Count Numbers

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Sophie and Red:

Sophie shifts slowly on the couch. “Shit, wait. You’re serious? Lemme try something.”

A piece of floor at the back of the living room slides back, revealing a flight of stairs down. She skips down, and comes back up with a piece of equipment made for modifying the memory of cybernetic brain implants. It’s about the size of a laptop, but about the thickness and weight of a phone book. It’ll take your connection, and give real time readings on the screen. It’s funny, the diagnostic machine’s got to be way bigger than your quatronic core does, because your quatronic core doesn’t have to capture or understand its own thoughts. It’s just got to think them.

“Okay. I’m just going to - think really hard about where are now. Okay, now think about the address you saw. Street, maybe. Yeah, yeah, okay, now think about girls. Think about the address again. You’re still thinking about girls, red - should have gone with bananas. Ah, shit, there’s overlap between here and girls anyway, cause this is ‘girl place - place of girl’. Fuck this is what I get for making sure it’d be something you’d think about as soon as I said it. Okay start over, think of this place, think of the address, think of the street… now, think about watermelons… cops… paper… cubic zirconia… here… noses… samurai swords… this street… Fucking got it. Okay now think about me. Just keep thinking about me. Me still. There.”

There’s a zap and a feeling of jumping forward a second in time, like waking up without remembering falling asleep. You know where you are, in that you know you are at Sophie’s place, but you don’t know where you are, as in, you cannot connect it to any part of Aevum. It might not even be on Aevum, you’re not sure.

She flips the screen over and shows you a step-by-step of what she did with every question. Areas of the quatronic core light up, and the datafeed is immense. But she takes the parts that most lit up with the address, and with every other word association she snipped and pruned at overlaps until only a small chunk remained lit up. And at the end focusing down everything to do with Sophie and getting rid of those edges from it.

“There, now you can’t ever remember where you are right now.” She says. “Tried to make sure that was all you can’t remember. Least I could do.” She grins.

“Holy shit. This is so much easier than an android, you’re way more rationalized. Since I already know the ‘me’ part of your brain, watch this-”

Red loves Sophie more than she thought was physically possible. Processing power has been taken from less important duties, like visual processing and the ability to move, just to dedicate more power on adoring her, since she deserves it.

And then its back to what it was just a few seconds before.

“Live editing of values, while you’re conscious of it. That’s so fucking hot. I can’t add anything new, but I can change how you feel about anything. Your head’s so fucking choreographed I bet I could figure out how to get you to go naked in public without realizing it,” she watches the screen as she says this, to gauge Red’s thoughts from the questions, “And here. Because I have so much information on your Girls score, I think I can-”

Red’s romantic and sexual preference for women disappears. In its place, and just as intense, is a heterosexual preference for men.

And now she has both, equally. Red is maximally, perfectly bi.

“You got any ideas, Red?” She licks her lips. “I know you do, I can see ‘em.”

Costa-Silva Heist (Green):

The first part, the smell? That works, kind of. The problem is cueball gets up, turns around and heads up the stairs to look for it. This is kind of good, in that when Green hides in the opposite direction to the smell she’s just made, she can slip out behind the guy and down the stairs… But she hears the report into the radio earpiece behind her when she does.

The children have been accounted for all day, so who was up here to cause it?

Shame, too, is actually, a miss; or at least it’s a false positive. Shame is a good idea, but in a house and family this large… there is a guarantee of shame. There is no guarantee that the secret you are looking for is the shame of the house.

You find a grand bedroom. Not the children’s bedroom, those are all circling the interior courtyard. Not the master bedroom either, that doesn’t fit your profile. It’s more like a guest bedroom that’s very frequently used. An aunt and uncle, Justice Carmen Costa-Silva’s sister and husband in law. The original assessment was that they stayed here full time helping Luis with the kids, but they’re clearly not here right now.

Inspection of the room tells a story. There’s an empty tequila bottle rolled under the wardrobe, with months worth of dust on it - but only months. The room is made up waiting for their return, but there’s a tension to the scene. It’s somehow not welcoming. There’s a feeling that it’s waiting for their return resentfully, like it’s inevitable rather than invited. Except there’s no public tension between them, and the sister looked happy in the wedding picture in Luis office.

Maybe it’s the furniture in here being different from the rest of the house, personalized. Clearly this was someone else’s space, not meant to be empty. Did they feel trapped here? Why?

You’ve learned something, and that someone you thought inaccessible is outside these walls. But it is not what you needed to find. The success of the show has bought you another guess, and you’re getting a better feel for the place now. It will be a little easier to not blindly stumble into guards.

You also now have enough familiarity of this traditionally constructed house that if you spend 1 point of architecture you can know that this is heavily inspired by the Hacienda De San Antonio, which could give you a mental floorplan or an idea of where significant changes were made. For both of your 2 points I’ll give you that, and you can declare something about the Hacienda that is usefully true for Green that was necessary for reconstructing it with Aevum materials.

Fiona and Crystal:

What is it like to be proud of something you’re ashamed of? Ashamed of something you’re proud of? She smiles when she can’t meet your eyes, and subconsciously covers her mouth with a hand whenever she does look at anyone. “I stopped before I ever got caught, before I even met Crystal. And what was I going to say? By the way, there are still active warrants on me for the cracking I did as a teenager that I’m looking at a minimum seventeen consecutive life sentences if anyone links me to it? And I only did it because I was a bored rich kid born on Thrones?" She rolls her eyes at herself. "One of the only reasons I got away with it is because I threw all the money I stole away. I don’t even mean to charities, I mean dumb stuff like having glitter bombs delivered to every cybercrime department in Aevum.”

“I thought you gave it all to Wikimedia?” Crystal asks, amused.

Fiona shrinks further in her chair. “I said almost all of it.”

“You thought glitterbombing cops was more embarrassing than giving all your money to Wikimedia.”

“I do!” She takes a deep breath. “Look, the point is I can do this, and I’m good at it, but I just need a physical access point. That was a lot easier on Thrones, I can’t just lean against a wall here. So if you can figure out how to get that for me, I have the rest from there.”

Crystal wasn’t listening to any of that. “Tell her why you never kept the money for yourself.”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes.” Crystal’s grin is evil, it’s wicked.

Fiona tries to roll her eyes but she’s too self-conscious to manage the sarcasm. “It was about the total domination. If I ever took any of the money for myself it would ruin the purity of it. I wanted to prove I could take what I wanted from them, even when I didn’t want it. Complete superiority.”

“It’s adorable, isn’t it?” Crystal says to Black and White. “Just remember that the next time you-” Crystal starts, but Fiona is already a burning red remembering the kabedon in the doorway, and Crystal just laughs instead. “Now who’s gagged, hm?”

Fiona lobs her ereader up into the air for White to catch it, to buy her a second to cross the room. She gives Crystal an intense look, and Crystal smirks over a sip of nearly-finished coffee. Blink, and miss Fiona’s hand wrap around Crystal’s throat and Crystal’s eyes go wide. “Put it down.” Crystal’s eyes widen, but she finishes her sip. The hand squeezes. “Put it down or it’s going to break.” Her voice is changing, deeper and slower.

Crystal slowly, theatrically puts it down on the kitchen bench next to her, and only then does Fiona’s other hand press down hard on a shoulder, forcing the larger unicorn to kneel - first on one knee, and then with another push, two. Fiona keeps her hand tight around her throat and but slips her grip up to force Crystal’s chin up.

“Apologize.” There it is. That one word. There are different genres of dom voice, and Fiona’s has the intensity of an ex-military stepdad. That the proof of their love was that they were holding back.

Crystal smiles playfully instead of answering, and gets slapped hard. Even with the cheek fur to conceal it, it’s loud and a red mark shows through.

“Are you done being a brat about this?” This is a genuinely dangerous warning. It does not feel like a scene anymore, except to Crystal.

“-” Crystal starts to answer, but as soon as she opens her mouth the next hit comes right on the same spot and she bows her head with a shocked gasp as far as the hand at her throat will let her. “Sorry, Sir. For disrespecting you.”

Fiona lets out a breath and kisses Crystal’s cheeks - first on the sore side, then a firmer one on the untouched side. “Thank you.” Her normal voice is back.

“Mm. It’s been too long, hasn’t it?” Crystal purrs.

“It’s been a while.” Fiona says, which isn’t the same as agreeing. They’ve both been switches before, but Fiona’s never been like that, or played with male titles in front of you. But she’s never offered to rob a bank before, either. Likewise, Crystal doesn’t normally take it that hard, she just seemed to like dragging it out of Fiona.

Fiona remembers herself. She lets go of Crystal’s throat and puts a foot on her shoulder instead, pushing her back until Crystal’s back is flat on the floor. She stands with a foot on the unicorn’s chest as she focuses on Black and White again: “I’ll get the money we need. I can figure out the physical access myself, too, it’ll be good practice for what you’re going to need me to be. I’ve got this.”

This isn’t some ego thing, or some self esteem play, where she’s trying to refuse help she needs because she has something to prove: It’s about wanting to prove she can do something like this without help. Quietly she thinks that she’s not the programmer she used to be, but the programmer she used to be made an enemy of everyone she ever met and was so atrophied she dislocated a hip trying to walk up a flight of stairs. Just being a specialist would make getting worse at her specialization feel like a mistake, and this is a chance to flex becoming a more well-rounded person.

[Also, while Crystal still needs help and Fiona brought up a lot of stuff to address here, I’ll flag that at any point from here you can end the scene, in any way you want. Sidenote; I’m not a coward.]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Costa-Silvas:

This works on a lot of different levels. Great kids media is real in some way, it presents them with the stuff their parents try to hide from them, to keep them from. And there has to be an element of real threat, real fear - not for them, Bondi stressed, but for someone. She explained this during rehearsal while practicing walking over hot coals, which wasn’t intentional for making her point but was pretty effective at it.

The adult stuff, the sauciness, as long as it’s only applied to the Caliban character definitely makes her more adult, makes her threat feel more real in a way that Isabella can’t understand. She won’t understand why Sir Barrera half rose out of his seat for the act too and almost shut it down, before Luis settled him down again - because Luis is an English teacher, and Luis has read the original Grimm tales, and Luis knows that Sir Barrera’s reaction to this display is exactly why it is so important to the performance.

And it helps. Because now even the teenagers are curious about why their bodyguard seems so threatened by the horny robot. They don’t understand because it’s the part of the show that they’re really liking, so they’re not going to interrogate if there’s a problem with it.

Critical successes:

The four year old Herman is hiding behind Isabella, and Isabella is encouraging him to point out Caliban when he sees her, so Ariel can save the show - something Bondi planned to say, but is delighted to pretend was Isabella’s idea.

Gwen, the fourteen year old mathematician? This is absolutely the criteria of a person who has a yawning void in them that they aren't aware of, and tries to fill it completely with the first thing that makes them aware of it. She has learned that she really, really, really likes robots. This will take a bit of time to mature, but right now she’s trying to understand feelings she didn’t know she was capable of having, and she’s going to straight up ice a bitch that gets between her and the source of the feelings she’s trying to interrogate.

Successes:

Pablo, the failson magician? He’s studying the act intensely, like, fiercely. He’s in full “oh shit I accidentally wandered in a masterclass” mode. The fact that the tricks themselves are simple and ones he understands well? Means that he’s watching someone do the performance better. It is one thing to be humbled by someone doing it better than you - another to be humbled by someone doing exactly what you do, but better.

Failures:

Selena the success daughter can admire presentation, but she’s suffered through enough of Pablo doing these tricks and the new packaging just doesn’t do it for her. Her patience is cracked, now, because it came pre-stressed. She’s not pissed off at you, she’s pissed off at her brother and Bondi is just reminding her too much of him.

Jordan, the punk skater with no impulse control? Yeah, unlike Gwen he knows what his feelings are and what he likes about them. The show’s good, and he loves spectacle, but also he’s just kind of shitty-horny, and if he keeps being too low-impulse-control about it - Barrera’s a caged tiger at the moment, and this is something that could break the lock on it.

Wild Cards:

Luca, the other twin, is still playing his console. And Oscar, the sweater vest book kid, is sitting at the front, just drinking it all in. It doesn’t read so much as quiet as on the spectrum - He’s just thinking so hard about what he’s seeing that he’s forgetting to show it on his face most of the time. For now he’s as much of a closed book as the one pressed tight against his lap, but at least unlike Luca he’s not being distracted by it.

Juan, the Eton blazer kid, is next to Sir Barrera, so he’s close enough to hear him angrily whispering into his bluetooth headset about the surprise guest. He’s not mollified at the justification given, about how it’d ruin the magic, but Barrera’s the world’s biggest hypocrite inside his head because he’s not going to stop the show over it now for the same reason. Not when Isabella is getting to feel like Herman’s knight in shining armor right now.

Juan just tells him he’s got to use the bathroom and slips away.

Green;

Luis office was clean. That’s not a failure to find something, though, that’s succeeding at finding nothing. The significance of that could mean a few things that could be useful - is it because he resents his wife’s corruption, is it because his wife doesn’t trust him to be a part of it, or is it something else?

A shiny-headed guard sits with his back to you on the narrow stair back down from the attic. This isn’t his post, but he’s using the step to eat a sandwich from a lunchbox and pull out a tin of dip tobacco - the stuff actually got a lot more popular with modern bespoke cultivars which got rid of most of the aftertaste and side effects. It’s a sign he’s making himself comfortable.

It’s only him, except the attic stair down to the second floor is barely more than shoulder width. How do you solve this, and what’s your move after that?

[You’re totally blind right now is the thing, in a place you know almost nothing about, and a lot of the prompts I’d give use information locked behind risk. Just choosing a direction to head in (like ‘down’) or a method of finding a direction (Find where it’s quietest) (Find where there are the most guards) would work best here.]

Crystal & Fiona:
Fiona asks; “Why did this suddenly become worth robbing a bank over?”

Crystal answers; “The day before I was planning this debacle, the Supreme Court will announce its decision that all transhumans are subhuman. And we aren’t allowed to tell anyone.”

Fiona absorbs this a moment, though she’s faster about it. “I can rob a bank for you,” she says, holding her wrists up and drawing one of the tethers out of them. “If you want. I’ve done it before.”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Costa-Silva:

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

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

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

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

Orange can make the crowd:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sophie:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crystal:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

The Magician, Bondi:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hierophant, Sophie:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Star, Crystal:

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

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

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

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Costa-Silva infiltration:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sophie:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crystal:

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

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

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

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink:

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

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

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

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

Red:

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

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

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

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

Black and White:

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

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

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you are ready to find it:

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

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

Sophie:

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

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

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

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

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

Crystal:

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

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

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

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

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink:

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

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

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

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

“Why is what different?”

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

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

“I don’t know.” Luis lies.

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

Red:

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

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

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

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

Black and White:

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

[...]

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

white just kabedons her

@Thanqol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sophie:

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

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

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

Black and White:

You get a text from Fiona;

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

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

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

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Team-Bondi:

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

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

Heist:

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

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

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

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

Sophie:

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

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

Uh?

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

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

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