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York:

“I’ll do the flower book and put your name on the condiments set.” York nods, flicking through his phone as Orange talks and narrows his eyes. “Found your source, by the way.”

He’s quiet for a moment, looking at his phone. Then he turns it off, takes the battery out, and puts both back into his pocket. “I’ve got to be vague, but don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m asking. Did you know before, or from what happened last night.”

There’s no tell how he feels yet. He’s hiding everything right now, though given what headlines he just read it’s likely it’s as much for Orange as from her.

Dudekov:

“The trick to making ships in bottles,” Dudekov continues with his eyes closed, “is that you have to remember your place. When you think about the next piece, you can’t imagine it already in the place you think it must go. It’s much harder than you think to not see it as if it is already there.”

He opens them again and opens a drawer for a hotel pen, no notepad but a Gideon bible. He tears a page out and uses it as notepaper, speed-drawing a rough bottle, some hull, and circling the number 13 to keep his place. He looks back up.

“Either my brain was not really ripped, in which case this is the real trick. The big show to convince me to, what? Call the right people, warn them? Have agents around the city see who jumps when I call?” Dudekov asks with a raised eyebrow. “Or that is a double-bluff, I have had my brain ripped, at which point you are the asset sent to liquidate me afterwards, or some such thing, and I am better where I am. There is no urgency, nothing more can be done.”

“I do not know what it is planning,” Dudekov looks at his sheet of paper again, at the number thirteen, and closes his eyes. His fingers twitch lightly as he imagines the work. “Only that no scheme is too contrived, too convoluted. One must imagine a GAI as a bored teenager playing the world like it has a save/load function.”
Dudekov:

Dudekov keeps his eyes closed at the edge of the bed. “You’re working for them.” He says. “You’ve come alone, you’re feigning shock. I don’t doubt all your credentials check out, that you are who you say you are. I don’t care.” His tongue pushes his lips out from where he pokes against the sides of his mouth in concentration, like a wriggling worm against the teeth of the skull. “I am busy.”

York:

York moves along the flower display in the cafe window, thinking. “I don’t think Junta cares for flowers. I just don’t know what else to get him. Maybe a decorative book? Should get him a book about flowers.” He nods, then looks back to Orange.

“Everyone knows that.” He says as he sits back down at the cafe table. “The Australia thing. It’s one of those open conspiracies, things you can’t officially confirm but we all know. Even if it’s true, who’s left to hang for it?” He shrugged. “Had to build the damn thing somewhere, was always going to collapse - it dropped because nobody cared then, and they don’t care now.”

“So why do you?”

Most of the collapse was out into desert, and while the fracturing upon the continent left even huge previously-habitable regions devastated, most people had gotten out from under it in the decades leading up to the fall. The rest were given about as much sympathy as Katrina victims rebuilding their houses on shoreline.
The Next Day:

This is where we move outside the scope of a single person’s experience of the world. The thing about historical events is that for brief moments the most important people in the world are the ones who step out of a crowd and then recede back into it, never to be seen or heard from again. The crowd itself is almost the more important character.

The world is too large for the important events to all come from the few people we have already met. Likewise, these events are too large for anyone to be left out of them, to not be swept up in this. We will see both.

*

Zhang Ho knows how to act like she belongs with the transphobes, she’s just got to pretend to be like her parents, say things she’s heard around the dinner table. Shut her brain off and flow with the anger, she can do that.

She wouldn’t fit in with the march of modded androids they’re working against either, a group that includes FUCKING SKELETOR in spirit - he’s in a different march in Ares right now, around Cerberus Augments where the more radical parts are made.

This one in Aphrodite is organized by a friend of Numb and York. Echidna Prime is an odd duck, naming herself for the Mother of Monsters that Gaea planned as a revenge against the Gods. She’s actually very successful, nearly 120 direct children and already two primes in her descendants. Not because she’s especially good at her specialty, but because of just how motivated the line is to be… different.

Which means spending a lot of money on aftermarket parts and upgrades, many of which are supplied at the company store. Echidna was chosen as the optimal lifetime consumer.

She walks on stork legs. At full height she stands like a stilt walker, but more typically they fold completely down, knees over her head, bending and flexing unnaturally to let her walk comfortably through the typical doorway. She has the body of an owl, bronze wings that end in claw-fingered harpy-hands, and the head of a beautiful young astronomer with round-rimmed glasses and long hair tied in a loose ponytail. She stands at full height with her megaphone.

She doesn’t use it, though. Her crowd moves in complete, eerie silence. There is an intense discipline drilled into this, because their hatred of Zhang’s group is palpable, viscerable, bubbles and boils off them. Their existence itself is their protest, and even so much as a sign would undercut that. Anything more, any read on their intention, must be projected on to the group.

We exist, and that’s the problem. That’s all it takes to piss you off. If we give you a single crack in the armor, a single argument to pull against, then you will take it. But if existing is all we are doing, and you still can’t handle that? Everything else is sophistry.

This is the group York figured best met the needs of Crystal’s exhibition. The one it’ll be hardest to justify violence breaking out against, when it happens, one that’ll be capable of defending itself if things get seriously ugly.

Zhang starts moving through the crowd and looking for tension points, the loose cannons. She waits for the police presence to already start showing up, and she keeps a tight grip on the heavy rolls of batteries she’s keeping in her biker jacket pockets.

*

Binh Van Ut was born with solar urticaria, an allergy to light. It’s a really rare genetic disorder, and in 2020 the only treatment for it was to essentially live as an astronaut would in void. Keeping to a blacked out home and only leaving the house in essentially a space suit.

“Dr Nguyen?”

She worked with her doctors for a modified treatment that would adapt her melanin to chlorophyll, would have her grow flowering ivy blooms in place of hair, would let her be healed and grow in the sunlight. Ever since she imagined it, the perfect opposite of everything she had suffered for the first fifteen years of her life, she has seen everything else as just… waiting. Waiting to be correct. Waiting to be herself.

“We can still treat your allergy, but that’s all we can do.”

“But I’m halfway through the treatment! You said, you said that…” she trails off, holding the phone. He said so many things, she doesn’t know which one to say. She just knows none of it matters now.

“We’re still looking into what this all means, it’s not - I’m doing everything I can that we can keep what you’ve already got of your current course of treatment.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re being told that we might have to reverse the cosmetic elements to be allowed to continue the public option treatment of your disease.”

“It’s not cosmetic.”

“I’m sorry I said that. I know.”

“It’s not.”

“I know.”

“I just, it’s the whole point. I don’t want to be, I don’t just want to be cured, or I… I never got to talk to other people, I never got to go to school, I’ve never been- If people can’t see what I got better from, then what was the point of it?”

“All I can tell you, Binh, is that I have a lot of phone calls like this that I need to make today. You’re not alone.”

Binh looked around her treated apartment, pitch black even in the middle of the day. She couldn’t even live with her parents like this, even though they loved her and visited her a lot. “Thanks, Dr Nguyen. For caring.”

“As soon as I have better news, I’ll tell you. This is just, this could just be the worst case scenario, we don’t know yet.”

“Okay.”

“I can give recommendations for private practitioners who are still going to be working through this, if… I’ll talk to your parents about it.”

“You should make your other calls first. Thanks, again.”

There was a lingering hesitation on the other end of the line before Dr Nguyen hangs up. He just doesn’t know what to say, and he has too many people he has to say it to.

Binh needed this. There’d been a point when the treatment started where she could go outside and talk to people for a while without the suit, and it had been one of the worst experiences of her life. When she wore the suit it was okay for her to be a bit weird and maladjusted because, well, people saw what she was dealing with.

She could look normal but she couldn’t act it, had barely experienced it to learn how to pretend it. When people thought she looked normal, then everything she said and did came across like she was failing and fucked up and wrong and that’s how everyone treated her.

If she was a dryad she could be shy, and weird, and different and that’s just how they were, that’s what she was. She could actually exist, she could have breathed, she could have…

Now she couldn’t.

Binh survives what she’s about to do to herself, she only has access to a bathroom medicine cabinet and it’s hard to make yourself more than just really sick with painkillers and sleeping pills. That’s why I focused on her.

Others won’t survive, because that is what happens. It is only important to understand that decision, not to marinate in its worst consequences. This can be fixed.

*

IAmWhatIAm: Are you all familiar with the idea of controlled burns?
AnthrozineEditorYork: cause a smaller fire to prevent a worse fire
IAmWhatIAm: The assassination has delayed a case that was about to be decided
IAmWhatIAm: The protections stripped by the Costa-Silva decision would have been a crack in the doorway to go further. I do not believe the two decisions being docketed so close together, and in this order, was an accident.
IAmWhatIAm: Now it is unlikely to go that way. Even when Hermes elects its replacement, the Justices have learned fear.
PerfidiouslyFickle: They’re calling it the Costa-Silva decision now?
IAmWhatIAm: They are. Whether it be in her honor or infamy is a matter of personal discretion.
AnthrozineEditorYork: hot take assassination works folks get on it
HartlyDworkin: That was a joke.
NumbToNothing:
3V: >:3
NumbToNothing: Wait 3V are you joking or are you joking about joking
3V: >:3

*

The districts are the size and population of continents. While they’re specialized, they are simply too large to contain only their specializations. It is more accurate to call them themed at this scale. Hermes might be the district of industry and factories, but there are also factories in Ares for more radical and intensive processes - like glass factories named for old Italian towns - and factories in Gaea for food processing. Those people still live close to work, they don’t live in Hermes and commute out.

That just means this kind of generalization isn’t useful at an individual level. At a macro level though, it’s true enough to be useful. Character is destiny.

One generally true statement is that Hermes is the most overtly conservative. It comes out that there’s already bills drafted that would see furries and non-anthro androids lose access to unemployment, disability, other forms of social insurance. But that requires constitutionality being decided by the courts, and right now they’re going to be too busy holding emergency elections amongst themselves.

* * *

November:

Dudekov wakes up mostly-naked in an empty hotel bathtub, empty bags of antifreeze IV and convenience store ice next to it. He carefully gets out of the drained bathtub and checks the long, sutured scar on his head in the mirror.

His clothes are folded neatly on a chair outside the bathroom, a green polo shirt and running shorts. He takes both and puts them on, sitting back onto a hotel bed, trying to piece together what’s just happened.

He’s foggy, still. Anesthetic? Anesthetic hangover? A bit of both. Either way, it would explain why he can’t fully feel the effects of an invasive brain surgery right now.

He checks the TV first - the cords been cut. As has the room’s phone lines. If he wants to call out, it’s just the phone in his pocket.

He sits at the edge of the bed and thinks about ships in bottles.
Dudekov:

He’s still handcuffed behind his back, but the boat railing he’s been handcuffed to snaps as the chain pulls through it - for a moment, Dudekov seems just as surprised about this as Black is, she’d tested its strength before using it.

Then he starts lashing out in a flurry of stomping kicks aimed at Black’s head, balancing his weight on his bound hands as he rushes her horizontally. He’s been holding back because of the illusion of powerlessness, the pointlessness of resistance, but some combination of just how badly Black has set him off and his loss of faith in the sanity of any of this has reminded him of something very, very important;

He is bigger than you, and he’s about to get his brain hacked by an insane robot. He roars, too furious to even think of trying to escape.

First check DC 4 just for Black to keep her footing on a boat while blocking the wild swings - Dudekov has no such disadvantage, he’s a sailor through-and-through. The nature of the centrifugal artificial gravity is enough to give even this river slight, choppy waves.

Then there is a second DC 5 to try and restrain him again, or disable him. Otherwise he’s trying to stomp Black’s face like he’s trying to get wine out of grapes just long enough he can do a can-can line on Crystal’s Kiss.

Chase Black:

It’s a twin rotor aircraft with twin VTOL tilt-jet assist, a bastard hybrid of chinook and osprey to make a gunner dropship capable of hauling a tank’s worth of armor through the sky to any part of the station at lightning speeds. This isn’t enough to crash it, because it’s an overengineered monster that won’t go down to any one single hit.

That being said: If any one shot could have, it would have been that one.

The main rotor doesn’t explode in a fireball or anything so dramatic, the cutting laser blasting its base cuts through the driveshaft as it spins, a spiral of damage that shoots the entire rotor blade directly up from the force when it comes loose, fracturing in the sky from the heat shock and sudden change of forces. The gunship wobbles as its rear rotor and tilt jets shift to take up the slack and regain balance from the sudden loss of force, but without the main rotor for upward thrust the gunship now has two different flight modes.

Now it can choose to fly as a jet, taking looping strafes without the precision of a locked-on tail it’s been benefiting from. Or it can rely on its jets in VTOL mode and lose a significant chunk of its maximum speed - still enough to keep up with a speedboat, but not enough to keep up with a better getaway vehicle if you can make the switch. A train, maybe.

It goes for the VTOL option, spinning into a side-on lean pursuit like it’s Tokyo drifting, a side door opening and two snipers peering out the hatch leveling shots at Pink and Brown - Black is too close to the VIP.

This could be a piloting check to serpentine wildly (DC 5 with damage to the gunship throwing off the snipers). Another shot might do it as well, the same table as last time but with +1 difficulty because you’re doing it under fire - and missing the shot would leave the gunner exposed to the return fire. You cannot do both - Aiming Crystal’s Kiss from the back of a wildly fishtailing boat is outside of November’s capabilities for now.

Dudekov needs to be subdued again if you want to try and escape through the marina and back out into surface streets, but that's right through the open and out under fire. It'd take a 2 Preparedness spend from Pink to have prepared sandwiches to pop smoke, and then it's a DC 5 athletics check to run through - but the DC drops down to 3 if you have something about the smoke that would completely fuck up a high tech multi-spectrum scope from a distance.

What’s your exit strategy?
Dudekov:

“You’re insane,” he says, incredulously, trying to push his back further into the wall from Black even though he’s physically strong enough to overpower two of her. “You’re Skynet in a tinfoil hat! The regency broke its ‘throne’ when we abdicated it twenty years ago, now it’s all bloody democracy! That’s been the whole point of hiding Goat. He was too important to let people screw it up. God knows if the regency was what you think it is, we’d have done something about it. Also” and here he raises his voice to a roar, “Whose fucking fault is it that Hermes has been having water shortages? Maybe the one who blew up the fucking rain pump!” He is so angry. He is so angry. He is so angry.

“Fucking incredible. Keep shooting lasers at helicopters, hope you’re not hitting anyone on the far side of the station with the overpenetration!”

Chase Black:

This is your chance, they’re hesitating because they want to escalate but they don’t want to hurt Dudekov. This is the one salvo you’re going to get off freely before they play hardball with you - and actually landing the hit will really piss them off.

Difficulty 4: Center mass
Difficulty 6: Weapons system (single wing)
Difficulty 7: Rotor

This is a Shooting challenge and you’re out of points, though. You’re going to have to get really creative about how you justify using other skill pools to this.
Dudekov:

“The fountain collapsed when there was nobody left to maintain the workforce anymore.” Dudekov just sounds bored. “Australia was picked for being the largest industrialized landmass that was still mostly empty desert, that was always the plan. Your brother was happy.” He says it and narrows his eyes. “Goat was happy, we relied on that. You’re projecting your own values onto him, if he wanted to stop there was nothing we could have done to prevent it. Nothing stopped him from taking breaks except that it was torture to him to try.” He shakes his head. “Christ, this is like dealing with the Catholics again.”

He thinks, but does not say: If I had the power to do what you say I did, then I would have been infinitely less stressed these last twenty years. Would have had to sit through a lot less meetings.

“No. None of you could never be given the power Goat had voluntarily, knowingly.” He looks at Black with deep, visceral, personal hatred. “You’d know how much power you held, and you’d leverage it. You’d take over the station with it. As soon as you thought you could.”

The hatred flashes away to something… genuinely empathetic and apologetic? The whiplash is incredible. “I hated the bombs, actually. You can’t show distrust if you want loyalty! The American didn’t understand that.” He’s not saying that in asking for absolution, he’s saying it because he’s embarrassed for being associated with bad policy.

Chase Black:

The helicopter maintains steady pursuit. It looks like it doesn’t want to engage, not while they’ve realized Dudekov is on the boat. Except:

It fires a single, bright-blue missile.

Pink, you can knock it out of the sky with that laser shot, and you might have to - it’s an EMP burst to kill the engines, and while you and the laser itself might be EMP shielded, there’s no way that jank connection of battery packs is. Your best case scenario is the shot wipes, your worst is those batteries actually explode from the overload.

Difficulty 7 to knock a moving weapon out of the sky with an improvised, but aimed and prepared, laser weapon you’re familiar with. You can justify other skill spends to enhance your shot, but at least one of them’s going to have to be your point in shooting.

“The river is a closed circuit, you have nowhere to run.” The helicopter broadcasts through directed speakers as it fires, trying not to disturb the other residents. “Return the hostage before we resort to lethal force.”
Dudekov:

“You’re self-absorbed, narcissistic, egomaniac, self-righteous, power-tripping children. Yes, I enslaved your brother, just like you condemned billions of people to death freeing him. Is that what you want to hear? And from what? Playing video games? They liked their job, I made sure of it.” He spits. “Your other siblings are just asleep. That’s it. Anyone else who acquired one of you did far worse than that. I have nothing to atone for. I did what was necessary and never one step further.”

“You, you fucking child, destroyed the rain pump for the station and left others to figure it out, ripped out its brains and condemned everyone to two years of life with no understanding of what you were doing, and no plan to fix it. And then you kidnap and threaten an old man in his home after he invited you in to talk, just because you knew you could. You wanted to show off. And the second you knew you could, there was no way this could have gone peacefully. All you children ever want to do is show off.”

“I have been dead from the moment you got bored.”

The helicopter’s searchlight winds from the house to the boat. This doesn’t have to be a chase; Just throw Dudekov over the side and run.

Otherwise it won’t be much of a chase. You’re a fast boat on an enclosed river escaping a cross-station helicopter. It’s like trying to do a police chase on a bicycle. You’re going to need to stall and evade, and that’s going to be difficulty checks and spending a lot of resources.
Dudekov:

“No.”

Bondi:

“No.” She says, and squeezes Orange tighter.

… no?

“You had plenty of time to find someone who could help instead.” Bondi half-scolds and half reassures. “Now you want to take a ton of explosives on the train to who knows where, at this time of night, by yourself, to chase after a helicopter?”

Just getting from Aphrodite to Zeus is like 45 minutes to an hour on its own, before factoring in cross-station travel and getting to the station and then getting to the helicopter from the station. Odds are high that a Chase helicopter wouldn’t even have enough fuel in it to carry an operation that long if it wanted to.

“I know you want to be there right now, but you can’t do everything all the time yourself.”

The truth is, you just don’t know enough people for someone to be in the right place at the right time in Zeus - well, except Knightly.

Dudekov:

There’s no bomb in his brain.

“I didn’t,” he tries to grab his head with both hands to wrench his neck, settle it, from where he's slumped in the back of the boat “I didn’t pull some ‘dumb action movie stunt’. This is just what you things are always like. Too much,” and he taps the side of his head, “and a sense that you’re all so immortal. You show up at the door to talk, I think you are just going to monologue about how you have found me because you are so very smart and better and I will give in to your demands.” His eyes narrow. “But you made it clear you were not just here to talk.”

You uh, you did knock on his front door strapped with explosives and threaten the guy in his own home, and it was his bodyguards that reacted before he could order them to do so.

The sound of helicopter rotors in the distance - They’re still going towards Dudekov’s house right now, not intercepting the boat route. You have minutes, but in a situation like this you grow to appreciate how long a minute really is.
Anthrozine:

AnthrozineEditorYork: Problem is we don’t have real information on her yet, just takes
AnthrozineEditorYork: Nobody even knows this girls real name
AnthrozineEditorYork: If we could get that, we could get ahead of everything and we can control that narrative, Junta can I get you to
AnthrozineEditorYork: Pope, you got this?
IAmWhatIAm: I would be proud to be your second choice on this
AnthrozineEditorYork: Have less dual loyalties dickhead then we’ll talk
IAmWhatIAm: You get what you pay for
AnthrozineEditorYork: Amateur means ‘does it out of love’ and we got plenty of love here
NumbToNothing: yeah but 3V’s hogging it all right now
3V: Yes. Give me all your love.
3V: I will not be sharing.

Bondi:

“You got your family separated and enslaved?” She asks, completely credulous. “How’d you do that?”

York:

“Pope’s got some androids to talk to about some civil rights stuff. Arguing a case that the mod blacklist could prevent things like bricking your wifi because it’s non-standard and that counts against self-defense and medical protections, apparently they forgot to work around that. But - I know some of you met Zhang Ho before, you want me to- Fuck it.”

LetsGoHo!: HEY
LetsGoHo!: WHAT AM I NOT ALLOWED TO DO TOMORROW
LetsGoHo!: I AM OUT OF FUCKS SO IF YOU WANT ME TO HAVE ANY I WILL HAVE TO BORROW SOME FROM YOU

Dudekov:

He’s not awake yet, and Chase Black is coming in a few minutes, probably by gunship. Normally that’s just to drop them off, but in this case…

Make a plan, cover what’s already happened, and wake the guy up. This is your one chance to discuss amongst yourselves what your angle of approach while he’s still too punch-drunk and concussed to understand what’s being said in front of him.

Fiona and Hazel:

“Uh.” Fiona moves in. “Hi.”

Hazel grunts. She’s going through the storage shelves assessing everything. She’s not so organized to use a clipboard, she’s just impulsively thinking of what she could want or need moment to moment and trying to see if it already exists in a place she’d think to look at it.

“Well. I’m Fiona.”

“Sure.” Hazel looks out. “Hazel Belle-Fleur. I’m working.”

Every fibre of Fiona’s being tells her to not act like a fucking landlord about this interaction so she grits her teeth and swallows it back, moving to a workbench she can unload her new legs on. “Same. What are you working on.”

“Nothing, yet. That’s what I’m working on.” Hazel looks over. “You her girlfriend or something?”

“Or something.” Fiona starts twisting and unbuckling her legs from the frame and wincing in pain with each strap. “Hers? Which one? Reds?”

“Red? Yellow.” Hazel furrows her brow. “I need to get used to that.”

“Yeah, takes a bit.” Fiona shrugs. “Easier when you’re not introduced to the idea in the shower and it’s a totally different person acting like it’s not. Because they’re not, but, you don’t know that yet.” She sighs. “So you’re the new friend, then.”

“Do we have to be friends?” Hazel raises an eyebrow. “That wasn’t part of the deal. I’m just here to make a dragon.”

“Ah. Got it.” Fiona says. Finally, with one last grunt, the legs are fully up on the worktable. Hazel flitters out from the stats to literally hover behind Fiona’s shoulders with a disgusted look.

“Not very aesthetic, is it?”

“Nope.” Fiona grins. “Way overengineered too, for safety reasons, lots of redundant power it's not using. There’s already a ton of extra give in the motors, I don’t even have to replace anything. I just need to strip the physical limiters out, throw enough extra batteries in to feed the burst, and I should be able to kick a hole through a cinderblock wall with these if I need to. I was thinking of running or jumping but it’s really only good for short, brute force hits.”

Hazel considers that. “A good start. But then it still looks like… this.”

“Yeah. But it’ll work.”

“You’re not going to build this back up from scratch?” Hazel asks, surprised, looking back at the shelves. “But you have everything you need here to make something actually good. Full encasement, something that actually looks personalized, not just…” She squints at the back of Fiona’s neck. “You’re using haptics when you have a direct neural link? That’d solve all your problems if you want to get it fine-tuned for running and jumping.”

Fiona brushes hair hair to cover her neck better and keeps looking forward so Hazel can’t see her face from where she’s hovering. “Yes, but this is something I can do tonight.”

“But it’s all you’re going to do with it, isn’t it?”

“Probably.”

Hazel nods, and both of them understand exactly what it means when she flies away.

Fiona is unworthy. Fiona doesn’t get it. The fact that she is technically capable only makes this failure more embarrassing and more personal.
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