Count Numbers

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Fiona:

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

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

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

Crystal:

She laughs, actually, at that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crystal searches that. “Paul McCartney has one?”

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

Crystal: What would going apeshit look like?

Train Station Cops:

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

Crimson Tower:

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

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Fiona:

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

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

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

Crystal:

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

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

Cyan:

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

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

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

3: Try it. The army approaches.

Crimson Tower:

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

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

Valkyries:

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

They’ll see how this goes.

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

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Fiona:

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

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

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

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

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

Crystal:

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

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

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

Crystal: It is.

The Train Station:

From walking the street:

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

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

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

From a drone to the high windows:

Dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zhang Ho:

LetsGoHo!: 117 pierre brissot st help

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

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

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

PerfidiouslyFickle plays the objective

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

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

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

Crap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a knock at the door. “Yes?”

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

“Uh, yeah.”

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

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

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

She reminded Binh of a sunflower.

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

“I… What do you want me to say?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Aphrodite Crisis Headquarters:

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

So, no. No ideas.

Apostle:

Junta doesn’t, because he can’t.

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

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

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

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

Zone out.

Fiona:

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

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

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

Crystal:

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

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

The Streets:

The colour groups spread out as planned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chaka Zulu:

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

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Apostle:

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

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

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

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

Fiona:

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile:

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

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

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

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

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

Moving fast and early might prove the right choice.

Meanwhile:

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, Pope just wants to grieve.

Meanwhile:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile:

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

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

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

“I do.” Crystal says cautiously.

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

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

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

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

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

Crystal feels overwhelmingly possessive.

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

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

Black and Orange:

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

The doors open again for Ares to move out.

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

Red:

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

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

But.

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

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Apostle:

“Just have insane amounts of privilege.” Apostle says without a hint of irony. “It’s great, cops apologize to me before they have to touch me. Highly recommend it.”

Aren’t they kind of transhuman looking, part of the targeted minority? Well, yes and no. It’s kind of analogous to being Asian in the Western tech industry in the 2020s putting you both outside of and at the top of white supremacy depending on the context, Apostle’s aesthetic mods squarely places them as a rich Thrones eccentric. They're biomodded, sure, but it's only to make their blood dry like movie blood so it looks prettier. Normal blood sucks to write poetry in.

“Junta has more experience with them. He’s better at the whole using privilege to work with government thing. He said uh, shit, what was it? Cops see the world like they’re sheepdogs, and there’s only wolves and sheep. So if you’re not acting like a sheep, then you’re a wolf. So trying to talk them out of things or outsmart them isn’t sheep behaviour, and they’ll make it violent. Which is why I thought you’d get hardcountered if you can’t use force, but if you can actually punch a cop then like, you’re good I guess? I think.” They think harder. “Have you considered being a small business owner though? Cops see those as bratty sheep.”

Fiona:

Fiona thinks about her play here. There’s going through the trauma with someone to recontextualize it and make it feel safer, addressing it and being there for someone, or there’s symptom management - trying to prevent the situation needing to feel like that at all. Pink’s already trusted her with the extreme, so.

No, definitely needs to be symptom management in this case, she decides. Pink needs a way to tap out if she changes her mind. Same reason you don’t put a gag in if you’re relying on verbal consent.

Fiona pulls the chip out of her phone, then tethers it with her left wrist and draws the right wrist line out to Pink. “Microphone, speakers, camera, and most important - control over the music player. At least what’s downloaded, there’s no internet right now.” She wipes kiss-mark oil from her lips with the knuckle of her left thumb. “It’s not much, and I’m still going to be your only way to get back. Just, if it gets too much, you’ll have a way to tell me, and I can talk you through.”

She half thinks Pink wants to do this as a way to test something, maybe to prove she can handle it, or just see if she can. The offer of the phone is going to bite into that, taint the purity of a trial by fire, lessen the trust being shown.

She’s still got to suggest it, though. Because the alternative way of finding out she’s done something not okay here is after having already done it.

The Evacuation of Aphrodite:

Crystal finds Orange with the Valkyries, negotiating resources for the heavy cavalry. While Leather leads the team commandeering emergency supplies, someone’s got to negotiate with the staff that someone will pay for it all, one day. Orange is in the best position for it - she’s on good terms with management after dragging Eli out of the fountain that first night.

“I’m so proud of you,” she says in a gap in the conversation, and awards Orange for it by pinning a ceramic orange-anarchism flag to her breast - fittingly, the symbol for mutualism.

Black can instead watch the colour-groups roll out a huge sheet of the thin, waxy paper they use to diffuse the large stage lights and instead use it as canvas to draw a giant street map, each group drawing their lines and planning their route. There isn’t too much of a focus on this, this all relies more on tactics than strategy, but the more that can be decided on before you leave is the less decisionmaking that needs to be made in the heat of a moment. It’s a lot easier to remember than to decide under pressure.

The group leaders all have enough walkie talkies to communicate between each other as well, squad-based decentralized sharing of information in the field. Leadership is still important, one trusted person making decisions saves a lot of mental load across the group, but this will be for sharing information - not orders. And the mob is its own kind of rapid response democracy if anyone were to lose the mandate of heaven.

The Ultimate Werewolf takes Ares and point, first in, last out from the station. They’re your grenadiers and they’ll be pushing the main boulevard hard, getting to the station first and trying to secure it. Apollo follows them and does aerial recon with drones, Hermes and Zeus takes the main side streets, Gaea with the least and most vulnerable members takes the longest and safest side streets and diverts back into Hermes or Zeus groups if they meet resistance, Aphrodite follows as a rear action to support and cover and keep backchannels safe for Valkyrie support as they go.

Like you said, moving this many people is more a plumbing problem, and the wide spread helps the crowd drain through faster. Everyone knows that these are lines drawn in sand, not set in stone.

When everyone’s satisfied, the Ultimate Werewolf looks at the leaders and asks if he can… he can? Sure, great. Hey, the soundproofing in here has to be good right, for the conventions? Like can he…? He can? Because he doesn’t want this to go down like that banner thing did- Someone closed the main doors, fantastic.

The Ultimate Werewolf lets rip a howl like the one from that first day that shook the exhibition hall under the light of a blood moon, and everyone - everyone - is compelled to watch. And he has the shameless of doing it that comes from a professional heel.

“This is your ten minute notice!” His voice echoes clear through the halls, from the front doors to the stained glass at the back of the exhibition hall. “Grab your things, find your teams, and be ready to go. Tell whoever you need to tell that you’re safe, and then turn your phone off and take the battery out. I’m serious. You think you need it for anything, you come to your team leaders and they’ll sort out an alternative that works, but you do not want to get hit by a pineapple today. If you get scared, just remember that anyone who wants to get to you has to go through me. And nobody ever has.”

He holds his chest out proud and hammers it hard with a fist. The other team leaders stand proud beside him at this, but they don’t match the Werewolf for his raw, confident violence.

It’s different from what Yellow was doing because he’s doing it as a heel. He demands no allegiance, asks no one to follow him - you’re safe because the scariest thing on the station is on your side.

And then he just finishes. No thank you for listening, no final notes, he’s done now. He hopes it’s the last time he’s even relevant today, because if he’s the focus of attention again it’s because his authority as Chief of Violence is needed.

Ten minutes, then. Black and Orange might not even have anything they need to do here.

Red:

The command centre in Aphrodite is a lot more like the one Crimson Tower found herself in for the Goddard Pump situation, a series of four interconnected solid-cement tenement style buildings made to withstand a direct hit from an artillery strike. If you remember that situation, then you remember what the inside of this building is going to be like - a multilevel basement top-to-bottom filled with lanyards.

It’s just, it’s Aphrodite, so the exterior walls have street art permits and the art cycles around a lot. Today it’s a butterfly in a soap bubble being whirled in a vortex that’s ripped through a field of tulips, the inside building being the eye of the storm. They’ve extended the contract for this one out a bit because it’s been a favourite.

This place isn’t going to be targeted by the riots, it’s only overwhelmed by its duties.

Crimson Tower will have no trouble getting in and taking a position of duty here. The question is more what she wants to do: Is she taking a position of open leadership in the chaos, or is she using the chaos to steal a work desk with the permissions she needs and try to go unnoticed, to be in a central location to justify herself if she does get noticed?

Like commandeering a pod to get here, neither of these require a check against the cover identity because they’re both actions established as within her remit. It’s only when she starts acting outside it that things could get difficult.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Apostle:

“I wouldn’t count on it, I’ve been in like seven different illuminatis and none of them were worth my time. A lot of the Lutherans have been in a few and say the same. There’s like three kinds - an even shittier MENSA just for cops, the school clubs for future world leaders, and ‘NGO that does something illegal’.” They smile. “The school clubs are the best ones, they’re weird and stupid in a fun way.”

“Mammon - he’s the tall starved looking guy at the meetings - says it’s because illuminatis have a hard upper limit on how powerful they can get before they become absorbed into formal government, because there’s way too much overlap in membership. So whenever there’s a power or resource struggle they get pulled into the bigger - you know, he explains it better, I don’t really care, I just know the ones I was in that didn’t have a secret tie code sucked.”

“What do you do though if a cop just pulls you over for a frisk and you’re carrying the wrong thing, though?” They ask curiously. “Like impersonate a sergeant in the middle of the arrest, or what?”

The problem with Brown’s chores that get these people acting like journalists instead of members of the public is they’re gonzo journalists, unwashed, undisciplined mass hordes. That’s fine, they don’t make problems for her yet, but we’ll get back to the consequences of this later. Don’t worry, this isn’t anything Brown did wrong, it’s just the nature of this beast.

Black and Orange:

So let’s set the scene a bit.

The Castle has its own green space and rolling hills for the effect of it. If the castle is absolute safety, these are your home field lines of skirmish. This is not automatically held, there are no walls here, but the terrain is favourable and the Castle projects force outwards over them. The winding, scenic cobblestone streets through the terrain take about five minutes at a crowd’s pace, two at a brisk walk.

After that it’s twenty-to-thirty minutes to the train station, a game of learning how long a second can be. The two biggest danger areas are the bottlenecks - coming out of the Castle green and coming into the train station itself. The green because it’s the inescapable exit point you must pass through before your alternative routes and options open up, and the station because- have you done any scouting?

This part of Aphrodite is styled like renaissance France, apartment buildings in the shape of baroque castle-mansions, strip malls like gothic churches. It’s got the density of the historical districts of cities like Prague and Munich as much as Paris, but more built up and expensive, more Disney-fairytale than legacy antique. A little bit more intentional, a little more deliberate, a little less real.

Still, by the end of the day more than one song from Les Mis will have been sung. Beyond the barricades is there a train waiting for me? This is Paris before the reforms, the version of Paris that this tactic was explicitly designed for. Again, scouting will help you here.

Then there is the station itself. From what you remember coming down from it, it’s built for Paris Central Station. Lots of archway entrances, mostly glass, beautiful but indefensible skylights, wide and sweeping concourses.

Image reference

This will make it easy for you to break in and keep your people there. It will make a poor place for a siege in its current form.

You’ve got your marching plan, you’ve got your destination and end point, you’ve got the scene. Now it’s just up to - Black? - to assign scouts and Orange to tell the team leaders what the plan is. They’ll be taking their own initiative, so it’s important to give instruction here.

This isn’t Yellow’s moment, but it could be Orange’s - clear, executional, organizational, practical, pragmatic and necessary. This might not be the place for a waving banner, but it desparately needs something like a flight stewardess to give the calm, clear directions for what to do when the plane is about to crash, and out both windows the passengers can see the engines are on fire.

As above, and so below, the sounds of violence erupt around the cylinder of Aevum, gunshots and grenades like lightning and thunder. You will guide them through the storm.

Pink:

Fiona removes it in loving silence and puts the last leg a bit further up the bed, away from you, to make space. Not even as a deliberate gesture, she just needed more room to work. And then she begins again, concentrating utterly on this leg as well.

There is no guarantee she’ll give either back before going for Pink’s arms as well. In fact it’s starting to look like the plan. Her focus on tending, the firm brush of fingertips in deep and inaccessible places, is so total that it’s hard to tell if it’s on purpose, or just because it’s the natural progression of steps - that putting you all back together is just a sensible last step, even if it leaves you helpless until then.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Apostle:

“Okay, so he didn’t galaxy brain you, he stuck his fingers in his fingers in his ears and went ‘la la la la I’m not listening, la la la la’” he does the gesture to Brown, nods, flops back in the visitor’s chair. “Yeah, okay. You’re screwed by anyone who follows a script they won’t change, then.” Apostle blinks. “Wait, there’s no way you’re not hard-countered by cops, right?”

Heartbroken, the beating heart recedes as the dream of magical robot fairy godmother slips from their grasp.

Also, hey, what assignments did you start giving out to the Anthrozine before you zoned back out again anyway? What did you send people to do?

Chaka:

“Wait, are you like, twins or sisters or something? I just thought you were Spearmint in disguise.” She moves away from the control panel and goes to do inventory, looking for the legal and non-lethal equipment to set aside from the train for Selene. “I’ll ask them. You do your thing.”

Logging into the system as Crimson Tower from here and accessing a car to get to a command center will require no hacking roll and no cover identity check this time. As your plans and actions get more ambitious, this will change.

What is the priority for a command center? Is she going to Aphrodite to be local, or Zeus and the Femur to be central?

Black and Orange:

Tag in. The crowds are fairly autonomous, but the trains aren’t ready yet. Make a decision on if it’s better to move out now, and have people wait at the end location so you can move them as soon as possible, or wait at the Castle where it’s safest and take the risk of changing winds in the time it takes to secure something. If it's staying, how are you keeping people here entertained, still and ready through the tension? And if you're moving out - well, the questions on what you're doing for that feel more obvious.

Might I recommend something more subtle?

Pink:

Build towards intent, then. Otherwise Fiona intends to take the right leg before putting the left one back on, now that she's done with it, just to be teasing.

It shines like new. All the dull little aches and pains from motors facing unexpected resistance and actuators hitting uneven friction surfaces along their bearings will have disappeared. Isn't that nice?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Apostle:

“Oh shit, that’s what she’s doing?” Apostle sits up in their chair and leans forward, panels brightening, heart pounding. “She’s going to give your core spawner a reproduction fetish and mass produce you to run all the infrastructure like a securitron army? That’s fucking sick. That’s incredible. Holy shit. Except she shouldn’t do it by reproduction fetish, she should definitely use the Crown and Slate model for forcing specific personality generation. It’s be a warcrime to do it to someone else, but if you did it to yourself it’s just self-torture for your art, it’s the most romantic thing I can think of, it’s why I refuse to write poetry in anything except my own blood. She’d actually be like Jesus at the crucifixion, fuck that’s aesthetic.”

The birthday card that was here when you went in has since been put in a biohazard bin by one of the nurses who prepared the room for York’s bed coming in, and Apostle’s still mad about it. They’ve just had to send a picture of it instead.

“I draft my poems in text first, by the way, I’m not insane. I-” They blink and you can hear the heartbeat skip. “Oh, shit. Ah. Look I really, really want to see her pull that off, so can you do me a favour and just act surprised when it plays out?”

“Because yeah, otherwise you run into the problem that right now it’s like you still think if you just do everything right, just say all the right things, if you’re just smart enough, people will do what you want them to do. But what do you do when they don’t? Like, how’d this guy galaxy brain you anyway?”

Chaka Zulu:

“Selene.” She says, and pulls her jacket tight around her. She’s sobering up more the more Red talks to her, the more she has to focus and wake up. “If the gear disappears and I’m a free woman at the end of tomorrow, my network’s going to think it’s because I turned snitch. They’re never going to buy the android guardian angel story, the same one who fucked me into fucking off in the first place. It’s not about the money, it’s not pride, it’s a limited hangout.”

What she doesn’t say is that a gun running network thinking one of their major runners has turned police informant ends badly for more than just her. And whatever you think of that, they’re people she trusts with her life, trusts enough to do this line of work with. Friends is too small a word for it.

Even as she sobers up, the panther’s eyes are still bloodshot from crying the whole night, and her hands still shake from the adrenaline pump-and-crash of standing blindfolded in front of a firing squad all day waiting for the bang. She’s still here though. She wouldn’t run from this.

The Castle Gates:

Eli runs into the cul de sac in front of Yellow, the roundabout street filled with English garden in the middle and meant for station-hopper taxis, dancing and cackling like an organ grinder’s monkey possessed by Satan and swaddled in cameras. They dance around Yellow and take photos from every angle, capture her banner aloft from all its angles, and then-

"You need to put that thing away." Leather steps in front of Yellow with his arms folded across his chest, face empty of features to read. "You’re going to get people hurt making it a stunt like this."

Checking over Eli's photos is Crystal, still in her black suit. She's taken the red feather pin from her hat, and with that becomes subtle and unmemorable. That's why she chose this for today. She checks over Eli’s work, deems it good, and commands "Fly, my pretty," pointing back inside the castle, and Eli laughs and dances and tears off over the bridge behind you. The queen and her historian.

As Leather stands with his arms folded, Crystal walks past her following Eli, and brushes her fingers over the back of Yellow’s neck as she passes and whispers into her ear, "Your moment is not lost, it is immortalized. You are radiant. Now the directors must stay behind the curtain."

Everyone already knows the way to the station from here. Every team has its own leaders. The banner is just a beacon to draw more aggression, it’s literally a flag to a raging bull. It draws attention to Yellow and makes her more likely to be indicted for something. And for what? A look? An aesthetic? That’s lib shit right now.

This is not a March on Rome, this is an evacuation of Gallipoli. These people are not your triumphant allies in a seizure of the state, they are the fleeing enlisted of something that should never have happened, a tragedy worse than they signed up for. There is honour in leading them, there is dignity in protecting them, but there is no glory or triumph here.

Fiona:

Without the proper workshop to do this right now, she’s taken Pink to the bedroom and the bed and started with Pink’s left leg, and true to her word her fingertips are scored from the fine-grit wet-dry sandpaper she uses to scour the first blooms of rust showing, and stained from the food-safe synthetic oil she uses to treat the metal afterwards, which smells like unbuttered popcorn.

Food-safe, because the same oil stains her lips. She kisses each small internal piece she treats after she’s done with it, like she’d kiss a scrape better after putting a bandaid on it.

Fiona is... strange about this.

For most people androids exist as a kind of uncanny valley of personhood, and the illusion shatters when you do things like remove limbs for storage or for cleaning. The brain sees it at first as horrific dismemberment. When it realizes it's not, it has to recontextualize everything it's been seeing, which means no longer seeing you as a body but as something else.

Fiona does not. Her view of anatomy and personhood is far more malleable and flexible, there is no jarring moment for her. She still sees everything as you. Taking you apart into your component pieces to her is no more than particularly advanced bondage, like a rope that can be tied and untied, a deeply intimate power over you she's been given.

That way of seeing these dismembered limbs as still you might make the cleaning she's doing read as, well, surgical, but she doesn’t see it that way. This is as sensual and loving as a deep tissue massage, taken to the deepest tissues.

This is not cutting you open. This is exposing you to a nakedness deeper than skin, an act of trust and vulnerability at a level of life and death.

Fiona's strange, and she knows how strange she is, but she loves you and she's grateful that you'd let her express it in her strange ways.

She says nothing, she prompts nothing, she’s lost in her work. If Pink has something she wants to say, she’ll talk. Otherwise she is very happy to make good on her promise to make Pink feel beautiful and shining inside and out, even if only they know it.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Apostle:

They seem surprised by that, and looks at Brown with pity - not in a condescending way, but in the way of someone who’s just walked across a mile of broken glass barefoot and looked over their shoulder and seen you start taking off your shoes. “Wow, you’re going to be so disappointed if you ever make it up here. Their morals aren’t corrupt, they’re localized.”

“You know the trolley problem? Just put the ‘five people’ further down the track than the person pulling a lever can see, and the other person right in front of the switch. People will save the one person and feel good about it because the ‘five people’ aren’t real. You can’t outsmart that because it’s stupid.”

“Everyone thinks bad things are good, they'll work for Babykillers Inc because all their friends work there and helping your friends is good. You tell an engineer to build a torment nexus and they’ll do it for fun. They don't care, they're not going to use it. Too far down the track to see is like, two meters in most cases.”

“And yeah, I mean, the system’s complex so people don’t even want to look because it’s hard, lol.” They snort. “And like, same, that’s why I’m making a perfect machine god to do it for me, so I don’t have to care. It’s actually way easier.”

There’s a pause.

“Also, really? Just… bread-and-roses communism?” They sound extremely disappointed. “Sounded like her plan was more about creating optimal happiness by playing fairy godmother, and that needs Cinderella sticking to her script for the story to work. I liked that idea way better. God I hope she’s just lying to you to make you go along with it, that was way more interesting."

...

"No offense?”

Chaka Zulu:

“Not my org.” Chaka shakes her head and slumps back against the console, head staring numbly up at the ceiling. “You. Them. Anyone I side with out there gets hit with conspiracy. If I get picked up defending the train station, then that’s a terrorism charge for everyone else I’m standing with. You gotta help me get this shit out of here before it can be pinned on anyone.”

It is illegal to participate in a violent riot. Conspiracy charges connect everyone caught doing a crime together. So, for a few short-lived days until the charges are investigated and dropped, everyone from the exhibition the police pick up - if they’re picked up with Chaka in the mix - is treated as part of a terrorist cell. At least if her connection to Alice is made.

If you think that’s complete bullshit, ask Persephone how she feels about it.

She covers her eyes with a furred, sharp-nailed hand and groans, “Most of my network’s gone to ground after last night, but if you can help get this to Henry Stanley station in Selene, I have it covered from there. I was just supposed to ride this out here until everyone was out of my blast radius, but if you get the fucking gear out of here then I don’t even have a criminal record.” She flashes a weak, but proud, smile, and lets the hand covering her eyes fall away and catches it in front of her as a balled fist. “I’ll help you beat fascist faces harder than I beat charges.”

It’s why she’s still here, you realize. If she’s sitting on the stuff when it’s found, she falls alone. If she leaves it and the police find it in the melee, then they tie it to everyone.

Underneath the drunken, moping self-pity is a soldier who has thrown herself onto a live grenade to protect the squad, waiting for the end because she couldn’t hack a train network.

It’s just if this gets intercepted, the intercepted train would be logged in Crimson Tower’s name instead.

The Exhibition:

Exhibition groups pull back from the streets as Zhang’s work draws the cops to the nearest counter-protestors, and without cops or counter-protestors to fight there’s a natural de-escalation.

The colour-groups forming up start looking like football teams, which makes what’s about to happen look all the more like a sports riot for it.

Leading Hermes is a pack of dyed wolves, and a lot of the professional wrestlers. Hermes is the most densely populated district of the station, but it’s got the least per-capita interest in an event like this, so the blue-collars - or, yellow collars, construction hazmat yellow in this case - still seem proportional to the others.

Leading Aphrodite, the pinks, is a lot of the larger performers like the perfect minotaur, and like Monk if she were here. This is the biggest group in number, because it’s the one that’s most interested in a venue like this, because it’s the one most interesting to a community like this, because it’s the local one. It’s the one that had to travel the least far to be here. This group will be your core stay behinders. Don’t forget how often ballerinas used to win gameshows like American Gladiator, the artist and actor group doesn’t fuck around - they are committed to your bit.

Leading Apollo, in electric blue, the tech industry, is more cyborgs than androids. The more heavily modded full electronic denizens prefer Ares, so this group is left with people like Odysseus the Self Made Man, the completely mechanical cyborg, who’s leaving most of his equipment at the venue but taking a solid forge hammer for the road. This group doesn’t have the muscle mass of the others, but the gadget freaks and DIY lovers are already equipping everyone else with impromptu riot shields and teaching the chemistry behind improvised gas masks.

Leading Ares, in blood red, The Ultimate Werewolf. Even the combat androids and disaster-mutants among these ranks give deference to him here, the pro-wrestling heel crushes this role with charisma and muscle mass. He’s kicked over a garbage bin to use a platform to start giving instructions on taking falls and basic mosh pit safety techniques to his group.

Leading Zeus in stormy white-gray is Anubis and Horus. They’re actually real lawyers in their day jobs, it’s part of why they love the acting side of it. This is about the same size as the Apollo group, and covers most of the journalists that were caught here today. There’s others, but even they’re kind of dwarfed by those two in both size and charisma.

Leading Gaea, in green and the smallest of the groups, is a motley mix of horses, bulls and bee girls. An anteater, too, a kilted Scot named Leon, one of the transhumans dedicated enough to give up hands, their long clawed toes are lethal. In the wild these things can disembowel a leopard with them. He’s lovely. A lot of the dryads, alarunes and the chlorophyll community is grateful to be in this group, naturally.

Leading your dedicated stay-behinds, it should be no surprise, is Leather. He’s not down here right now though - right now he’s taken a small team up and down the elevators to secure fire extinguishers and first aid kits from every floor and centralize them in the lobby. He’s firm about this - anyone that gets seriously injured, anyone who gets taken out on the way to the station gets brought back here by his team, contactable by “commandeered” hand radios from the hotel staff. They’re calling themselves the Valkyries.

They’re going to be making a field hospital out of the first floor hotel rooms, booked at less-than-half-cost due to mass-cancellations, because it’s closer and safer than pushing people to their destinations when they’re already injured, and because they can guarantee the resources here. They can’t for other parts of Aevum.

Those are the groups.