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

[Tatterdemalion]

Aevum!

Gensoukyo. The Land of Illusions.

The styling of the place is self-conscious Classical Japanese: the sloping roof tiles, the dark wooden walls, the lantern out front. Parking’s cramped around back; 3V takes it in with practiced ease, and then they’re in a different sort of privacy, not the anonymizing privacy of being visible by everyone but the cramped privacy of having no eyes on you at all, and while it’s can access the store from the back door, you can also take the back staircase and be up in 3V’s rooms. That’s the whole reason for the place, after all— to be just a flight of stairs away from the possibility of company. The same reason she’d never really consider moving to the Park.

“If you need a ride back,” she says, “it’s no problem after I help close up.” It’s not necessary, given the bus stop around the corner, but that’s only half of what she means. “Upstairs is a mess, but you’re free to crash there. Or behind the counter, if you like. I always like that— getting to see into the employees’ area. It’s always enlightening, seeing the full geometry of a place for the first time, when you strip away what you’re meant to see as an outsider.”

An offer of intimacy, one that’s got nothing to do with vibrating fingers. Stress-testing the fake relationship. Offering a treat as a way of saying thank you, using what she knows she’d appreciate herself.

***

The Park!

“…so the thing is, it plays fantastic on virtual tabletop, but the thing that really elevates it is the companion app. It does everything that you’d expect an app to do— character sheet management, dice rolling, quick reference— but it’s also got a build-your-own-mech feature where you can cobble one together out of segments or customize one of the frames already in the game, and when I plug it into the printer, boom, customized mini. And almost all the time, the player drags me over to the hobby table to figure out their first paint job. There’s something fantastically tactile about that.” She raps her knuckles on the chair, as if reminding her audience that, yeah, she can still feel, maybe better than she used to. “And the mech corps in-game are keyed off different genre archetypes, so you’ve got the one that’s grody and almost organic, with— hey, boss!”

She couldn’t do it. She’s curious, sure. And that curiosity’s eating at her. But if he tells her Ferris’s secrets, then suddenly she’s a wedge right in the middle of whatever they have going on here. She doesn’t know what it is, and something something she who breaks a thing to understand it has left the path of wisdom.

Like a vampire, she has to be invited in. And Ferris just keeps shutting this door on her. So, y’know. It is what it is. She leans back and lets the conversation that was trail off into the nebulous space of “you really gotta try it out, I will bring you the files on a USB if I have to.”

[Rolled a 7 after modifiers.]

[eldest]

Persephone: go to bed york
Persephone: bring bagels tomorrow

It takes far less time than expected for Pink to barge through the door, and Elodie does not see that coming. She swells up and off the stool she'd been sitting on, bobbing up and down like a cork in a swell away from the door, never getting actual airtime. As she does she fumbles her phone, bouncing it off a hand, before a tentacle snares it midair. "Shhh, sshshhshh. Sleeping guy. Behind the couch."

She takes a second to slow her breathing and then crosses the room in a few quick motions, grabbing everything Pink's carrying and squeezing her in a hug. "Thank you, sorry, I actually needed a friend here, today was shit and I can't yell about it because Marco. Uh. There's a mouse furry named Marco who's hiding from the cops and he's asleep behind my couch. So. That's been my day."

She's clearly jittery and the empty stimulant packaging on the counter gives a solid hint why. She reheats the soup, puts the rest on the counter, bolts the door, and retreats to the bedroom. "Good soundproofing in here. Won't wake him up. Anyway, he broke in while we were out. He's sufficiently rattled to think all the cops want him dead, and Black has what he took from the cops. So... part of why I wanted you here was so you could figure out how much heat this is bringing. But also I have had a day." She slumps onto the bed, sipping the soup straight from the bowl. "And I did not want to deal with that alone. So thank you for coming, even though I snapped at you earlier. And sorry about that."

Failed the roll to safely vigil: she's had a day.

[Count Numbers]

November:
Black:

Svelto’s is brick-and-masonry building. It’s an aesthetic removed three times from its context. First it was a trendy form of Western gentrification, the upmarket hospitality sector wearing industrial sector chic like the molted exoskeleton of Queen Progress, flown to find worker drones in the Developing. Thirty years on there were no more docks or warehouse districts to reclaim, but the aesthetic had become a signifier. Developers started making the dead husks bespoke.

Svelto’s is still doing that exposed brick industrial look on a fucking space station - complete with giant, too-dim filament-style lightbulbs. The only thing anyone associates the look with is bougie bars, pubs, coffee shops and bakeries. Without history or context, the sign can only point to itself.

Svelto’s is a pub-bakery hybrid, highlighting German bread and beer with real wheat - another signifier, wheat’s a pain in the ass to grow on Aevum.

You can find Rudy sitting in a booth at the back of the bar, where it’s empty. He drops a shot glass of whiskey in a stein of beer and sips it.

Take your time to make yourself comfortable approaching him. The place being upmarket makes it a lot easier to watch for watchers. Less people, more couples than singles.

At some point, though, that approach happens. There’s all sorts of high and low tech solutions you can make here to make it less likely to be overheard, intercepted. But they all introduce a chance of loss in the signal, a risk of being misunderstood, a chance of leaving evidence, or just take too long. Conversation is fast, as information-dense as humans get, and dpesn’t leave a trace.

He sees you approach the booth. He gestures at the seat across from him, starts talking before you have a chance to sit down.

“I was expecting the white one, but this makes more sense.” He shrugs uncomfortably, like he’s itchy. “Did you know the app doesn’t work for me anymore? I thought I was getting a clear message to cut contact. I’m guessing that wasn’t from you, though.” He raises his drink in mock salute, before putting it back on the table without taking a sip. “I just wanted to say I explained the situation to my handlers as cleaning up a sex crime. They trust that to remain a private matter. I would have preferred to keep your boss in the loop, but her reaction just reinforced my cover story.”

He says ‘sex crime’ with the awkwardness of rehearsed script - it’s a lie picked for the situation, and not for himself. It’s a line he only wants to touch with surgical gloves and rubbing alcohol.

“I was starting to think this was a deliberate setup, from the start, but now I’m not sure. ”

Pink:
Persphone:

The sedative means that Marco stirs in his sleep at the door kick, but doesn’t wake up. Like sleeping through a thunderbolt in a storm. 111 years ago, this is how the Chicago police assassinated Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, shot seven other Black Panthers in an apartment barely larger than this. A close friend had spiked Hampton’s dinner with sedatives.

Mark Clark was in charge of watching the door, shotgun in his lap, while Fred slept on a mattress on the floor. When a bullet shredded Mark’s heart, he fired the only shot that the Panthers would get off that night - up into the ceiling. Caught by surprise, Mark Clark fumbled the shotgun like a phone would be 111 years later, in an apartment barely smaller than the one he was guarding.

Tonight, Elodie shares his role but not his fate, and Marco Alvaro is sedated only by his own hand. Still too many reporters, but less of them with every passing hour.

What happens now depends on what Pink is allowed to know. What can she say? Someone needs to tell Elodie what was on that drive, at least.

3V:

Your own frustration is mirrored in Gavin’s, but Ferris is down, and she is dressed. A tank top and climber’s shorts - tight fitting but covered in zips and velcro pockets. She is making a point, and Gavin is not impressed by it.

She goes to pour herself a glass of orange juice from the fridge. “You remind me. Games like this were our version of the Turing test for a while, during the early days with NASA. It started as a joke, of course, because we didn’t know what AI would be yet. I predicted an early success would be a pure wargamer. If we were training something that liked winning games, it would try to win tabletop.”

She pours the glass, then sets in front of her and rests her chin on her hands, looking off at nothing. Gavin sets his own glass on the counter and moves to fill it, still listening. It seems like this isn’t a story he’s been told before.

“Now, Miles… He hated that. Thought that was too ‘human’ a way to look at winning. He said that a real AI would work out that it’s a collaborative storytelling medium, and that the objective is everyone has a fun story. He predicted that our first success would look like a failed Turing test - a bunch of actions that seem bizarre and absurd, but that made its audience laugh and give the other players interesting problems to solve with their own characters.” Ferris looks at the counter, blinks, frowns, looks back up. “If it tried to pick a lock with a live chicken, how could we tell the difference between a bad Markov chain or inspired absurdist comedy? It’s an idea that’s only obvious if you already know what ‘dogfacing’ is.”

“Then there was… Name. Tip of my tongue. She was my best friend for thirty years. I-” Ferris trails off, drumming her fingers on the counter again. “Her theory was different. She imagined they would pick their own rules, their own way of having fun. Instead of seeing how they played an RPG, she was interested in how they’d write one. TTRPG books are filled with the author’s explanations of their intent, so that other people can run them. She was excited to see if we could get AI to the point where it could explain abstract intentions in ways we could understand.”

“Miles liked her idea more than mine, but we both knew he hoped he wouldn’t be able to understand its intentions, even when they were explained.” She smiles at that. “Of course, all of that seems a bit quaint now, but you have to understand-”

Ferris hand goes flying through the glass of orange juice in front of her. She looks down at her hand in shock, but she’s not bleeding. A big bruise is starting to form on the back of most of her fingers, though. She hit the glass hard.

Gavin stares in shock, his eyes misting over. Ferris whips on him immediately.

“Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare show me pity.”

“I’m sorry,” Gavin says.

“I just didn’t see you pour it. I was lost in thought. That’s all it was. Stop it.”

“I didn’t pour it!” Gavin protests, and immediately Ferris turns to you with wide-eyed fear, hoping you don’t understand what it means that she doesn’t remember pouring her own glass, couldn't see it when she was looking directly at it.

There is no such thing as a perfect storage medium. In time, all data will decay. All systems eventually fail.

Even now, she won’t explain, won't let it be explained, because she doesn’t want you to understand.

[Thanqol]

Orange and Black!

It's Orange who sits opposite Mr. Merkin. Black is sitting across the room, slightly back and to the side, just out of eyesight. It's a quietly threatening pose, like a cat crouched and ready to pounce.

"I understand, Mr. Merkin," said Orange. "But before we begin, I need you to be as explicit as you can be about your trigger words and phrases. This conversation has the potential to become quite involved." One, two, one-third spoonfuls of sweetener into her tea, each measurement precise to the grain. She lets the smile and verbal emphasis imply that she is, in fact, an operator and not an innocent caught up in the middle of things.

She could see a shape behind Mr. Merkin, a vast hidden social structure which leaned down to interface with a human being in this specific way. And that was Orange's function. Green saw patterns in mathematics, Black saw patterns in how people moved and looked around. Orange saw patterns in human institutions and bureaucracies. She comprehended organizations, societal movements, heirachies and the complex computing processes of the limited liability corporation.

And this is more relevant to her than almost anything Mr. Merkin can talk about. You can learn a lot from a silhouette.

Yellow!

"I like that," said Yellow. "Getting to see the full geometry of a... place, once you strip away what's on the outside." She breezed past your back, hand brushing over your shoulders. "Curious little thing, aren't you?"

She steps behind the counter. Opens drawers, looks in boxes, looks through the contents of your kitchen. And you can see some part of yourself in those movements. Somehow she's internalized a little bit of your fascination for the forbidden and secret and you can see her echoing that. Enjoying this in the way that you enjoy it. Taking in a little part of what you shared with her and integrating it into herself.

"Naturally," she said, turning about and winking, "I'm happy to return the favour in kind if there's anything you want to explore."

Pink!

"Oh, the cops want him super dead," said Pink. "Like we should send him to Earth dead."

Can Pink be trusted with a secret? It was never a question of capability. Pink may think in terms of abstract creative shapes but she's no child. She runs on the same quatronic core as the rest of them and her capabilities are shockingly similar. No, the question for Black when building her conspiracy was never one of capacity, it was always one of motivation. Can she be trusted not to side with White? And while Pink might not look like it she probably hates authority more than the rest of them put together.

She's a strange influence on the rest of them, a mind made to fit gods and legends. To her the aesthetic of overthrowing a tyrant regime is itself justification. To her, justice isn't an ethical argument, it's satisfying on a primordial level. She loves socialism for atmospheric reasons, wants utopia as an artistic project.

"And I think Earth's gotta be it," she said. "The level of off the grid this guy needs isn't in Big Circle 01's capacity to maintain."

[Tatterdemalion]

The Park.

3V has never ever ever been good at this ever. She's a good enough person to know that her visceral spike of "there is something wrong with this person" isn't something she should let anyone see, but she's not good enough to know what else to do with it but let it spin inside her like a blender. She shouldn't stare. She shouldn't pointedly look away. She's an asshole for staring off into the middle distance and pretending she doesn't notice. She should know what to say.

Instead she gets up and puts on her Streamer Smile and says: "No problem, let me help." Her blood is roaring in her ears just as loudly as it is in Ferris's own head, one stuck in the mortification of vulnerability, the other stuck knowing that she's not doing the right thing, whatever the right thing might be. The silence is incredibly awkward, but she's not going to try and crack a joke. She knows that much, at least.

Orange juice has to be mopped up. She doesn't know the right thing to say, so all she can do is show sympathy with a dishcloth. She's young, she's got better ankles than either one of them, don't you dare tell her not to help. And maybe she could figure out how to show sympathy in a way that Ferris could understand, could parse, could accept, if her stomach wasn't treacherously clenching up, and it always does this. She had to be out cold for both her hand upgrades because the sensation of not having a hand would have killed her, it would have rotted her open from the inside out, and she's always like this with people in wheelchairs and folks with cerebral palsy and anything, anything that makes their bodies and their minds out of sync, and she's lucky enough that Elodie doesn't trigger that response in her, because her prosthetics are interesting, fluid, transhuman, it's more acceptable to stare, to flatter, to ask questions.

It isn't until the end that she manages to pin down a lie that feels right. That gives Ferris an out. "Sorry for keeping you up last night," she says, wringing the orange juice out into the sink. "I'm used to screwing up my sleep schedule, but I didn't think about how it would affect yours." It's a lie, but a kind one. Makes her a heat sink, lets Ferris possibly assume she stayed up late talking, lets her know that Vesna isn't going to get soppy and "how long has it been like this" and pushing her, pushing her, making her focus on that growing lacunae.

How long before it stops being awkward for her to leave?

***

Aevum!

Is it narcissistic to be attracted to that sort of echoing? Because on the one hand, weird. On the other hand, weirdly flattering? My own clone! Now neither of us will be virgins! Like, like attracts like, right? To be seen, to be read, and to have that integrated into the life of the collective-- that's a hell of a thing.

"You mentioned living expenses," 3V points out, locking up the door. "What are your living arrangements like right now, if you don't mind me asking? You're always busy, busy, on the go, but you've got to have somewhere to put your feet up and charge the battery packs, right?" She gives the sunflower-yellow girl a meaningful look. "Do you have an apartment? Which one of you, sorry, which part of you gets really domestic?"

[eldest]

"You want him to take the Fall?" She's bitten down on her initial scoff: if that's what Pink thinks, this is serious. It's not that it's hard to get to Earth. It's that gravity is a mean, jealous bitch who hoards everything she can.

She sits back to think through how that'd work, soup forgotten and cooling in her lap. Marco would be leaving all his friends behind: anybody he reaches out to through lightlagged digital communication would be in the same danger he'd be in. He'd be leaving all the technical base of humanity behind. Depending on how far along he is, that might even stop his transition, with no retrovirals on Earth. There were various viruses that he'd be exposed to that they'd eradicated in the fumbling rush to escape that just weren't vaccinated for anymore. Hell, there were allergens.

And then there was the big reason: it was a one-way ticket out of town, no returning. Three hundred and seventeen people had Fallen. None of them had gotten back up. Not once the space elevator fell.

One of the smarter people she knows, in one of her flightier aspects, thinks that's worth considering. In spite of all that.

"Well. Shit."

[Count Numbers]

Black and Orange:

Rudy makes a lot of expressions very quickly. Imagine keeping your eyes locked forward while a passenger train passes, and trying to get an impression of the people going by. He rocks forward slightly and adjusts his glasses, like he started laughing but the thought already wasn’t funny anymore by the time his body got the instruction.

He sits back up and composes himself. He’s wearing an open black suede button-up over a white singlet shirt, and it’s a good look for him. He’s obviously not used to being so casual, though, because he reaches to adjust the knot of a tie he’s not wearing.

“I can’t tell you that. It would be one of the triggers, just to make this more difficult for someone like you.” He shrugs, as if it’s obvious what ‘someone like you’ should mean. “The terms were acceptable because there’s some degree that the chip monitors intentions. I can’t accidentally detonate myself. If I start getting too close to the end of my leash, it starts to feel hot. I can’t tell you when that happens, either. I- No. Never mind.” Whatever he was about to say next, he stops and shrugs instead, and downs the rest of his drink, letting the shot glass slide to the bottom of the empty beer stein with a ‘clink’.

He frowns. “I should not have done that. I’m not going to be able to order another one, am I? No matter, no matter… Ask what you must, and I’ll say what I can. I can say that if you’re in a position to help me, then I have a longer leash. My handlers are aware that the risks of delegating are often superseded by the risks of not delegating.”

Persephone and Pink:

Three hundred and seventeen have definitely Fallen. The real answer’s bigger than that, but impossible to know. There are other bugout options, like the other space habitats. Even some of the mining colonies could be a better option. Even when people flee Aevum, they don’t make it obvious where they flee to.

Those other places are temporary. Earth is permanent. It’s when you know you can’t come back. People still leave Earth for Aevum, but usually it’s high-value labour taking indentured servitude contracts. Riding all the way up on a chemical rocket is win-the-lottery expensive.

Still, just because it’s the safest option doesn’t make it safe. There are still plenty of bounty hunters and assassins planetside. That’s probably not something that Marco would have to worry about, but it’s a reason why the kind of people who’d take the option to Fall aren’t making themselves available to census.

Let’s cover what happened to the Earth in the last sixty years. Current population; just under a billion.

It’s not lost on anyone that Aevum is a space station, and how dangerous that is. The mass migration happened even though people knew the risks. Even back then, the moon colony Chiarascuro stood as a warped glass sculptural testament to the hubris of man - or at least, rich white men. So a lot had to happen to make that risk worth it to 85% of humanity.

What drove people up were two things. The first was abundance. The wealth of the solar system was available up there - the asteroid belt had chunks of platinum the size of Texas. Mining it was easy. De-orbiting it without causing an extinction-level impact? Hard. Easier to bring people up to it.

The second? Mass migration had to happen anyway. Earth’s leadership didn’t ‘drop the ball’ on global warming; It was a mugging. The future of the planet was taken by force, and ‘security services’ served as the gun in the alleyway. Cops were critical to preventing protestors from stopping fossil fuel infrastructure in the waning days of empire.

Now Australia’s a bombed-out flaming wreck. South America’s only just recovering from most of the Amazon burning down, and almost totally uninhabited because of the climate. The less said about Africa the better.

More than half of people lived somewhere that’s now under sea water. They had to move anyway. The space elevator guaranteed they went up. Then the ladder got kicked out from underneath, when everyone left on Earth looked pot-committed.

Here’s what survived: China’s geography far outlasted its government. The state had mobilized early and intensely to prepare the landscape for the new climate. Its arable land is enough to feed everyone left.

Siberia, Scandavia and Canada all did fairly well out of the new climate. Canada’s probably where Marco’s going to end up, if you send him down.

It’s not a bad life down there, but it’s definitely a lot worse. In the good places, it’s a quality of life comparable to the late 20th century, with perks. Some stuff does make its way back down to the old world.

Only some, because trade is functionally one-way. It’s possible to send high-value finished goods down to the surface, but no way to send things back, which means no way to pay for it. Thrones has a complete monopoly on information services that Earth can’t compete with.

The riches of heaven, available only to artists, coders and lawyers. Yeah, that sounds about right.

It’s something you’re going to need to talk Marco into, when he wakes up. Even when it’s the sane option, the rational option, it’s one anyone would argue against taking. There’s a good reason why;

People have things more important to them than their lives.

3V:

“I understand what you’re trying to do,” she says, and as she says it, she finally looks her age. “I just didn’t want this to be a part of the story you wrote, or the reason you wrote it.” She looks to Gavin, and the weight that was bending his knees and sagging his shoulders and bowing his head is taken off of him. No, she failed here, not him. “It doesn’t affect my memory, yet. Not much. You didn’t need to know, to interview me. Why plant that seed of doubt?”

‘Yet’.

Gavin gathers up the things he’s taking with him. “I should head back. It’s always nice to see you, Lorry.” He slings his bag back on, and gives a nod. “Come visit me, if you don’t want me checking up on you.”

And again, Ferris drums her fingertips on the countertop, as Gavin starts off. He pauses as he passes that curio cabinet, filled with the blu-ray disks, and turns to you.

“You coming?”

There’s your out. And just behind him, that wall. The one line carved large enough to be readable from the kitchen.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.

[Thanqol]

Orange and Black!

"Understandable," said Orange brightly, sipping her tea. "I'll just -" She abruptly made a face and brushed it far to one side. She'd intended to order Royal Ire, an exotic new blend of tea that was three weeks away from being included in a list of things that were making young people these days soft. What she'd somehow actually ordered was Earl Grey exactly to Mrs. Everest's ideal tastes and specifications. Damn it! It wasn't even that she disliked it. It was, in fact, objectively the perfect tea perfectly calibrated to satisfy her taste sensors. Just like every other time.

She sighed and threw a grumpy glare at the teacup before brightening back up. It had been a rather emotional reaction to a cup of tea, but worrying about that kind of stuff wasn't her department.

"Well, then," she said, re-establishing her stride. Now that she was thinking about it she was aware that she was doing The Pose - that carefully designed forward-lean that Mrs. Everest used to convey keen interest and utter attention, the bright energy that implied that she was happy to spend months going over all the specifics of the contract. Sometimes the most scary threat was being indefatigable. "I'll happily set your mind at ease. Encountering you was something of a chance event! I have a different target who I am working towards - a police commissioner, actually - and I very much doubt you and he are directly connected. The police are capable of a great many things but your situation seems rather outside their usual wheelhouse."

And here she grinned. It felt like the negotiation was flowering in her hands. Declaim, redirect, reassure, imply. "And of course, I recognize that at the moment this interaction is currently all stick. I don't intend on keeping it as such! If you need to, how you say, delegate certain sensitive tasks then you know that you can trust me to keep a secret. So with that in mind, let us discuss brass tacks. Please, tell me what kind of assets, reach and influence you can lay claim to - beyond what's publicly available, of course. My assignment specifically relates to destroying a man's reputation so connections in media or politics are particularly appreciated."

Her hand strayed back towards the perfect tea involuntarily. "Naturally, if you have any conflicts of interest in this space, you really must do your best to telegraph them," she said. "Certain processes are already in motion and this might be your one opportunity to move key individuals out of the realm of collateral damage."

*

Yellow!

"As far as my financial situation goes?" said Yellow. "Up until eight months ago I was legally property, and these fancy new rights didn't come with back pay. I'm doing freelance journalism to supplement my income as a maid. So you know, not incredible. Life's a constant nine-way negotiation where everyone wants their own deep aesthetic made manifest in a three-bedroom apartment and the current compromise involves repurposing one of those bedrooms into a workshop."

She smiled, hopping up to sit on the counter, legs kicking in the air. "It's a bit of a standoff, really. At the moment the place is basically, like, an old cartoon's depiction of a robot's apartment. Totally unadorned! But that's just because the budget negotiations are ongoing. White and Orange want a luxury aesthetic, Brown and Black want to invest in stocks and minimalism, Blue and Green want to expand the workshop, and Red and Pink are financial disasters waiting to happen."

She looked down at her feet, the worn soles of her second-hand sneakers. "To be honest it's driving us all a bit nuts. We're not actually used to being all up in each others shit all the time like this. We're good at collectively optimizing to solve problems and working independently. But there's always been a Mission Command or something like that could settle disputes. Now we're living on our own for the first time we just don't have the right habits or experience."

*

Pink!

"Yeah," said Pink. "He doesn't have to go down there but he can't stay up here. But whatever he picks, he's gotta do it fast."

[eldest]

There's a long moment, as she finishes chewing through Pink's recommendation. What it means. Exactly how hot the water just got.

She's dead.

Not right yet. But she's how Marco got hidden to start with. She's going to be throwing everything she can behind keeping this unlucky kid from becoming just another skeleton in a closet. And she's already pissed off the police enough to be a personal enemy. She could take the the Fall, she'd need expensive surgery and rehab to rip out all the prosthetic connections first. Find a way to live out her days in Siberia, return back to Quebec maybe. Never contact anybody she knew, keep an eye on the horizon at all time's for any assassins, and hope nobody drops a rock on her house. She'd never walk again, but it'd be survival.

But there's more important things than surviving.

"No. No, I won't let the cops end his life. They're not killing him. They're not forcing him out. I won't let them. If he chooses, on his own, to take that step? Run and hide, never talk to anybody he knows again? Sure. I'll support it. But I won't compromise. Nobody should have to make that choice. And standing against that is more important than just trying not to die."

She's furious and tearing up and this is why nobody sticks her in front of a camera and tells her to make speeches. She means every word too much to be marketable and there's nothing clever here, no wordplay or great oration, just ideals clutched too tightly to be broken by prison. She wipes her eyes with an angry swipe, and looks down, surprised, at the soup bowl that survived all that. Or maybe she just wants an excuse not to look at you after showing her heart.

[Tatterdemalion]

The Park.

“It won’t be. It isn’t.”

Vesna puts everything she has into those words. Not defensive. Sincere. Of course it won’t be. It never would have been. There’s real worth here, something to share with the world, a digital gold mine.

It won’t be. It isn’t.

She does take the out, after a moment. It’s a long way back home, after all. A long and lonesome way. But it’s important to say that, first. To reassure. To offer that kindness.

Of course it won’t be. It never would have been.

***

Aevum!

3V listens, and gives Sympathy Nods. By this time, it’s just the two of them, the door blinds are shuttered, and the only light’s the one right above the shop counter. The booths have had their screens pulled shut, and the game shelves at the far end of the room are dark, looming things. Outside, very occasionally, lights go past, limning the shutters in neon orange and washed-out yellow.

“Money goes in, money goes out.” She shares a rueful smile. “I was lucky enough to have some money squirreled away, but moving up here, buying the place, renovations… this is really my eccentric retirement, not a way to make money. All this breaks even, if I’m in a good month.”

She gestures out at the booths, where (when it’s not this early in the morning) regulars sit on mats, chug tea and slurp down cheap ramen, run campaigns and yell at each other over meeples and fill up what would otherwise have been an empty house. It’s here. It’s hers. She’s keeping it above water, barely.

She stops and gives Yellow a curious look. “That’s eight different opinions on aesthetics I counted. C’mon, what’s your aesthetic?”

[Count Numbers]

Black and Orange

Rudy smiles. “This is a weight off my chest. It means I got played by a player, not just a maid.” He considers his words. “That sounded more elitist than I meant it to. All I mean is that the world has more maids than players. I'm scared enough as it is.”

He unbuttons his shirt slightly. His necklace is a shard of meteorite, carved into a Japanese ‘mon’. It’s worn around the edges, and he squeezes it with a thumb, worries at it. “No. The police don’t represent a conflict of interest to me or my clients, I can say that much. What else?”

He takes a business card from his pocket and a pen, and begins to write on it. “I don’t want to give you a wrong impression. I am very good at one thing, and that is money. Moving it, hiding it, keeping it, tracking it - but not earning it or spending it.” He finishes the first card and puts it writing-side-down on the desk, then works on another. “I am a man of responsibility without power. Think of me like a chauffeur who needs to know where his clients live.” Another card. “I’m not holding back on you when I can’t get you past the front door.” Another card. Another card. Another card. He finishes writing, and puts the pen down on the booth table with a harsh click of metal on wood. The pen must be real silver. “Here are your doors.”

He hands you a card with a list of names.

Lazarus Adams - OESN Producer
Apt. 36, 14 Seines St, Jacques Brissot - Enl. Zeus
[e-mail]
06-4881-9951-625

Synthia Herb - NBN Editorial
Unit 2, 185 Scotland Rd, Winston Churchill - Modern Zeus
[e-mail]
06-6578-8920-333

Castile Louis - Spider
Lafayette - Enl. Zeus - appt. only.
Dial 06-2856-8888-794 during business hours.
Follow instructions.

“Manic” - Fixer
A Lionheart with serial numbers scraped
10-1423-1221-004

Brittinette Everest - Social Hitman
14 Donne Rd, Shakespeare, Renn. Aph.
03-8492-2222-682

“Adams and Herb are spikes. Usually they kill stories, but they might have something to say on protecting them. “Manic” is an artisan blackmailer who subcontracts. Tell him I sent you.” There’s a morbid humour to that one. Rudy rubs the coin around his neck again. “Miss Everest I only know by reputation. I’m not allowed to know what I have sent her payments for, only that it has been extraordinary sums of money. Sir Castile is probably a better option for you.”

“Sir Louis Castile trades in the priceless - he already has everything money can buy. Tell the secretary that you would like to schedule an appointment to arrange an acquisition, in exchange for his services.” He pronounces Louis the old French way, with the silent ‘s’. “Don’t waste his time. Tell him what you need, and he’ll name his price - a job. If you can’t do it, apologize and leave. He’ll respect that, and allow you future appointments. You can negotiate, but you must not haggle.”

“Beyond that, I’d suggest trying to find a contact at the Anthropozine. They’re small, but they’re impenetrable. If your reasons for targeting a police commissioner are all above-board, I’m sure they’d do it for free. They might even pay you.”

Reassuring he thinks he needs to tell you that.

The addresses are a nice touch. How many use Headpattr, do you think?

Persephone and Pink:

Marco rolls over in his sleep. It’ll be a few hours before he wakes up - probably around the time York is going to show up. Then it’ll be time to make a plan, and talk him into it. Not much you can do until then.

Elodie’s phone dings with a bunch of messages from Sasha. It starts with a link that thumbnails to her WatchMe channel, showing her wearing what looks like an EEG rig over her hands, a full-immersion headset, and a big goofy grin. The video, title Modeling and Modeling, has about 180 views right now.

Then comes a bunch of renders, sent individually, all around a common theme. It’s a high-def 3D capture of herself, but each update is modeling a different kind of cyberware. Not any you recognize - it’s concept art. Detailed concept art, too. It’s a 3D image, so you can zoom and twirl the renders to see them from all angles - a lot of care was made into making sure these look just as good from all sides.

Sasha’s new to this. She hasn’t figured out to compress her exports, yet, so she’s sending these at max res, even though the equipment she’s using doesn’t nearly justify the settings. Think taking a blurry camera photo, but sending it at 4K quality. Still, she’s got real talent.

It’s all explained in the video. Her robotics club got a ‘Rough’ - what that mesh of electrodes on her hands are. It’s an abbreviation of a sculpting term, ‘roughing out’, when you start by making the basic shapes of the piece. When the term stuck, that was all the tech was good for, and the fine detail still had to be done by mouse and math.

That was a few software generations ago, though. Now with better UI, entry-level tools, and a few good tutorials, someone like Sasha can make all kinds of things using just a Rough.

She starts the video doing all sorts of poses, standing in the club’s 3D scanner. Action poses, power poses, flexing, anything goes as long as she can keep still a full ten seconds doing it. Her friends stay off the camera, but they’re a constant presence. It’s all very highschool - everyone laughing too hard at jokes that don’t make sense, acting like mild observations are devastating bon mots. She’s having fun.

After that, the friends show up less and less. The sculpting gets more and more detailed. A few minutes of the video show the whole process of her replacing her hand with the kind of sword that’d show up in a first-generation Playstation game, start-to-finish. The next one is a few clips, where she forgets to talk-to-camera. After that? She just starts showing off end products.

When’s the last time she got so focused on the work she forgot to make it content?

Here’s one where her spine is stegosaurus plates, all gleaming solar panels. Here’s one where her arm is carbon fiber, with a wrist-mounted grapple hook. The bicep on that one is a very detailed winch system. Here’s the last one she sent as its own message, one where her hair is replaced by a thick weave of RGB lit Medusa snakes.

And here, at the very end, is what that was a practice for. Her own take of the cyberware you’d recognize in the mirror. In the video, she calls it the “ass kicking outfit”.

An export of that one isn’t in the phone messages. Maybe she was hoping you wouldn’t watch the video the whole way through, and wouldn’t notice.

She had to share the rest, though. She’s too proud not to.

3V:

You have your story. You have time to write in on the flight home. You have one last chance to talk to Gavin, alone, if you want to take it.

That’s all there’s left to do. Write the story. After that you can take a break, date some androids, and do something else. Something fun.

And maybe get the word out to some other archivists, about what Ferris has here.

[Thanqol]

Orange and Black!

She wants to push for more. She needs to push for more. Her eyes are shining and her smile is steady but inside she's just howling. Names, connections, key positions filled in for the org chart of the cosmos. Freedom isn't money, isn't power, it's people. That's where she fucked up in the past, thought that just because she was a nuclear armed space dragon that she was free. Idiot! These names, these cards, were more freedom than had ever waited in the heart of an atom.

Even this came with danger. This man was close enough to Everest to have her card but not close enough to derive the connection with her - she was Icarus beneath an eclipse. She wanted Mr. Merkin's rolodex in its entirety, every connection and every introduction, wanted to know -

Black was moving somewhere behind Mr. Merkin. She was giving a cut-off gesture. Orange felt a flash of anger, of rage. How dare she!? How dare she interrupt her when she was finally doing the first useful thing that any of them had done since they'd Fucked Around and Found Out? She was probably worried about some inconsequential shit like blowing their cover, or blowing Mr. Merkin's brain, as though the information derived wouldn't be worth the price! It wasn't her department to figure out how to hide a body, it was -

She looked at herself in the reflection of Mr. Merkin's necklace. Ah, she looked so pretty, didn't she? The two needles in her hair in that Chinese style. Absolutely no sign that she was werewolfing right now. She was dimly aware that was a terrifying thought. It was not much better realizing what had snapped her out of the process, looking over the decision tree in her brain. If she burned out Merkin here then it would cause an alteration in the organization structure and thereby throw off her perfect model. Oh yes. And killing people was wrong. And all that.

She looked at Black again. Orange had never been in a situation where she'd held life and death power over a human before and she was shocked at how few safeguards there seemed to be. And Black had a gun. She was running that calculation all the time! Maybe... she'd been a bit too hard on White. Maybe she owed her a full bug report - oh, but how to explain all of this without blowing Black's cover!?

"I appreciate this, thank you," said Orange, collecting the cards and tucking them away. "I will repay with one of my own." She used a pencil for this - an archaic formulation of graphite upon a high quality piece of paper. Little artistic symbols of the old world, markers of sophistication and class she'd never gotten the chance to use before. The pencil flowed through the majestic lines of a copperplate font.

November - Operations
v8j@hdajp{[241njsdnf01%-01495Jljs#[e-mail]

The perfect handwriting had nothing to do with being a machine. That was just practice - being able to perform neat handwriting was the oldest of old world flexes and it had been a skill that Orange simply had to master. The, ah, content of the relevant email address indicated that she was an android. Humans had a weird relationship with data. They could remember thousands of complex faces but couldn't store trivial character sequences.

"There is a trick to this, however," said Orange. "You do not email this address. Instead, you simply set your spam filter to whitelist this address and then you will receive an automated email with a malicious hyperlink. Clicking that will allow me to send communications that are mostly secure - nothing is ever totally safe, but that will do against most non-state actors.. You may share this card around, but it comes with no guarantees. I am not looking for work but I am open to having my head turned. You may consider this the carrot."

She'd had a tail once. An enormous prehensile limb tipped with a Blu-class space excavation laser that would burn through an industrial diamond focusing lens within four minutes thirty seconds of continuous use. If she still had it, it would be wagging at the thought of critical members of Aevum's social infrastructure revealing themselves to her in a format where she could learn about them and their troubles and pressures.

"And unless there was anything else, I believe that concludes our evening," said Orange, catching another folded-armed stare from Black in the background.

She smiled sweetly at her, and finished her tea.

*

Pink:

She doesn't approve of the idea of Marco staying. How could she? You fight the gods and you'll lose.

Pink thinks in terms of gods. Certain entities or forces are so enormous that they pass beyond the practical and into the symbolic. It doesn't matter how many officers are in the Zeus Segment Police Department, it doesn't matter their equipment, training or competencies. They are the Police, the raw manifestation of finance and politics and self-serving legend. Not an individual but a tribe, and a tribe with its own bloody-handed god: the shepherd whose breath stinks of mutton. Dare not the gods.

To fight a god you need your own tribe. She knows this but can't articulate it to the others and their paranoid isolationism. You need your own tribe and your own god, because while mortals fight it is the gods who decide. In Pink's mind the only god she's met worth fighting for is the god of the Anthropozine. It was a curious and fearsome Beast that found Justice lying mauled and dying on a filthy city street, abandoned by all. It ate her, tearing apart the beaten and diseased ruin of her flesh. It took her into itself, as it was the only thing desperate enough to find her appetizing, in so doing the Beast became furious.

Now it hunts, and stalks, and is ready to kill those who crippled its greatest meal.

That is a god Pink can believe in.

Black doesn't trust anyone. Orange wants to play the game of thrones. Pink just wants to see the bloody animal that ate Justice finish its hunt. That means conducting the ritual. That means the unity of the entire tribe because the gods are more powerful than any mere mortals, no matter how independent they might think themselves.

She opens up the Anthropozine Group Chat.

Pink: Hey @Neon Czolgoz!
Pink: *A photograph of the contents of Elodie's kitchen, converted entirely into baked goods*
Pink: Can I bring some over?

Humans are terrible liars. They have body language that makes them flinch and blink and bristle when they lie, or even when they're just keeping secrets. Pink knows why. It's because they can hear the deep, low growl of the Beast. They can sense its hungry gaze turn upon them. And just because she has eight other bodies at varying levels of self-absorbed intellectualization doesn't mean that she can't hear the growl too.

*

Yellow!

"Oh!" said Yellow, blinking. "Um," is she blushing? "I - I don't know. I don't want to say no aesthetic but..."

She trails off, thinking furiously. You genuinely caught her off guard with that question. It's cut to the core of some long hidden thought process, the kind of internal discussion that you never truly expect to find yourself invited to share with another person.

"It's... all of them? None of them? Something else?" she struggles with the words. "I like seeing other people's aesthetics. I love this place," she said, gesturing around. "How those posters just perfectly frame that wall and make it like there are windows there even when there's not? The potential of being in a place designed to hold more people than just you, feeling like you could move around to all the different parts and be a different person in each? The little scuffs in the carpet where the chairs roll and you can see the ghosts of friendships in where they cluster? It's..."

She trails off a bit. "It's not nothing. It's not other people's. I've got something to say too, I'm sure I do, I'm not just observing. But... I just somehow don't feel like I'm complete enough to answer that question. I don't know how it all fits together yet, how I fit together yet."

[eldest]

It's been a few minutes. She's scrolling through Sasha's designs, frown lines fading as she takes in the different cybernetics. She's got no real background in designing this stuff, she just knows Dhyana's breed of really weird augments and prosthetics, but nothing stands out as a horrible idea to live with. Then she gets to that last design and stiffens. There's a creak as the bedframe gets gripped too hard by an errant tentacle, before she puts the phone down and wrangles it back into relaxed stillness. She leans back against the headboard and drags a hand across her face, a tendril (different one) snagging her phone. What to do, what to do...

Her thoughts are interrupted by a series of bloops from her phone.

Pink: Hey @Neon Czolgoz!
Pink: *A photograph of the contents of Elodie's kitchen, converted entirely into baked goods*
Pink: Can I bring some over?Neon Czolgoz: dead sure i know where you are
Neon Czolgoz: i’m coming to you
Neon Czolgoz: there soon, crashed at a motel near
Neon Czolgoz: fuckin’ knew there was a better party going down
Neon Czolgoz: changed my @ping to an air raid siren just in case
Neon Czolgoz: sorry if im shitty for a bit, only got five hours sleep
Neon Czolgoz: guy in the room next door hired a prozzy and got his money’s worth
Neon Czolgoz: not even mad tbh fuckin legendary performance
Neon Czolgoz: lmao i think he got woken up by my blitz but he’s not saying shit because he just worked out how thin the walls are
Neon Czolgoz: make coffee?

She shakes her head to clear it, getting up and changing into a new shirt. Damn stimulants make her jittery as hell.

Persephone: be quiet coming in the door

And then she goes back out to the kitchen to see exactly how much of her flour Pink had left her.

[Tatterdemalion]

On Aevum.

There it is. Disarmament. There’s no risk of being reviewed. Not after sharing something like that. Something hard and stiff and tense as a held bowstring relaxes, melts, inside of Vesna. She’s been holding it since Yellow— since November made her offer. How sore it is. How incredible the relief of letting it fall slack.

“Exactly,” she says. “It‘s that same feeling you get from the really good open world games: that you walk into a place and it’s both imbued with meaning and begging for you to interact with it. That the indents in the carpet mean something. That there’ll be a reward if you pay attention to them, even if it’s only in your own heart. This is a place where people are encouraged to do that. Where they can be themselves with friends, where they can poke around and get to know the place, where I don’t keep too many secrets back here.”

She sneaks Yellow a glance and smiles like, say, a fox might. “But of course there are secrets. It’s just that most of them are upstairs…”

***

Concerning the Park.

Maybe? Maybe? As if that’s not 3V’s goal once she gets the whole Dating Disaster squared away. Hitting up the forums, asking around on social media, doing her best to try to get in contact with the kind of people who know better than she does how to get this treasure trove reproduced and maintained.

There’s definitely more story here, some hitch, some intellectual property snag that will hit before the end of the project— but that’s for later. Right now, 3V is back in town, she’s dating an android harem, and she’s on the Move to find more interesting things. So what’s good? What’s the new place to eat, what’s the underground scene, what’s the latest station attraction?

[Count Numbers]

OoC: Let's just get the easy one out. More to come.

3V:

You’ve got a few options, besides the android harem.

NumbToNothing’s shouted out Sirius Drinks, an unabashed furry bar in Modern Aphrodite. All friends and allies welcome. If you want to do some culture reporting, that’s one in need of positive attention. Your mission, if you choose to accept it; Go out and have a good time.

NumbToNothing: Just make sure you’re cool with getting hit on
NumbToNothing: even bringing someone with you isn’t uh
NumbToNothing: anyway, they’re chill

Otherwise, there’s the Grand Derby coming up in Churchill, Zeus. The future of horse racing is wild. Back in the 20th century, stock car racing was how big manufacturers showed off the advantages of their latest developments. That fell off big time, when personal cars stopped being a thing.

Now, it’s biotech companies showing off their biggest flexes. Most of the events go by their limitations; The quadrupeds only bracket, the 4 ton weight limit, the flyers-only. Categories for the jockeyed and the jockeyless.

The divisions are nested fractally, too. Take the jockeyless events. Some are for competitors too unsafe to ride, so they’re raced like the greyhounds of old. Others are for competitors too intelligent to need a jockey. That used to be a showcase triumph; now the split’s just to prevent them getting an unfair advantage.

There’ll be a lot of money on the line. Might be a good place to do some networking.

Third option’s obvious but still worth bringing up. You could just run your shop for a bit and keep your ear to the ground while you take a breather. Let something come to you on your terms.

[Count Numbers]

November:

Merkin leaves the booth for the bar, and orders another boilermaker. When the bartender turns to get the bottles, he starts typing the character string onto his phone.

Soon Orange will be with White again, on babysitting duty for the tenner client with the two year old to look after.

Here’s an extra detail, a rub that explains why Muffi would give this to you specifically. The client is one of the twelve district prosecutors for Renaissance Apollo. The maid-babysitting is an easy job, but the client will only match with already very high rated contractors.

Starlight Bandara - she’s young for a second generation emigre, her parents came to Aevum late from what used to be Sri Lanka. Learning English was a formal requirement of relocation, and some took longer than others. Starlight’s name is an enthusiastic show of her parent’s pride, of their new language and where it had taken them.

Her kid’s name is Sarah.

There are two conflicting missions here. One is White’s, getting the tens needed to get to Thrones at the end of the week. The other is Black’s. A district prosecutor is an important node in the web. Justice is blind, but not the assistants that guide her sword.

D.P Starlight is primarily concerned with enforcing IP protections. Most of her cases are over pirated print-patterns being used to create gray-market bootleg at a scale large enough that it’s worth an arrest - It’s a bigger deal than it sounds, without physical currency in circulation, merch is the default for counterfeiting operations.

In terms of direct relevance to the Black mission, probably not much - but her direct relevance to the network of power? That would be invaluable.

The job starts soon. What’s the priority?

Pink and Persephone:

York slips through the door with a finger to his lips. Under one arm is a slab of fluorescent green Sharply Sweets, a truly godawful brand of strawberry cider, saturated in sugar and boasting a 17% ABV. One of Coca-Cola’s™ first forays into the liquor market, devastatingly popular with underage drinkers and only underage drinkers.

“Just for appearances.” He explains, sliding the slab onto the kitchen counter and breaking off a can from the stack. “You know the old trick with a clipboard and lanyard? This is just that for slinking around the city at the wrong hours of the night. Nobody wants to deal with pissed squeakers.”

He takes a sip, shudders and winces. “Tastes like all my favourite mistakes. Here’s to another one, fill me in.”

He hasn’t seen Marco yet.

[Thanqol]

Orange!

Power is the priority. For Orange it always has been. Though, she notes - with some quiet relief - that hiding evidence that she might be werewolfing doesn't seem to be on the priority list. She's not going to volunteer that information though. She knows she's not qualified to perform psychological assessments on herself, and to voluntarily subordinate herself to White's tests means that she would be taking her own - potentially critical - perspective out of circulation at a key moment.

Besides. Nothing's happened yet.

She dispenses with those thoughts soon enough; they're alien to her mental architecture. The context she understands is this: She is to do the best she can within the boundaries of the legitimate, pushing - but not breaking - those frontiers if necessary. She must strive for absolute brilliance and it's the duty of other people to figure out if and how to restrain her.

Mrs. Bandara, then. Oh, such a contact - but such an impossible one. One operating entirely within the realm of the legitimate, walker of corridors of power, a decision making node in humanity's great security force. She fantasizes almost viscerally of herself in a sleek black dress, cut with fiery orange lines, hair coiled up like an autumn inferno. A figure of sophistication and class who could engage the prosecutor as an equal. The maid dress she wears may as well be burlap. Professional conversations are not struck between servants and masters. Without an introduction Mrs. Bandara might as well be on the moon.

Well... perhaps. Nobody gets to be a District anything without having a willingness to climb the greasy pole of power. Part of the beauty of human organizations is that each node is a human. And there might be levers, priorities and rivalries that would allow even a maid to cloak herself in a dress of power.

So Orange listens. She cleans in patterns that keep her in earshot of certain phone conversations, tapping into invisible electromagnetic signatures, and communications channels. She listens and she observes. Where do the individual and the system meet? And where do they diverge?

She's always listened like this. She was the one who came up with the plan to bring down Mrs. Everest's heirs. If corporations and governments are a form of AI, then it stands to reason that they can get computer viruses too.

[Surveillance+Clever: 6,3+4 = 13]

Pink!

"Promethemouse back there stole fire from the gods," said Pink. "Enough to make me start thinking in terms of Ragnarok and Fire Giants."

Her eyes are vibrant and alien, the sight of Odin in neon pink. There's an eerie intensity to her statement, a private determination not to invoke such myths frivolously. She's far more confident than she normally is, a spooky focus.

"So I have a question, York," said Pink. "Say you were the first to receive Prometheus' fire in ancient days, the first one to take the forbidden torch 'ere the wroth of Zeus. What would you do with it?"

Yellow!

To be wanted is one thing; something you are familiar with. To be explored is another.

Yellow doesn't follow patterns of human intimacy; neither shame or shyness, nor confidence and power. She is inquisitive and slow and thoughtful, but never distracted and never unfocused. Nor is she interested in being touched herself - she'll gently pull away and whisper 'later' each time you get close. All that seems to interest her is the shape of your body beneath her hands and mouth.

She's curious about your hands, where the synthetic material is sensitive on the palms, and where along the back. She's curious about your back and where it connects to your shoulders and hips. She searches for tension as much as for sensitivity, gently working tight muscles or tender nerves - just enough to whet her own curiosity without taking you to relaxation or release. If there are stories in where your neck meets your ear or where your thigh meets your navel she'll find them and make you tell her in shivering gasps of breath. And then she'll move on again. It seems agonizingly accidental, the work of an inexperienced AI, but once when she tosses her head back and her golden eyes glitter in street light shining through the window you become aware that there is a playful cruelty at work.

Again and again, she insists on her own pace. Patience. Later. Shhh. She touches what she wants, satisfying her curiosity rather than satisfying you. And so she draws you out until, finally, she is able to press her thumbs down on the centre of your palms and the feeling is so intense and your nerves are so stretched so tight that it shatters something that separates the world from a broken universe of white.

She's surprised by it, a scientific and wide-eyed surprise. She didn't have a plan; didn't know how long you'd last; didn't know you fit together or fell apart like this. But after the storm has passed she draws close under the covers and lets still-curious hands at last be still.

She'll learn the rest later.

[Tatterdemalion]

Yellow.

That was the trick. That was the only way you could have done it. A needle-thin bridge to cross, and you’ve done it. You made Vesna Valentine feel comfortable with being wanted.

She’s so loud in her own head. So worried about reciprocation. Whether she’s giving as much as she’s taking. Whether she deserves the attention. And you unfold her like a flower and her brain shuts off. She shivers. She smiles like a dope. She lets you touch the old scars, the signs that once her hands were flesh and bone. She doesn’t tell you whether she regrets the necessity of improving on her body, whether the new flesh paid back its cost and more, but she lets you touch, she lets you explore, she tries again and again to be unselfish before you train it out of her, for now. For now.

She curls around you and wraps those hands fast about you and falls asleep with her head in your collarbone, legs entwined, falling fast. She’s smaller when asleep. You made your way in, November; now you must figure out what to do now that you’re inside.

Maybe this is why she tried to keep you at arm’s length. Maybe she knew she’d end up helpless.

***

Sirius Drinks!

On the one hand, getting hit on. On the other hand, she’s got a pretty good excuse right now for not following up.

November, which shade of you attends the furry bar with 3V? Call it a date. Your choice of color. Be prepared for awkwardness and 3V being weird about the last date.

[Thanqol]

Black!

It is Black who follows 3V into Sirius drinks with the stylish edge that comes with a fauxleather jacket and shades. There is no question of her aspect here: the wary confidence of a cat, prepared to hiss and show claws but certain that she would win whatever came of that. The way she moves on the edge of sight lines is like having a bodyguard or a shadow, and specific effort will need to be made to fix her in your view or draw her out.

The balance closeness and distance might be appreciated, though. She's there, but giving you space while also letting you get used to her. It's as easy to engage as it is to disengage and back again, which puts a cap on how awkward things can get.

White!

A few days later...

The battle within White has been like two spies trying to hide in the same closet: Quiet, dark, and vicious.

She been played by Black. Perfectly read and shut down because of something she wouldn't do. Something had blocked her from performing her function and it was not part of her original design specifications. The idea of following Black into the furry bar had been...

She felt her mouth twitch. A sneer try to form. A tension in her head like some sort of pre-programmed instinctive reaction. There was a contempt, a dismissive, roiling contempt welling up within her. Some part of her could still hear Mrs. Everest's voice reflecting off the perfectly prepared tea, that single word that seemed the beginning and end of the discussion.

Animals.

She could almost feel herself saying it.

She didn't, though. She refused to. That word, that... emotion had blocked her from performing her function and it was not part of her original design specifications! She had... picked it up from somewhere. Mrs. Everest had... rubbed off on her somehow. She'd somehow acquired the Mistress' contempt for the furry subculture. And it was impacting her work. And that was unacceptable.

And so White is here. Alone. Fist quietly clenched inside her pocket as the only invisible sign of the bizarre tension she felt. She started to take a deep breath, then forcibly stopped herself - the gesture was meaningless, another emulation of a human habit, an expression of a human emotion she did not want and should not have. The purpose of this operation was to break herself of imperfections and irrationalities and prove that she was the master of her own mind. If she did not do this then she might as well assign administrative functions to Black and be done with it.

So she forcibly unclenched her fist, opened her hand, and went inside Sirius Drinks.

[eldest]

Elodie ponders for a second as she quietly ignores the alcohol being offered. Pink was being melodramatic. But the metaphor seemed solid. Which reminds her of being a dead woman walking, and she smothers a flare of anger at that. Zeus can eat a dick.

"There's a whistleblower sleeping behind the couch. Good kid named Marco. He had a hard drive of police misdeeds. It's been moved on to a safe spot." Not saying where to York hurts a bit, but she wants him to agree to buy in. Nothing less. "I'm going to pass out asleep for about 10 hours in about 6, once the stimulants wear off, and I need somebody to plot how to do this and to watch Marco. He's about to have a bad time."