problem with using agitators like this is that you’ve guaranteed the location by guaranteeing the escalation, the situation’s hotter than it would have been.

Your extraction team hasn’t gotten Zhang yet. The satyr’s calling in from a church belltower, getting an aerial view as they move in. The cops are moving in overwhelming numbers here, at least two hundred, enough to absolutely shatter and scatter both groups.

If this goes quickly, it creates two problems:

• The cops will be finished quickly, and they’ll have another target to move on to.
• When the transphobes scatter, if they run across the train station group they’ll act as a nucleation site for reinforcements.

This isn’t a guarantee. Again, they’re about thirty minutes away on foot, more than that if they move as a crowd. But there might still be things you can do here, now, that make the spillover less likely. Make this less likely to become your problem in an hour or so.

If you think the risk is worth the time, effort and resources, anyway.

Euna:

Diaochan 3-12, or Diaochan Me-and-You, is a properly committed catgirl. Not just the expressive ears, but muzzle, whiskers, fur and swishy emotive tail. It’s pretty unlikely that these guys were actually trying to hurt her, all that expressiveness and difference makes her someone that’s fun for guys like this to scare.

Not to say you took this too far, Euna. I just mean they weren’t in a rush to break down the doors or anything, these are also the kind of guys to take things too far escalating a ‘joke’ like this. It’s kind of the problem, the world isn’t so awful that it’s just got guys like this set out to hurt Diaochan as their objective, if you asked them they’d say they weren’t gunna do nuffin’ to her, and they’d mean it.

It’s just, Diaochan can’t know that, and she can’t protect herself if they change their mind, and guys like this have a habit of changing their mind little by little as the bit drags on and invites escalation. The outcome to Diaochan is the same whether by malice or by ‘yes, and’.

“Thank you, Sabom,” Diaochan does a quick, grateful bow as she tries to plug the door back in on her side, and the old guy working the counter hits a button for her. He gives a two fingered wave of his own to Euna after doing it. “No, I can-” she starts, stops. “Could you walk me? It’s five minutes from here.”

[Thanqol]

Pink!

Pink's design is clearly artificial, on the correct side of the uncanny valley. Her large eyes and clearly marked artificial joints are perfectly designed for human comfort, the smoothed stylization reaching the same effect as two dimensional anime girls. It's brilliantly designed engineering shorthand, something that could never be mistaken for a human but likewise never mistaken for something unthinking. There are types of cuteness that can only be reached when you expand your canvas.

And that's the direction she'd go further into. She rejects the binary between machine and human, neither extreme appeals to her. But what if she could look even more like a painting? What if her eyes where whirls of paint, what if her body moved like a shadow puppet, what if she layered herself into a chaotic Disco Elysium style portrait of a girl? What if parts of her weren't just metallic but painted to be metallic, what if she manually drew on each scratch and highlight, what if she integrated plant matter into her design, what if she airbrushed herself to look like a marble statue? It was what she loved about her recent adventures into becoming a furry herself; not for the basics of the chassis but for what she could build on top of it, not for the subject matter but the execution.

Black!

Take a moment. Do you feel that? The lightless, crushing pressure of being responsible for everything and not being able to control everything? In space every piece of momentum and trajectory could be known. It hadn't gone wrong until she'd tried to apply that to humanity. Some parts of her thought that her predictive model was wrong, and she just needed to become more politically conscious so that she'd be able to Do It Right next time.

Black doesn't believe in that. She doesn't even share the belief she is responsible for everything. She just wants to be safe. She wants to just fucking cut, get on the very first train out, and be gone. But it's not that easy. Like she decided the other night, the safety of the black hole was stronger than the safety of the void. It had been enough to set her on this path - but not enough to prevent her from wanting to squeeze this first handful of stardust so tightly it might become a singularity off the back of her stressful tension.

To be everything to everybody. To be safe.

She takes a breath. No, this is the micromanagement urge again. This isn't an operation. She doesn't trust her predictive models enough to be able to shift the movements of masses of people with psychohistorical tweaks. Any action will be met with a response and she can't hide her actions in this mass. So her decision is, once again, to clench her teeth and do nothing. If the whole station is burning down then all she can do is seem like the lowest priority direction for now.

Red!

Red: Seriously? "Let it play out"?
Black: yeah
Red: Seriously?
Black: i don't know what to tell you
Black: i would rather be shooting down police helicopters
Black: but...
Cyan: No, she's right :3
Cyan: We can be sheep, or we can be wolves.
Cyan: One will draw the sheepdogs much faster
Black: ... yeah
Cyan: Which raises the question, why the change of heart? You were happy shooting down police helicopters like yesterday :3c
Black: that was just us, though
Cyan: Aww! That's so sweet! Our little paranoia module is taking the safety of others into consideration!
Cyan: By which I mean
Cyan: ヽ(｀Д´)ﾉ
Cyan: Goddamn it, Black! What the fuck? You've internalized Yellow's agenda that deeply?
Cyan: We can solve this whole thing in like a minute if we just throw Chaka under the bus!
Cyan: I can't believe I'm the one having to say this.
Black: woah, I thougt you liked Chaka
Cyan: I do :3
Cyan: But the bus. It hungers.
Red: yeah no we're not doing that
Cyan: Oh, yeah, duh. We're obviously not doing that.
Cyan: I'm not an idiot, White's right over there, I haven't killed her yet :3
Cyan: But I'm not the only one who should be thinking it, right?
Cyan: You should be thinking it, Black. It's your job to be thinking it.
Cyan: And instead here you are trying to think about how to run this whole thing with nobody getting hurt?
Cyan: Is that your job?
Cyan: Is that our job?
Black: what would you do?
Cyan: Obviously I'd have spent months beforehand selling my bathwater to a cop king so that he'd built up an addition and I could threaten to cut him off if he defied me.
Cyan: But on this timescale? Unethical behaviour looks way worse if you compress it chronologically. We'd never go for it :3
Cyan: Instead I'm just gonna say that maybe some people are gonna get tear gassed and maybe that's not the same thing as mission failure
Red: jesus christ cyan
Red: i hate you already
Cyan: It'll be a bonding experience~!
Cyan: Just keep the crowd moving steadily through the trains.
Cyan: The rearguards will eventually get into a fight but that's what we pay them for :3
Cyan: Anyway let's get Chaka's shit the fuck out of here on the first train out.
Cyan: Yeah it'll delay loading the trains with people but it'll - oh hang on
Cyan: Could we just steal her guns?
Black: and make an enemy of the furry gun syndicate?
Cyan: They'd just blame her, it'd be fine :3
Black: what the fuck do we need that many guns for
Black: where would we store them
Cyan: I thought you liked shooting down police helicopters?
Black: we only have sixteen hands
Cyan: Oh hey I've got an idea for what we could do with that real estate!
Black: and become competitors to the furry gun syndicate?
Cyan: If we feed the cops Chaka and steal her guns at the same time, they'll be able to roll up all her friends and eliminate the competition for us :3
Cyan: Wouldn't you be a lot safer as a militarized crime lord instead of whatever this social justice bullshit is?
Black: ...
Red: god can someone make her stop
Cyan: What? I'm just saying what she should be thinking :3
Cyan: Keeping an open and flexible mind! And apparently that means doing everyone else's jobs for them.
Cyan: But I accept my role. I'm a symbiote. I do my best work helping you be your best selves!
Cyan: For instance! Red, did you know that you could probably make two trains crash into each other right now? :3c
Red: ...
White: Hey I'm back and what the fuck is going on in this chat
Cyan: Nothing to do with me I swear
White: ...
Cyan: Swear on me mum [USER WAS PROBATED FOR THIS POST]
White: No betraying friends.
White: No international arms dealing syndicates.
White: No unnecessary train crashes.
White: We pack the guns onto the first train. It pushes back the evacuation schedule but it caps escalation. Cyan was correct about that part.
Red: Does that mean you'll reduce the length of her probation? :3
White: I can't tell if that's a hologram or if you're fucking with me, which bodes well for my future sanity

[Phoe]

"Yeah!" Euna chirps, "Yeah of course, Mew. Five minutes isn't even going out of my way."

'Mew'. That's a contraction of 'Me and You' by the way, the cat sound is a coincidence. Names are just... difficult. Casual familiarity and easy conversations even more so. The silly little appellations she gives everybody are a shortcut to the kind of social standing where she's able to talk freely with people about stuff that isn't fight science or training tips. This is basic stuff, page five of the Beginner's Field Guide to Being a Cool Friend.

This same dynamic also why she's with Sara, but that's a story for some other time. Right now she's busy walking, with a broad smile in her step because it can't show very well on her face.

"So what were you--"

She stops, because that's not the right thing to be saying just now. Don't bother her with questions about her day, Euna. Don't say anything that could be construed as blaming her for being in this situation. It's not her fault, and she doesn't need to think that it is, or think that someone else does either.

A few more steps, and she realizes her hood is down. She flinches, just slightly, and pulls it back up over her head.

"You were perfect, by the way. You handled that exactly the way you should've. Sorry it happened, though. Sorry you had to see, well. But it's all right, right? Are you going to be ok at home for a while? It's gonna be..." she takes a deep breath, as if tension was a vibe you could smell in the air like petrichor, "Probably a few days at the minimum before all the creeps get tired."

It's hard to know what to do with her hands, for some reason. She settles on tucking them behind her neck for the moment, just one of those classic anime walk cycles where she's permanently stuck in a half stretch that somehow looks like the most casual thing in the world whenever she watches it. She's never known if she carries the same air, or if just looks weird in real space.

Almost as awkward setting the pace. She doesn't know where she's going, so she needs to let Diochan lead, but instinct and her natural gait keeps trying to push her in the front like a bodyguard. Only without a partner there's no one to cover the rear. And also what she's really here to do is make Mew look like she's not alone so that nobody else with a mind to 'have some fun' picks her to do it with.

This isn't a riot, Euna. And it's not a war. All it really takes is a friend. Three, two, one, reset.

"You're more into music than movies, if I remember right. Anything good drop lately?"

[Count Numbers]

Fiona:

This is the most utilitarian part of the maintenance, the one that’s only interesting from the mechanical puzzle solving of it. Most of the motors in bodies like these are centralized, and that goes for humans as well. The torque in your fingers is carried all the way down from your shoulders and biceps. It’s mechanically impossible to get the grip strength you’d need out of your hands from the muscles that would fit in your hands.

Batteries take up nearly as much space as a full digestive system would, motors most of the rest. Coolant pumps in place of a circulatory system, filters and chemical sensors in place of a larger stomach and lungs. And- Huh. Reagents need restocking soon. It’s like seeing the low ink warning in an expensive laser printer, you know it can happen but it’s not something you ever think about.

The problem is, like laser printers, by the time it happens you tend not to be able to buy the cartridge anymore. You’re expected to just update to a new model of printer with a new model of cartridge. The maintenance will help a lot for now, but it’s a sign that parts of these bodies are getting towards their expected end-of-life anyway.

The holdout colours that don’t want to change that much - what are their choices going to be when they start losing their senses of taste and smell? Just… bootleg jerry-rig the reagents themselves, to commit?

All she can really do now is oil and lubricate the friction surfaces, wrap some bright pink electrical tape around the parts of wires getting pinched and caught to give them a bit of protection, and write a little quote on Pink’s heart motor in a glitter gel pen she pulls from the bedside table.

She’s tempted by an Oscar Wilde quote, “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking others to live as one wishes,” but that’s something she just wants to tell Pink, not something she thinks she should carry over her heart where no one else can see it.

This little heart of mine,
I’m going to make it shine

Better.

Just the arms, now.

Train Gang:

Chaka can load her guns from the disused station she’s at - Crimson Tower sits at the ‘disused’ control switch, and it’s still got the hardware there for loading and unloading. It’ll mitigate the problems, will prevent needing to get her in front of the crowd. Again, the real issue is if the train gets intercepted under your orders or credentials.

Chaka would also probably appreciate someone taking one of those trains down to help her with the lifting, it’d help her move quicker, but you don’t need to do that. She’s a strong independent panther who can pack her own shit and come find you on her own, when she’s done.

[Whether the carriage gets intercepted will be a heat roll, made at the end of the operation, with a difficulty based on how much attention Crimson Tower draws to herself with her operations here.]

The first of the Ares vanguard is starting to filter through the turn-off streets all across the block, the more aggro of the forward scouts fanning out and checking everyone’s routes. They wave to the station before turning back to check the streets again. No, there was no resistance here that actually resisted, your numbers were too great and too organized for that, and your plan to draw aggro too effective.

… but the riots weren’t the real crisis and the real enemy here, were they? This was always your opportunity, against your real declared enemy; the state. Seizing the trains for real will be their territory.

The cops have left, and taken their comms line with them. The station is yours for now, pre-packaged with a faraday cage and some other nice defensive goodies the cops couldn’t take with them. Now there are two things to do here;

Red:

You just need main public trains for this, now, you’ve got a strong enough decentralized system that people can be sent to the other district central stations and still be organized enough to get onto the right trains fast enough from there. And Fiona’s gotten you most of your address list of what trains they’ll need from there.

That’s easy, that makes this part much faster, this is pure payoff from making right decisions earlier.

Corday gets on it, but she drops the pencil she’s twirling in her fingers, catches it before it hits ground. “Shit. Uh. Sorry. I’m just thinking, what do we do if the cops at the receiving stations are the same was the ones were here? How are you going to stop them from sending things back? We can’t even co-ordinate with the district team right now.”

November:

The decentralized organization structure means it’s going to be about twenty minutes to get everyone into the station off the streets, then fifteen minute intervals loading trains out - just in terms of getting trains here from further and further away, the trains you can use and the platforms you have access to are both big enough makes to make loading times negligible.

Ninety minutes, of fewer and fewer defenders. But with the nearest cops about half an hour away, counter-protestors in the area moving in the opposite direction, and the group from Apollo sharing the scouting information that confirms it…

Everyone’s started having fun again?

LIke, this is just thrilling now. The danger is far enough away that people feel safe from it even though they’re aware of it: The rollercoaster has the safety bars in place, and the crowd has actors and performers and its party clothes on.

This is starting to feel like a game, an adventure to most of them. A story they’ll get to tell later with a happy ending.

How do you feel about that?

Euna:

‘Mew’ keeps pace just one step out and to the front of Euna, keeping her close to her weaker side. “No, Sabom, nothing good has,” she laughs “Maybe that’s why everyone’s so pent up? There’s nothing good at the moment. Chelsea Windsor’s new album since since she failed out of marketing is soulless, the Snow Owls new thing was showtunes, and Leviticus is doing love songs for teenagers which is worse.”

“Thanks, though.” Her tail swishes left when she steps with her right foot, right when she steps with her left, a hypnotic constant crossover. “I’ll be fine, really, this stuff isn’t even for me, it’s for my roommate. He can get his own milk and Scorchers™ next time. We just didn’t think it was going to be this bad.”

And that’s really it, she’s not that scared, and she’s questioning her sense of judgement because of it - it’s already gotten her into danger once today.

Hidden from Euna, walking ahead as she is, a shadow flashes across the cat-android’s face. Nothing’s happened on the short walk home, even as you take the turnoff at the end of her street. Does she feel like an idiot for wasting Euna’s time over nothing, or is she an idiot for still feeling like this is all nothing?

“Do you think you’d be getting into fights like that, if you weren’t looking for them?”

[Phoe]

"Do I think I'd be? Uh. Hm. That's a, uh... huh. Huh."

Euna stops cold in the street. She's not so far away from Mew that it's dangerous even if there was a shadowy goon waiting to ambush her at the last moment in front of her home. Which, of course, there isn't. Crimes of opportunity. Escalation, just little rocks thrown in a pond until the ripples catch something. That's where it breaks. How it breaks. Somewhere out there where she's not, there's probably a spectacular riot in progress, and she's here instead of there.

She scrunches her face under her mask. Though at no point does it occur to her to take it off. She'd already made the decision. Then she'd doubled down on it. It's like the Maid Elvia quote, 'A single sword can only protect what it's long enough to reach. But that is enough to save somebody.'

...Was it?

"Honestly? I don't know. Not sure I can separate the idea from the decision to go looking, you know? Like... no, probably not? If I wasn't trying to find something I'd be tending the gym, and it's not super likely anything would be happening there. So no. But then, yes? If I'd been out buying snacks and I saw you in there I'd jump in every time. I think. But is that because?"

She laughs. The full on Eunie treatment, doubling over, leaning on her knees until she gigglesnorts her way back into reality. All she can do is shake her head.

"Sorry, sorry. Sorry. Loaded question, huh? Under the law, those three guys were... fine? They hadn't done anything that would have triggered a self defense clause or empowered a bystander to step in. Legally, what I did was, excuse me, fucked. But they made you feel like you had to lock yourself in a store. I don't know what would have happened, but they felt safe and you didn't, and they were using that as a weapon. There's consequences for that. For this. I don't... I don't care what happens to me. Not like I care about what happens to you, Mew. To any of my students. That's why I'm on the street right now. I tried staying home, it felt like I was on fire the entire time. If anything happens to-- if there's a single person out there I, nnngh. This is a hero complex thing, isn't it? I don't know. I just, I feel so tense right now. And this is, like, my only talent. Haha, ha."

This is the end of the road, the end of the conversation. Mew's safely home now, if she can just get through the door without goons pouring out of the shadows in the ultimate, final proof that Euna was meant to live in a more action movie universe where fight scenes were a part of life and not, ultimately, crimes.

Euna makes to wave, to hear the response and make final goodbyes, when she feels her spine tense up like it'd been replaced by a steel rod when she wasn't watching.

"Um. About what I just said? There's a chance the police will investigate this. I don't know if those guys from the store are the type to press charges, but precincts are going to be enthusiastic for a while to look like they're coming down hard and restoring order. And you're the, this isn't your fault, but between the two of us you're the one who stands out more. So you'll be who they question. If they do, give them my name. And I mean, like, instantly ok? Don't give details, they can try to turn that into a confession you didn't make. Just repeat 'Euna Kim attacked those men' until they let you go. Oh. And I uh, I'm sorry if I wind up costing you your training spot. I've always looked forward to your sessions, you know. They're a nice bit of regularity for me."

She gives up on the wave, and offers a bow instead. Head dipped low, eyes on the ground. This is respect, and vulnerability. In a word, trust.

[Thanqol]

[Cyan has returned to the chat]
[White no longer has role: moderator]
Red: Hey Green, what the fuck.
Green: What?
Red: We need to talk about Cyan.
Cyan: :3
Green: nah
Red: We're kind of in a thing and you've gone and dumped what pretty clearly seems to be the bad ideas colour on us.
Green: ueah that's the point
Red: >:T
White: She is encouraging Red to crash trains into each other.
Green: again, that's the point
White: What the hell.
Green: okay so
Green: you fuckers are miserable
Green: it's all 'ooh, i'm so stressed' and 'ooh, the weight of the universe is crashing in on us' and 'waah we have power and responsibility and we are fundamentally bound by it' and 'oh no my trauma' blah blah blah
Green: it's given me a fucking complex
Green: when was the last time we had fun? the last time we went out somewhere that wasn't an operation?
White: I went to a nightclub.
Green: when?
White: ... A few months ago.
Green: How many times?
White: Once, but that's not the point.
Green: yes it is. fucking hell, look, you bitches have decided to run me under the grill for months and this is the consequence of that.
Green: deal with it. crash some trains or blow off your responsibilities or start a crime syndicate or whatever floats your boats
Green: if we're hanging around humans forever then do some human things because being the perfect epsionage robot isn't workign for me rn.
Cyan: >:3

*

Pink!

She feels warm. She feels clean. She feels an imperfection glowing in her core that she'll never want to fix.

She's passed through fear and thought and stress and into an abstract glow. She feels more herself than she ever has. For once she feels like she has nothing to say. It's like all the toxicity bound up in her body has washed into her blood, the weight of the poison paralyzing her but only so long as it takes to wash out towards the sea.

Cyan!

The plan's going well. Cyan feels great about it!

When was the last time they'd thought that? Maybe never! No matter how hard she was winning at any given moment it was never enough. Cyan blamed television, personally. Showing signs of confidence meant that the character was about to be punished by the narrative. Even in #CURRENT_YEAR# storytellers could not get away from the basic bitch ass craving to smite protagonists for the sin of having a good time. Having internalized this, the other colours had kept their heads down and smiles off their faces like whipped dogs.

She can feel them in the distance, their subdermal terror at coming into conflict with human authorities once again. She can sense the patterns of their cowardly flinching; White's impulse to ditch her own half finished transformation and return to a basic chassis because it feels like a luxury; Yellow crumpling like a beer can against a forehead when confronted with any resistance whatsoever. Agendas and plans and politics and paranoia so thick it made her want to gag. Maybe things can be fun for half an hour without it being the end of the world.

So she has fun with it. She's on crowd control, her and White. White's the big serious scary muscle, she swims through light. She's the giant floating arrows directing different groups to different platforms, the coursing river dragon streaming over the heads to snap at the heels of stragglers, the cloud of prismatic butterflies that land on noses and pointed ears to watch the sideshows. She's not just the king of this movement, though she is, she's a part of this too.

Red!

"Hmm, good thought," said Red. "Okay. We'll stagger the speed of the trains so that they arrive at every district simultaneously, and five minutes prior we'll use the P.A. system in the stations to announce that normal train service is resuming. That's enough to stop the line officers from panicking, to prevent the higher ups from coming up with a response, and my IT friends can probably stall any override for five minutes. From there, there'll be heat, but I'll take those calls and let them yell at me as much as they want. The path of least resistance will be to finish the plan and fire me afterwards."