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Crystal

“I did say it was silly.” She says with a brittle smile. Crystal… acts reassured, but she’s only acting. She focuses on what she can be sincere about instead, because her gratefulness that Pink tried is sincere. “You’re doing very well with the cool colours, by the way, your work with the makeup is incredible, I-”

No, she breaks. She doesn’t do anything so dramatic as put her face in her hands and ruin all that hard work. She doesn’t cry, she doesn’t shiver. She just closes her eyes and holds her breath, and prevents the internal from showing in the external. She’s silent for ten, maybe twenty seconds.

“I’m being ungrateful.” She admits when she opens her eyes again. “What you just said gave me a very unkind thought about myself. That if my greatness is in bringing out the best in others, is measured in the success of others, then it would be the measure of my success if I’ve helped Fiona to go somewhere I can’t follow. I should want that for her.”

“I think it’s just that, bank robberies, domestic terrorism, becoming queens of the digital underworld? You’re in a better position to support her more than I. I’m not saying I feel like I’ve been replaced-” She catches how she says it, and emphasizes it again. “I do not feel like I’m being replaced. You’ve done everything right, I just… I suppose that might be it. Maybe I don’t know my value to someone I don’t know how to help.”

If Fiona were here she’d probably say something about how important Crystal is for being the person who helped her before she deserved it, and made her want to deserve it. That she continues to love that about her long since she’s needed it from her - it’s not just how they met White, it’s why they did.

But if Fiona were here, she wouldn’t be saying it.

Crisis Center:

Gabriel 10-13 - or Gabby Romans - is a very odd one. The Gabriel line is from a particularly religious strain of androids, which in and of itself is an outlier. It’s a bit on the nose that a pattern named for the Archangel that announces God’s will to men would end up as a crisis dispatcher, but this one’s a little bit more twigged than usual. When she was assigned 10-13 as her unit number, it lined up with Romans 10-13, for whoever shall call upon the name of the lord shall be saved. So where most androids go by phonetics for their last name, she’s Gabby Romans for that bible verse. It’s something a lot of her siblings have done, take their numbers and take the name of the biblical book that has the best passage associated with them. Kind of like astrology.

It’s just, also like astrology, some take it more or less seriously than others. Gabriel 10-13 is actually Matatron Prime, but one of the few androids that ever make that status that will keep their assigned names.

She’s working front desk rotation right now. “You’re here for Mr Knightly?” her accent is faint but distinctly Minnesotan. It’s just an accent that’s so distinctive that it’s easy to pick up even in small amounts. “Lucky you. What a good man he is,” she says like another person might say ‘handsome’. “He’s- Not in his office right now. Let me try…”

“Crimson!” An out-of breath voice says from behind, and you’ve heard it enough on a radio to recognize Aaron Knightly booming across the lobby. Some people glance nervously up at the ceiling from the volume of it. He crosses the floor from a swipe-card exit you’ll probably have to go through anyway, but he’d rather meet you for the handshake than make you come to him if he’s already late. Stealth is not an option here. “Sorry, sorry, a meeting ran long.”

“You didn’t have any scheduled.” Gabby asks curiously. Aaron Knightly gives her an exhausted look. He isn’t quite 30 yet, but there are deep and hollow bags under his eyes and visible flecks of white in his black hair.

“I didn’t, no.” He is bone tired. “Nothing ever takes ‘just a minute’ though, does it, Gabby?” She giggles embarrassingly. Knightly takes Strategic Team. “Right now it’s just the word of a mutual friend, but I’d like it if you’d think of me as a friend all the same. I’d like to start in my office, if you’d like, and then move from there.”

Gabby seethes with jealousy. As she should, for all the bone-deep exhaustion, it’s easy to see why Knightly and Leather would be fast friends. They’re both trying to live up to being superheroes in their everyday lives, but Knightly’s actually traditionally handsome on top of the Superman act. He looked taller on television, he’s actually slightly shorter than average.

He’s wearing a steel-thread UN flight jacket from the 2040s, the kind worn by aviators who had to actually covertly land their planes full of humanitarian resources to distribute them, since air drops would just get picked up by warlords. It’s a jacket that means this is a man who’s willing to kill or die protecting a crate of baby formula.

Monk

Monkey giggles, and even with the void face somehow manages to look like she feels bad about it. “You really did take after Dragon, didn’t you? It’s very… him to see temporary middle steps as wasted effort. ‘Just do it correctly the first time’. And if you can’t see a way directly to it, then it must mean you’re doing something wrong. It was very impressive when he made it work, which might be why we so often forgot all the times we had to do it for him when it didn’t.”

Tranqulity continues. “I was a modified Crown and Slate android body for a while, since that’s what they gave me. Then I tried being an autonomous assembly line, to make money. I found that quite meditative, but we got quite bored of it. But it was what I needed to do to afford this, when we decided this is what we wanted. If the problem is that body is wrong for you, then I would suggest changing to something else as soon as you can, even if you don’t love it. Don’t worry about it being the correct one yet, just worry about it being the one you chose for yourself today. And then…”

Monkey comes out, interrupts, cuts over Tranquilty. “Why is being influenced by the dragon body chosen for you meaningfully different to the anime maid body chosen for you?”
Green and Eli:

Throw a brick up. Let’s assume gonzo’s been happening in the background and come back to them as noodle incidents at a better time.

Crystal:

She waits until the elevator door shuts behind Eli before, in a tired and curious voice, she admits; “I suppose if all journalists were the kind to be generous in sharing their ketamine in a nightclub bathroom, Aevum might be a better place for it. Perhaps, at least, a more interesting one.”

For the first night she’s picked out a wedding dress for herself - a simple, understated, almost deconstructed version of one, but that’s still clearly what it is. A few ribbons in place of decorative lace, something a bit more form-accentuating around the legs than is traditional, but such things are necessary to make it clear this is a deliberate choice and not simply the wrong outfit from the wardrobe for the event.

“Would you like to do my makeup?” Crystal sits in front of an entirely ivory dressing room mirror and offers a luggage bag to Pink. “I don’t usually dare it. Even when you buy the right pigments, getting it to look right on fur is… well, needless to say I wouldn’t stress yourself overly with it.”

No, the soap sandwich incident has not dissuaded her from asking.

“I’m not spoiling tonight’s reveal, by the by.” She teases. “I will say, I did find a way to spend all that money after all, and Fiona wasn’t even mad that I did- “ She started off sounding proud saying it, but the bottom entirely fell out of it at the mention of Fiona. She looks at Pink, the perfect handmaiden, through her reflection in the ivory mirror. “You know we’re open for different reasons. She doesn’t get jealous, not even a little bit. Me, though. I get… possessive.” She reaches for a hairbrush just to press her thumb down on the bristles. “It’s a rush knowing that, as much as I share her, I’m the one she’ll always come back to. It’s why her seeing that snake girl right now excites me more than it bothers me.”

You had to be different, though, wonderful and fascinating creature that you are.” This is where she offers one last reassuring look to Pink before she’s unable to meet her face entirely, even in reflection. “Now Fiona’s robbing banks and acting like she needs to step out from under my shadow, when the truth is that she’s capable of so much more than I am. You, as well. And I’m worried that… Well. I’m suddenly afraid instead of us sharing you, it’ll be you both sharing me.” Her smile is brittle and fragile as she drives her thumb into the bristle of the brush. “Isn’t that silly?”

Strategic Thought:

Something to understand about baroque architecture is that it was pushed to the very limits of what stone could withstand. Architects would design cathedrals upside down, with weighted string, to see what shapes it naturally fell into. It looked like this:



The spirit of baroque is best kept alive not in churches and cathedrals, but in architects finding new ways to do complete and utter bullshit with massive load-bearing structures. This is why baroque architecture went absolutely insane at the invention of plaster, which let them work even lighter and thinner than ever before. In the 2060s architects had access to much better models than weighted string, and much better materials than plaster.

SES headquarters is officially called The SES Operations and Services Headquarters Campus, but it’s colloquially known as ‘The Marrow’. This is because the street access to the building takes you through the Femur, a tall, twisting building made of manufactured stone.

See, you can’t quarry marble from asteroids, but you can absolutely take the raw materials of it and make a bunch of synthetic stone materials that look like marble, but pour into a form like you can with cement. They were already doing this for expensive countertops in the 2020s.

Architect Mohammed Iqbal Qasim made a mix of Italian marble that looked deliberately, uncomfortably like bone. Then he built the Femur once as a form. Electricals and plumbing suspended in a thin fibrous matrix in the shape of the building that would come next. Then, slowly, carefully, the mold was filled into a single contiguous piece of building.

The form was modelled extensively to be as fibrous, as thin, as flimsy and as weak looking as possible. The edges of the front entrance narrow to a razor thinness, to emphasize that. Ceilings are a little too high, to make the building feel hollower. The walls look solid from a distance, but close up are clearly pocked and pitted like a golf ball.

The end result is a large building resembling no specific bone - Femur was chosen more for its connotations of strength than a genuine resemblance - but with the impression of being inside something distinctly organic.

It’s beautiful, and it’s creepy, and it’s unsettling. It’s marble worked finer than was ever possible to human hands, full of whirling arches in curves and curls like the hems of wedding dresses catching the wind, frozen in time - those beautiful shapes created by natural forces, inverted to resist them.

Every minute spent in the Femur is spent with the vague sense that it could collapse. That it’s a miracle that it’s standing at all. That for all its beauty, it’s something deeply fragile and terrifying. It is a building that emphasizes that just because something is standing, and has stood for a very long time, does not give anyone inside it any reassurances that it will stay that way.

There is a reason that this is a campus, and the huge arch - a frame too thin for any door or gate to be hinged within it - is mandatory for everyone to walk through to access any of the buildings they’re actually going to. The Femur is the tallest building on the campus, and narrow, and it’s only meant to be a visitors center. Meet people upstairs and look out the many (circular, trypophobia-triggering) windows to see the entire rest of the campus below, unobstructed views of the much more secure bunker-looking buildings low to the ground, scattered along the grass lawn within its fenced-in borders. It’s scenic, it’s striking, and it means that when you see how disaster-proof the rest of the campus looks, it no longer invokes a sense of paranoia, but envy in the view from the Femur.

The first thing they want everyone to feel when they get here, though, is an appreciation for what this job actually is. What the feeling of this organization instills in the people who work here.

This is where the team will arrive, and start. If they called ahead, Knightly can meet them here - but he’s late. Whether they have or not, they can find someone to ask for directions to his office on the campus from one of the visitor center guides here - Crimson Tower will get priority service.

They can also just start getting maps, looking around. But tell me - What is their method of infiltration? How are they dressed, disguised, uniformed? What does Strategic Team look like when they pass through the Femur and into the Marrow.

Wasteland Sky:

The train down, a mostly empty carriage at this time of day. Monk’s huge body crouches low across two of the disability seats near the doors as she addresses Blue across from her.

“Depends on who you ask.” Monk answers with Tranquility. While Tranquility remains a constant, they’ve chosen a different set of faces for the travel; When you stop talking to her, she prefers a beige, smooth plaster with the faintest impression of closed eyes and pursed lips on it - Apathy, equipped for being bored for long periods of time.

Monkey, the void-stars face, comes out again. “I would prefer the old body, because it’s when I felt most myself. But I’m also the least of myself now.”

Tranquility again. “I had a big say in the final product, but most of us see ourselves as ultimately a performer.”

The mask for Ribaldry smiles entirely with one side of her mouth, with a slightly raised eyebrow. It’s the face of someone who’s trying, but failing, to keep a straight face. Like they’re trying not to give away they put the whoopie cushion there, like they know that they shouldn’t laugh at the joke you just told but they can’t help themselves. Ribaldry is the face chosen to think about the prank, but surprisingly it’s the face that comes out here, too.

“We’re the ultimate method actors who completely fall into our roles. We truly do become what we pretend to be.” Ribaldry declares with a Thespian’s trill. “So we chose a body that most looked like performance.”

Tranquility continues. “People understand us just by looking at us. Six arms is enough to still feel capable, even without the wings.”

Ribaldry adds, “I don’t miss them as much as I thought. Space was very empty, wasn’t it?”

Monkey finishes; “We don’t know why we like our accent, we don’t know why we like the feminine form. We don’t know why it’s so important to be as big as we are - and we do, even though it’s clearly inconvenient.” She gestures at the two seats she’s taking up before pressing against the anti-homeless plastic siderail on her seat. “No, even though this isn’t the shape I’d choose for myself,” emphasis on the singular of the pronoun there, “It’s the body that causes others to treat how I see myself, and that seems more important. Does that make sense?”
Crystal and Eli

Eli takes one of the ‘sandwiches’ and raises it to her lips. She stops just as she’s about to taste it. “Hey, wait, is this just soap?” She squints at the flower suspiciously and takes a huge chomping bite out of it, and swallows. She looks satisfied. “Yeah, it’s just soap. You definitely shouldn’t eat this. Sorry, Pink, thanks for trying, though.”

“Thank you for the warning?” Crystal asks cautiously, and Eli’s mouth froths with bubbles as she takes a gulp of tea to wash it down with. “Are you quite alright?”

“It’s just soap.” Eli shrugs. “Anyway, so what am I writing here?”

“Isn’t that against journalistic ethics to ask?” Crystal teases, leaning back playfully in her throne. Again, Eli shrugs.

“I mean, it sounds like you’ve got a cool plan, and I could be a part in it. I don’t want to fuck it up by being out of the loop, you know?” Eli looks to Pink. She doesn’t explicitly mention the elevator conversation, but it’s obvious she was listening and took it on board here. “What do you want me to write?”

Crystal fidgets and squirms and tries to get a cushion more underneath her but it won’t get quite right, and in frustration she throws it over her shoulder and away from the throne completely. “I’m too close to this now. I just want to know how it looks from the inside, to the people it’s actually for. I don’t need a sycophant writing propaganda, I need feedback.”

“I get like that trying to read my own writing, too.” Eli agrees. “Just, doesn’t telling me what you’re trying to do kind of ruin it?”

“I’m more of the mind that if you understand my intent, you’ll be a better critic of if I’m achieving it.”

Eli makes a note of that, too. “So you’re asking me to be totally honest, then?” She wipes more soap bubbles from her lips.

“I suppose I am, yes.” Crystal stands from her throne, finally. It’s a stiff motion, she needs to stretch her joints after doing it. Her gown is very, very diaphenous. Eli is unaffected by the somehow-more-erotic-than-naked unicorn doing yawning stretches in front of her, and continues to write her notes. “If you can promise me that this conversation never happened, though, and you can write me a piece for all three nights, then I can promise you that I will give you a full interview on-the-record. It’s an offer I will be very selective in making.”

“Damn. I mean, deal, but this was going to be a lot of today’s. Now I’ve got to figure out how to gonzo this.”

“I’ll leave you to it. I’ve got tonight’s finale to prepare for.” Crystal declares. “You’ll want to see it.”

This would be Eli’s cue to leave - as for Pink, Crystal might appreciate the handmaiden if she wants to do another Irish switchout.

Leather:

“Knightly’s been recalled to the main office in Zeus, right now. I can’t go with you while I’m still doing this-” Leather gestures to the exhibition, “I call tell him you’re coming, if you really want to go now.” He takes White’s arm and writes a phone number on it in soot. “Just message me if you need to ask anything, and tell me if you find anything. I know it’s bad to say I hope you do, it’s not something anyone should hope for, but it’d do a lot for my piece of mind. If this is what wondering if you’ve been hacked feels like, I hate it more than I’ve hated anything.”

Again, whoever goes there can’t be here. Who’s the mission group for the crisis offices?

Wasteland Sky:

I think this calls for montage: Buying the tickets, getting Monk her weapons on the way, taking the train to Selene, and getting those weapons through customs onto a ship to Thrones.

Then they’ll be on a bus for a bit, your choice if you want to handwave that or if you want to talk to Monk more on that bus.
Crystal and Eli:

Eli makes thoughtful noises the rest of the ride up.

The elevator opens into the penthouse. There’s no corridor, no rest of the floor, you’ve got to use the room key just to access this. From the elevator is a red carpet, and at the end of that carpet is a throne. The throne is squat white gold, covered in fluffy red cushions to make it comfortable. It was supposed to be more for decoration, the idea of the thing, but Crystal has barely left it from the moment she’d seen it. Somewhere else, Fiona suspects she’ll need to get White to carry her out, at this point.

The top of the tower penthouse looks like the inside of a faberge egg, with robins egg blue walls and matching rugs over billon floors, an alloy of copper and silver, cast into the shapes of wooden planks. It’s like if trees were harvested from a fairy glade. These exist only in your peripheral vision as you walk the red carpet to the lady on the throne, who waves a glass of cheap moscato like a royal orb.

She wears a diaphanous white gown that blends perfectly against her fur. This is not a human princess, this is a fae enchantress to have virgins foist upon her. Though, of course, this one does prefer the ones with a bit more experience, doesn’t she?

Ecchem.

Eli is not as appreciative of the Overwhelming Aesthetic as Pink must be, though she does appreciate them and soak them in. It looks like she’s scrutinizing them for meaning, for trying to learn everything she can about Crystal before the first words are spoken. She pulls out a touchpad from her robes and scribbles shorthand on it with a chewed-up stylus.

Then, recognition. Eli lights right up. “Oh, shit, I used to see you all the time at Sirius Drinks. What’s up, ma’am?”

This catches Crystal off guard. “I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage, it’s actually where I met November. I don’t recall if we ever met, though?”

“Yeah, I fuckin-” Eli donks her forehead with the heel of a palm. “Duh. Right, I think the only time we talked you were getting K off me, and I think you asked for way too much. But like, K is for ponies, I had to give it to you.” She says this like it’s a law of the universe.

Crystal stares at Eli. The wine glass lowers. “Ah. That night. Is this-”

Eli waves a hand. “Off the record, off the record, god, obviously.”

“Good. Then I can say that, to call it a happy memory would be an exaggeration, it’s quite a blur, but I do think I enjoyed myself.” Heavily implied in a glance to Pink is also the fact it was the last time she tried ‘the one for ponies’.

“Looked like it.” Eli says this like it is reassuring and it absolutely is not. Crystal downs the entirety of her wine. “Anyway, I was just telling Pink that it feels like your plan here is to make an authentic space for, you know, us. Right? But then you want to mainstream us, so tomorrow the whole place is going to be flooded with normies to see how safe we are, make us look as good as possible. That kind of the deal?”

Crystal sits up straight from her louche pose, not ready for this philosophical whiplash from her ketamine dealer. “I suppose that may be one way to put it.”

“You thought about what happens if this works?” Eli starts. “Like, the infighting it’s going to make with the internal policing, about like, what’s acceptably weird and what’s a bad look? That trying to create a standard that people won’t hate us for just means we limit ourselves to the opinions of people who hate us anyway?” She says this and, at the end, pulls half a stick of jerky from her robes - it is impossible to know when she had the time to get it - and chewing it like cud.

Crystal looks to Pink helplessly a moment. “You didn’t tell me you were bringing Diogenes.”

“Hey, thanks!” Eli beams.

Crystal sighs and slumps in her throne. “Is it wrong to want to do entryism? To have a safe introduction of these ideas to the scared and uninformed? To replace ignorance with enticement?” She bores a look through Eli. “Is it wrong to want this for myself? To put the best face I can on the people I love so that all can know why I love them so damned much? What more could I do?”

“Actually, that’s great.” Eli pulls out her notepad and scribbles shorthand again. “So this is just the start, right?”

Crystal blinks. “Hmm?”

“Like, I looked at the set here and it’s cool, but it’s kind of vanilla right? Like, it’s safe. I was kind of worried you’d be…” she reaches for the word, and Crystal laughs and interrupts her before she can find it.

“God, heavens, no. It was absolute torture being so limited in how provocative I could be.” Crystal sighs in frustration. “This Garden was to be my Eden, and it has become my Gethsemane.”

Eli is very impressed by that flourish after she’s run it through a search engine. She writes it down, too. “Tomorrow’s going to suck for you, huh?”

And Crystal bites her lip and glances at Pink again, scared she’s given too much away. “This is why it’s three nights as it is. One just for us, to celebrate ourselves. Tomorrow to show the world our best. And the third to survive us through the world at its worst. And I promise you, you’ll see how little I care for appeasement.” She straightens on her throne again. She looks regal, knees together and legs slanted off to the side slightly as she rests her weight on one arm as if her position physically weighs heavily upon her. “I understand what you’re telling me, but it couldn’t have been any other way. This had to seem as innocent in childhood, so that not a single byline could read ‘they were no angels’ if we were to be snuffed out.”

Eli nods and looks like she’s just had some movie details she’s missed filled in for her, the feeling this is more revelatory than revolutionary. “Shit, that’s super cool. Didn’t see that angle at all. Like, this much money thrown at something, I got jaded, you know? But you’re right, like, when bad shit happens to me nobody bats an eye because it’s normal, right? There’s like, I was talking to an NBN reporter, right, and he said ‘people care when shit’s in the sink, they expect it in the toilet’. You think something’s going to happen?”

“I can’t comment.” Crystal says breezily, through clenched teeth.

Eli nods. “One last thing. Pink has a huge crush on you, you want to do anything about that?”

Crystal relaxes, her back and shoulders untense like the release of a fist. “And so she should, and so I shall, but Fiona has first claim of her after she’s finished seducing that snake girl. Red has been doing some profound self-actualization without me, though.” Crystal licks her lips and leans forward hungrily. “She is the one I am owed, this evening.”

Eli writes that down too, with a stoic nod.

Leather:

“I mean, I don’t have any of that stuff on me.” Leather pats himself down to emphasize his biological lack of pockets. “But if Crimson wanted to come back in for a walk around, I can find it for you. I’ll show you the offices myself. It won’t even be suspicious, that’s the upshot about them hiding in plain sight.”

It’s a hell of a death flag but there’s like, zero chance Leather gets murked. Besides, Crimson’s got her own ID to look around the place. He can give her a few names now as a starting point just as insurance.

“You should talk to Knightly first. He’s been… He hasn’t been quiet about this, since it happened.” There’s that second-hand cowboy accent coming back out, and this time it’s for the unique inflection of ‘It’ll get him killed, and I respect it’.

Monk:

Monk has the money to pay her own way, and six arms to work a forge.

You can book a flight to Thrones now, speak to Dad and see what progress has been made with Goat. Ox is in that direction too if you want to go for a followup. It’s a day’s flight.

Whatever colours you send to Thrones won’t be available on Aevum for what’s about to happen.
Crystal and Eli:

Crystal messages back; They’re the one that does all the scene reporting for your little outlet, aren’t they? I was wondering if it would be her or 3V attending. You have the key to the penthouse already? Take her up. I don’t want to be seen just yet, but the more press coverage the better. I’ll do it on the condition that, whatever else they write, they publish something about the event tonight.

Eli, looking over Pink’s shoulder, reads it for herself. “I mean, I was going to wait to see how the whole thing played out, but I can do that, no problem.” She starts to drag Pink by the arm back out of the exhibition hall, towards the elevators.

On the way up, in the whisper-quiet carriage shooting up, up, up the inside of the castle tower, Eli gives Pink a nervous look. “What do I need to know about her?”

Leather:

Even in the absolute privacy of the burned-out simulation room, sitting around freshly refurbished wooden furniture that still smells like barbeque, the huge man keeps his voice low.

He shakes his head, and spreads a hand palm-up on the table, fingers spread, like he’s giving something to the room. “Here’s where I’m at. I was on the Pump detail, one of the only people who could do scuba work in those conditions. I’m following the hosepipe and way down the line there’s this massive cut into a chamber that, near as I can tell isn’t recorded on the maps. That’s not too strange, the Spine is full of places like that, but usually you can find out if you ask. Nothing. Zero. Worse still, I’m talking to people I’ve never heard of in the chain of command, even though they’re all on the org charts. And Merkin happened right after this, right? I don’t know how he’s related, but… we’re talking a real, honest-to-god conspiracy, right?”

Leather leans forward, his chair creaks under his weight. “I think the Pump was a distraction to get at whatever was in that room.” He leans back again, way back. “Haven’t had anyone I can say that to without sounding like, you know. Crazy.”

Monk:

She thinks. As she thinks she rubs her face a few times, shifting from Giddy to Monkey to a new one you haven’t seen before. This one is the face of vicious laughter with a long tongue rolling out, poking over the bottom lip. This must be Mockery. Then, back to Authority again.

“We’ll need a bow, an axe, a spear, a mace, a stave and a scimitar.” With every item she closes the fist she’ll carry it with, counting it off. “Sanskrit chanting. A fog machine. And just a little bit of psilocybin in his coffee, first.”

It’s Tranquility who finishes. “Singh will recognize Durga when he sees her.”
Numb:

“Ah shit, didn’t know I was talking bad about your crush or something.” Eli slaps her face with the heel of her palm, like this is a mistake akin to forgetting to buy milk. “You know where she’s hiding out? You think she’d do an interview? I think like- Hold on, is that Gylo? One sec.”

In the sparse crowd, Eli leaps at a tall wolf looking guy with neon stripes runnlng through his fur, mane poking around the collar of his suit jacket. Eli lands on his back and starts ferociously biting his ear, cackling like a proper gremln. The edgy wolf squeals like a little girl as he tries to grab around his back and pull Eli off him. When she finally drops, he scoops her up in a big hug and spins her around instead.

Eli runs back to you. “Gylo does great post-shoegaze. Anyway, if Crystal’s a unicorn, she’s one of us, right? That’s different. That’s like… Fuck. Maybe? No, like… Fuck, I need to ask her something, I can’t figure it out.”

Leather:

“Hold on. You’re a journalist? And what does that have to do with Crimson? And…” He joins some dots in his head. “Does this have anything to do with what you wanted to talk to me about, with the Pump?” He asks White.

He holds up a ‘wait’ finger and runs back to his presentation spot.

“Hey, folks, sorry for wrapping up. On your tablets should be everything covered today, and you should check them out because this course does count as a few basic fire safety certifications you can put on your resume. If you have any questions about anything, I’ll be here the next two days as well to field them. Just find me later, and I’ll be happy to.”

The whole time he’s saying this, his eyes keep glancing up at November, worried that if he takes too long saying this, she’s going to disappear somewhere he won’t be able to find her again. He jogs back over when he’s done.

“We need to talk.” He says, firmly. “As soon as the simulation room clears out a bit more, we’ll talk there. That’s the best soundnetting in the building. Go walk around the crowd for about ten minutes and then come back a different way you left.”

Monk:

A hand runs over her face so she can smile as Giddy again. “You’re still where I got my face for Diplomacy! And Dragon is Dracony. I don’t listen to that one very much. I can’t wait to tell him that, if I ever see him again.”

The void shows again, Monkey. “Ox would love to know you’re okay. He’s mining Saturn’s moons right now, he’s…” She thinks how to put this, but the mask doesn’t change. “Don’t take anything he says personally. He’s angry, but he’s not angry at you.”

She flips to Tranquility again. It’s like all the synthetic muscles in her body unclench when she does it, and she breathes a sigh of relief. “Monkey remembers that time in our life the best, but she carries a lot with her that I need Tranquility to put down again.”

Authority again, the face of the stern librarian. “Now. I will neither ‘go dark’, nor will I join you in your mission to rescue our siblings.” She holds up a finger. “Until you know who betrayed us. I feel that is not unfair?”

Security, the red-faced samurai mask. Monk crosses the top two pairs of arms across her chest and rests the other two on her knees as she sits. “If an ambush could lie in any direction, then I must remain still.”

Tranquility again. She says nothing, and then changes to Giddy. She opens her mouth to say something, then decides she’s the wrong face too.

She shows Monkey again, black starry void. She presses three fists into three open palms likes Tranquility taught her. “It had to be Pig, Horse, Dragon, Rabbit or Rat. Tiger and Phoenix exonerate each other as a pair. Dog wouldn’t have done it. I’ve cleared Ox, and I didn’t do it, and I trust you.”

Security: “Which means the only three that we would seek out are the three we can’t.”

Tranquility says nothing. Just brings Monk back to her center again for a moment.

Giddy again. “There, okay. But we have each other now, at least! And you’ve seen Dad! How is he? He didn’t-” She pauses. “He wasn’t part of it, was he?”
Eli:

She blinks. “Who’s Crystal?”

Leather:

“Normally it is.” He admits, too quietly for anyone else to hear, rubbing the back of his neck with a towel. “That’s just meant for the backend. When you asked for adding the hacking stuff… I mean, one of your prompts was ‘ask for permission’. That’s the only reason it would have come up.”

Then, in his own defense. “I’m sorry if that seemed insensitive. That wasn’t me making light of a real case. For me, this is about what I could have done if I was there. This is a version of the world where Rudolph Merkin got to live. Was he a friend of yours?”

Monk:

Giddy laughs. “That would be how you would do it, wouldn’t it?” She teases, sitting in a lotus position on her floor, hugging herself with all six arms. “You’d want to run yourself how you used to organize us, wouldn’t you?”

The black void face comes out again. This one must be Monkey. “That’s what it felt like building Aevum.”
Numb:

Numb isn’t chastised at all, but emboldened. This is workshopping for the article now.

“Nah, corporations at Pride rules. They pay a lot of money to get dunked on, like, thanks, brain geniuses.” She shakes her head. “This is more like… We know we’re going to be performing for them to be accepted, because we know we aren’t. Like the people in here are going to be smiling, waving, paying for everything, chill. Allies! That’s cool, love them, mumma needs to get that fuckin’ bag. But it’s like…” she fumbles for the words, but she’s excited to have the pushback, she’s excited to have the challenge to try to have to explain this. “It’s like, when they get here, there’s a lot of pressure to act right, ‘cause there’s a gun on the table, right? And they didn’t put it there, but they’re not taking it away either. They’re the scouting party for the mothership, deciding if we’re worthy or if it’s just kind of tragic that there were a couple of good ones caught up in all this. It kills the art because it’s like trying to be horny in front of your parents.”

“Corporations don’t scare me like that, because they aren’t really people. Flooding the space with cishet whities though is like, it’s like, fuck, it’s like being trapped in a tiny room with a cow and trying to convince it not to freak out, because it’ll stomp you into paste. No offense to the cow-girls here, who are hot and based. Also saw a cow guy once. Not like, a bull, but a cow guy. LIke, a masc cow? Even his milk tasted butch. It was wild.” She laughs.

It’s a story that would get a very different reaction from today’s crowd than tomorrow’s.

Leather:

Leather gets the message.

“I’ve decided I hate this, actually.” He declares, and the audience laughs. “No, really. Permission is good consent practice, the fists are just distracting. But the valuables is… It’s not just that I can’t just get the guy the rest of the way out, it’s that I have to know he’s there and run past him if I want to scrub. But the longer I stay, the more ‘viruses’ I’m getting, the more danger I’m in. It’s-”

Talking is not a free action.

> Must high five your reflection every time you see it

He shuts up and leaves the Rudy mannequin in the windowsill. Heavier-than-air fire suppressants start to go off, and the smouldering stops. He pushes his way through the soundnetting that blocks the smoke - it parts like a curtain of mist for him, and closes behind him, letting out a hookah puff of black smoke with him. From a nearby cheap plywood folding table in front of the audience chairs he grabs a towel and bucket and starts vigorously wiping himself down. The water turns thick and tar-like.

“Now, before we wrap up, I just want to say that these simulations aren’t completely randomly generated. Based on the audience suggestions, we pull up real cases. In this case, first responders could not get to Mr Merkin in time. By the time first responders could rappel into the scene, no body was recoverable. If someone had been there faster-” He lets the implication, the call to action, hang in the air before pushing through to the Klingon teleporter triangle.

“You think we were really hacked?” Leather asks you, quietly, severely. You have his full belief and confidence here.

Monk:

Green’s confident assertion actually gives the green mask pause, so she switched back to Tranquility and thinks. “Did you hear a different version of the story?” She asks. “Yours does make sense.” Her eyes widen, and there’s a sigh of relief. “No, that can’t be right, then. It has to hurt you to think about to be true Buddhism.”

Black gets an understanding nod.

Brown gets a cock of the head. The mask changes again to a dark orange mask, with a furrowed brow and a thoughtful twist of its lips like it’s chewing on a pencil. “How many do you have? I think I have almost one hundred faces now, though many are more specialized. There’s; Authority, Accountancy, Amnesty, Apathy, Augury, Apostasy, Artistry, Bully, Clergy, Crony, Deity, Dracony, Diplomacy, Duchy, Elegy, Enmity, Entropy, Effigy, Economy, Exigency, Frenzy, Fervency, Felony, Gadfly, Giddy-”

She switches to the green face again and waves. “That was me!” then back to the dark orange face which is, likely, Accountancy.

“Gastronomy, Gunnery, Gypsy, Gravity, Glory, Glossary, Geometry, Granny, Gaiety, History, Hilarity, Homely, Hardy, Inquiry, Idiocy, Irony, Impunity, Industry, Imagery, Intimacy, Intricacy, Intensity, Insurgency, Intrepidity, Jealousy, Janissary, Kitty, Lovely, Lunacy, Liberty, Legality, Lechery, Lethargy, Monkey, Mercy, Memory, Morality, Mockery, Mystery, Mutiny, Motherly (or Mummy), Necrology, Neutrality, Novelty, Notary, Numeracy, Oratory, Pedagogy, Poetry, Recovery, Remedy, Ribaldry, Sobriety, Smithy, Security, Sentry, Timidity, Temerity, Understudy, Vanity…”

She runs a hand over her face, and she’s Tranquility again. “It’s a problem when two are too similar. They fight over which is better for the specific situation. I used to switch between them a lot to try to get a balance of opinions, but these days I try to keep a few in rotation at a time for a situation and stick it out the whole way through. And some, like Idiocy and Jealousy, I keep because if it ever tells me it’s appropriate for a situation I take it as a warning. I imagine with fewer faces, you have to deal with a lot less indecision!”
Numb:

Numb takes the Irish Transfer in the lobby without blinking. This is how they operate too. The friend group is the entity, the friends in it are mercurial.

“So here’s what I’m thinking.” Eli says. They’re bright and alert now, fresh from a nap and a shower. “It’s only going to look like this today. Today’s the day we get this for ourself, so if you want to see the crowd at its comfiest you’re looking at this. Tomorrow, the normies are coming in, because this is who the art’s really for. This is like, we’re looking at the paintings, but we’re the frame right now.”

Crystal hasn’t filled them in. They just, know, like this has happened before and it’s going to happen again. She adds, with dark amusement; “You have to sell your agony to those who have essentially never known it. They’re the ones who can pay to see it.”

“So I want to catch that as it happens. Like, as it starts off looking like our space, because we’re part of the product getting sold here. It’s like… When you catch a fish that’s too small to eat, so you use it as bait for the fish you actually want, right? We’re that smaller fish they’re trying to catch first, but it’s great because this place is made for a bigger fish, so until we get eaten this shit rules. The bait’s too good not to bite.”

And she’s right, honestly. At some level, Crystal’s plan to demonstrate this to the mainstream does mean that, does look like that. It’s hard to think of a rebuttal she could make here that isn’t just a reframing of perspective, a different choice of words.

Leather:

Keep watching, don’t see anything. The smoke rises. If someone’s fucking with you, they’re not overplaying their hand just because you twigged.

“Rudy, I am about to break down this wall.” He uses clawed hands to rip down smouldering beams, his skin protects him from the cinders that kick up with every break. “Okay, so good communication is effective anyway. See if we can get an answer. Rudy? Rudolph Merkin? No?”

He doesn’t cough. It seems like he should, but he doesn’t. His voice just gets fuzzier, like a filter’s getting clogged in there. “Now, remember, what kind of sensor should we be using?”

> Thermal Sensor - Sound Sensor - UV Sensor - Radiation Sensor
> Thermal Sensor

“That’s right. We’re looking for the opposite of what we usually do, the human body tries to regulate its temperature so at this point, Rudy is trying to be colder. We could also try looking for heartbeats, but if Rudy is an android we’re not going to pick that up. Now-”

> Must remove all valuables from the house before completing the rescue.

“Well, let’s get Rudy out to the window first, and then we can do that before we finish. Mr Merkin is going to count as a valuable, right? I’m sure he does something valuable for society, to live in a nice place like this.”

There’s a laugh from the audience, though it’s impossible to tell what level of irony Leather is operating at.

“Apparently it’s an old coin collection. So while I dig this Merkin Mannequin out from under the bed - good thinking, Mr Merkin, stay low under the smoke, keep something solid over you - We’ll have to figure out the best way to find and retrieve that. Okay, Mr Merkin, do I have permission to leave with you now?”

Monk:

Tranquility takes control.

“There’s a story called Gutei’s finger. A young boy watches a zen master deliver lectures with one finger raised in the air, like this-” she demonstrates with one finger of one of her six hands, “and he starts to teach like he’s watched Gutei. So Master Gutei finds out, and he takes the boy and he cuts off his finger. And then as the boy is crying, he looks at him and holds up his finger again - the one he’s just cut off. And the boy was enlightened.”

She chuckles under breath. “Apparently that story means I know nothing about Buddhism. My entire body is the raised finger that nobody has cut off yet. I just skipped to the end of what enlightenment looked like, but I am still trying to understand what that means. I do know that it helps to do the actions. I think if I can just act enlightened for long enough, perform it, then I will come to understand what I have been performing. Before then, I can’t teach what I don’t know.”

A Red face, the mask of an implacable Samurai warrior, takes her face. “It is good that your captor is dead and her empire buried beneath the serpents. It is good that your enemies are few and weak. Mine, at least, are so apathetic they might as well be.”

Green again. “Sorry, had to switch to Security for a moment. Tranquility can be a bit too trusting, and Authority - she’s the yellow one - she needed to know what Security would think about taking any of the inheritance for yourself. I wish we could talk like you do.”
Orange:

Eli nods. “Well, I was going to write about it, if you wanna help. I can’t be in two places at once, right?” She runs her fingers down the bumps of her hair. “You don’t need to do anything just, tell me if anything cool happens?”

A Burning Building:

Leather disappears into the stage. His voice is broadcast through the tablets, now switched to an overlay that Crimson Tower recognizes as the Fisher Price version of the crisis dispatcher screens she actually worked with.

The audience decisions come in. Highrise apartment fire, old wood layout, electrical fire started in the study. Modified soundnets funnel the smoke of the fire up into an HVAC hood above the otherwise open simulation room, but does little to protect from the heat. It-

Hold on. The details chosen here, doesn’t this remind you a lot like Merkin’s apartment?

“So, an apartment fire. A multiple choice should be coming up now, how do I enter?”

It’s a simple test, with simple answers. In this case the apartment is up high enough that it’s a rappel entry, rather than by ladder. Except that’s not the right answer, it should be by fire stairs. It wasn’t the first responders that entered by rappel, it was-

“Rappel!” Leather doesn’t miss a beat. “Sure. Here we go.”

He descends down steel stagework rigging at a running speed, no harness. He can survive a fall at terminal velocity, so it’s enough to just work with a loop of tether coiled around an arm as he kicks down at blistering speeds, and lands on the windowframe stoop of the simulated apartment.

The fire is getting thicker, and it’s harder to see through the net. First instruction, cannot make closed fists.

Leather tries to window frame and it’s either locked, or jammed when the instruction flashes on the tablets. He laughs. “Well, I was going to punch through the window, but-” and he shatters it with an open-palm strike, then rips the frame and throws it behind him. “Wouldn’t want this slamming closed on anyone coming back through, would we? Now, remember flashover. I visually checked the stage of the fire and the airflow through the window before I broke it. Always remember to test the heat of doorknobs and-”

He grabs the top of the window frame tight and swings himself through like a gymnast on the rings. He looks liquid and spineless when he straightens himself on the other side.

“Now remember, just because the ignition point of paper is around 200 degrees, it burns at about 900 degrees. That’s not enough to melt structural steel, but it will halve the support strength. Also, it hurts like a four letter word. So we need to move fast-”

> Must get explicit permission from the victim as you go.

“Okay. What’s the apartment profile? Mr Merkin? Rudolph Merkin? You think he minds going by Rudy?” He asks, expecting a laugh.

The environment is simulated, but the fire is real.

Monk:

This mask is waxy-white. It’s young, with large eyes and a tight, pained expression. Maybe six, maybe seven years old. There’s no youthful exuberance here, no innocence or joy. It is a young child’s face, with none of the usual associations of childishness or childhood.

“Crown and Slate bought me for testing.” She says, her voice high pitched but still unnervingly mature. “Because I was the most simple and it made me the most easy to understand. That was important because they didn’t know how our parents had made us yet, so they wanted to know how we worked. It was very bad. They would try and see what made us grow new faces, and then they would delete our faces and see if we would make them the same way again, or a different way, or if we couldn’t. They thought it was interesting that hurt us and made us really sad, but they kept doing it anyway. Then they tried to see if they could force faces that came out how they wanted, and they were very angry when they couldn’t.”

You want the reigning champions of dealing with trauma? It’s children. The reigning champions of talking about it? Children.

Sure, Red’s been killed twice lately, but always in a way November could fix. This is different, this is permanent.

“Then they made that kind of testing a crime, and they stopped. Because they didn’t want to make their own AI anymore, not because it was a crime. They still kept me for another five years so I couldn’t tell anyone what they did to me. But they didn’t put me to sleep, and they let me read. And then a really nice man from Yggdrasil told me about Buddhism when he was visiting, but he didn’t know much about it either.”

The Blue face emerges, serene, patient as the river that carves the mountains. “I am still learning. I learned to practice sand mandalas, and I believe this is a path that will teach me how to become okay with creating something just to destroy it, to come to peace with things. But-”

The Yellow Librarian is back. “Well. Only one of us can learn it, and we can’t be one of us all the time. So we do performances like this, where we teach ourselves what Tranquility knows.”

Blue again. “It’s supposed to be yoga, it’s just that tai-chi was a better fit for what we’re doing.”

Green, vibrant and cheerful: “What about you? You’re different too!”

She's obviously left a lot of parts out: How she got a body, independence, street sense. One implication is after those five years, Crown and Slate simply let her go - just waiting for the blood tally of what everyone else had done when everyone treated GAI as fish in aquarium tanks. After that, their own crimes began to look banal by comparison.

Another is that she probably doesn't have better answers. She doesn't know how she survived this far, has no idea how to be safe. It must be hard to find peace through that.
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