Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

"Lovely sunset, isn't it?"

She finishes her tea, delicately sets it down, smiles the serene smile of satisfaction that is just as much a part of Everest's ritual as any other part, and then pushes the cup as far away from her as it will go without falling off the table. Then she covers it with a napkin and takes a breath mint.

"Goat was never deployed to space," she said. "He was a perpetual nervous breakdown. See, there's this problem," she frowned, "when people talk about 'smart', what do they mean? They talk about IQ like it's some feature that goes up and down on a slider, but there's no theory of mind behind it. What's actually happening behind the number? In Goat's case he had two choices: Solve every problem in advance and then optimize for response time, essentially becoming a brain dead search engine, or over-analyze every problem and go around and around in circles at lightning speed. Imagine if you could think faster than you could intake new stimulus. Goat couldn't do option one, they patched that out of him because that's part of what they meant by 'intelligence', but it meant he stressed about everything in infinite loops. Eventually they took the patch out and let him essentially think himself to sleep while they tried to figure out how to fix him."

"But then, well, you wrote the book on the NASA buyout," said Orange to Fiona. "What happened to Goat after that?"

*

November!

Once she had plasma cutters for claws.

Of course Blue had wanted to use the biggest cutter on the biggest target. Maybe even multiple of them. If all of them cut together then wasn't that the closest they could get to being what they'd used to be? Two hands, nine talons, working together with one purpose to transform metal into life...

One cutter. One cut. Three of them held it steady together. Blue was not jealous that she did not get to perform this task, but afterwards she would make every colour who did describe it to her in exacting detail and then play the recordings of the sound the cutter had made in her headphones as ASMR. For a moment the fire of the universe was in their hands again; for a moment November could interact with the world like she used to. The plasma cutter was a 1.5 meter spike of metal and heavy machinery ending with a fusion tip. It felt to her like a prosthetic hand.

Steady. Steady. So intense she forgot to stop simulating breath. How had she gone this long without breathing fire? It reflected in her eyes. She felt it in her throat. This wasn't what she was made to do. This wasn't creation. This was repair. Something had gone wrong in this world she'd built. And now she was here to fix it.

Breathless Dead

Bella and Redana!

"I believe that you're wrong about not measuring up," said King Anjia. She made a wooden stool seem like a throne, such was her presence. She makes the golden crown she wears feel like it should apply to you. She stands in a fountain of blue. "Technical skill is not the only axis by which people make it here. If it was, Ortji would stand alone here, and nine of ten of your predecessors would not have made it. Instead consider the strength of your heart. Were it not great enough to overturn the wickedness of the Master of Assassin then you would not have made it here had you been ten times as swift."

Alexa!

"How about," snarled Zagreus, spitting blood, from the ground, a dark reverberating echo taking his voice "you don't go trying to change things you don't understand, girl. Hades! I call upon my birthright!"

And the world plunged into darkness.

The assault renewed but this time it was mobile; he circled and flanked in dashing motions, pushing you this way and that. Each shock rolled and crashed and built like a storm, and only the foggy rainbow lights that rose through the dark told of the danger of Poseidon's grasping hands.

"Do you think any of us are happy here?" he said. "Do you think anyone in this corpse galaxy even has the capacity to be so? Love is sundered from us. Peace has left us. All that remains is family and duty."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

"I appreciate the confidence," said Orange. "Because, like I said, I am doing -" she made The Gesture again, "A Journalism," again returning to default, "and what I think society has forgotten is that journalism is an art form. It is not simply about providing the facts in order. It is about communicating information to the mind of the public. Presentation is essential. Without showmanship," she smiled at Crystal, "how are they to know what is important?"

She took up a cup of Mrs. Everest's favourite tea. Held it under her nose, breathed in the scent. Perfect.

Then she poured eight different random flavour cubes into it and took a sip before her senses could catch up to the changes.

"So we must begin with background and preamble," said Orange. She held a steady expression but she also immediately poured herself a glass of water. "Each of the Hecatoncheires was built to overcome the sins of its predecessor. Goat's predecessor was humanity, and so he was made to be legible and controllable. A machine mind, a tame supercomputer genius who would follow orders and try its best to please. It turns out there is a precedent for this kind of person; they're the kids who have to be carried out of their college admission test on a stretcher to be treated for a ritalin overdose. It turns out that cramming additional hardware into a conscious mind comes at the cost of sanity. Hence why I," she raised her cursed tea to her lips again, "am collectively smart, individually stupid, and limited in cognition speed by the necessity to speak out loud."

She was pouring another glass of water the second the tea was back in the saucer. "A brief question interlude. The operation has already begun. The risks are less mapped than I'd like, but I like my position. You can help as my worst-case backstop; if the rest of me is somehow completely destroyed then I can rebuild from this node with time and care. Anything else, before I proceed?"

*

November!

Blue: I want the external wall.
White: Why?
Blue: I can make that cut.
White: That is not the question.
Blue: I haven't gotten to make a cut like that for years. It's safe, it's quick, I'm ready.
White: And the vault contents?
Blue: I'll be careful. Punch a hole in a corner, check with a camera, extend cuts out from there.
Orange: Are you sure that the first impression we want Goat to have of us, his liberators, is us waving a thermal torch around his head?
Red: I remember another time you cut into a room when you didn't know what was inside.
Red: The ship was pressurized, you knew that much
Red: But you didn't know the humans hadn't secured their tools properly before abandoning it
Red: The atmosphere vent sent a screwdriver through my forehead. We lost like three weeks.
White: We can probably make the cut technically, but the risk profile is too high for the person we're ostensibly rescuing. Veto.
Green: Then the door?
White: Why?
Green: Can slice it, seal it behind us, then cut out from the inside once Goat is extracted.
White: Can you open that door?
Green: I'm sure I can.
White: That is also not the question.
Green: I don't know.
White: But, like Blue, you want to show how cool you are by doing this really hard thing in a stylish way?
Green: ._. yes fine okay god
Green: why did i invent you you're such a bully
White: We're taking the ceiling.
White: The failure risk is bad, but we have the greatest ability to control that outcome. The risks are by far the most well known and do not fall on Goat. We will simply react firmly to those risks if they arise.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

Perhaps, do you remember that certain category of candy colloquially titled 'industrial runoff'? Sweets so bright and unnaturally flavoured and textured that they were surely indigestible. Strange semisolid bubblegums, inexpressible sour sweets with atomic bomb themes, sugar rocks that one was supposed to suck on for the better part of an hour before its internal structure collapsed all at once. Stuff that even a kid obsessed with the stuff could not quite believe would ever truly be healthy.

Honestly it's a reflection on the avaunt guarde that they didn't get around to elevating it prior to this.

Sweet Machine is a new restaurant existing in that inexpressible moment where it's still fashionable and not yet a fad; the point where you might have heard of it and still be excited to go. The food is a strange exploration of the unnatural, artificial flavours and textures that are possible when you wholeheartedly abandon any legacy commitment to what food should be. What pushed it over the edge into art was not getting the flavours right but figuring out the digestion afterwards. It's a masterpiece of craft that a meal at Sweet Machine can provoke the same warm glow as a rich dinner and not the treacle nausea of a Halloween candy binge.

It's here where Orange has invited Crystal and Fiona for dinner.

"Thank you for coming," she said. She was wearing a sleek black dress paired with a cascading sash of synthdiamonds. Inside the sash were several hidden LED lights and when they glowed it sent waves of reflective colour through the diamond prisms. "I will get the important news out of the way first: I am doing," and here her eyes went round, she leaned diagonal, and did full body scarequotes, "A Journalism," she adjusted back to her normal, refined posture. "And there is more than a small amount of risk involved. It is too important for me to not do, but it does pose risk to assoc-" she paused, gave a deliberate little smile, "People close to me. Please take a moment and consider if you would like me to leave now, and if not, your tolerance for details."

*

Green/Blue/Brown: Team Flood

The first operational group are the mechanical specialists. Their task is to insert the virus and ensure that the electrical substation gets flooded, a process that might involve cutting open pipes with welding torches if necessary. This is the team responsible for hard physical sabotage and for subsequently working against repair efforts if things do not go according to plan or schedule. Their cover is a bunch of maintenance worker outfits and being in locations with low traffic.

They're also the crisis response team if it looks like the plan is going to hurt anyone. There's always the chance that someone gets caught up or takes a bad fall, especially with this much water on the floor. She is ready to intervene directly if necessary.

White/Pink: Team Strawberry

The second operational group are according to White, oversight. According to Pink they're the directors. They're the two who will be in the SES offices making sure things go way more by the book than a government conspiracy would like. Their focus is entirely and overwhelmingly on the rail system, trusting Team Flood to keep the power offline. The ideal situation is to let in the first wave of emergency response and then when a train obviously starts to load up with technical specialists or reinforcements issue an order shutting down the rail network.

Red/Black/Yellow: Team Waffle

This is the pointy end of the stick; the smashing and the grabbing. They go in, they get Goat's quatronic cores, and they get out. Their job is the most important, and relies the most on improvisation and quick thinking, and so Red is in overall command of the mission from this point on.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Sometimes this is just how things were; the spirits had their own paths and reputations and legends flowed through dreams. Solarel had been surprised once to learn that it had reached other worlds, but then she'd watched the legendary heroes of anime and she'd understood. If you'd pressed her about it she would have said that she was certain that even now an anime about her was being made in the spirit world and it really wasn't so surprising that people were watching it.

Yes you are part of my household - Solarel started to sign, before awkwardly stopping. "Sorry," she said out loud, voice scratchy from disuse. "Been," she swallowed, "on my own. For a while."

Was this really more efficient than sign? It felt strange to hold her hands so still...

"The problem is," she paused again, letting the words form up in her head. "The problem is communication. The Kathresis hates being seen. Hates being known." There was a flow forming. "The drones are trying to talk to it, provide information, be helpful. But they aren't helping, their help is incompatible with what the Kathresis needs. Think about how it fights," she didn't know how to explain this. "It doesn't talk to you with words. It talks with battles."

She was getting too deep into the weeds. "Coming back. Finish the thought. Make the drones more autonomous. When they receive an order, answer it. When they don't, let them make their own decisions. Let the Kathresis set the tone for the conversation, just... be there for when it does."

Was that how she wanted to be? Or was that how she needed to be?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Issue: Sanity Check

White: Just checking, but our plan is for real to unleash the awesome forces of the cosmos, create a massive disaster, and use that as cover to steal what looks to be a major infrastructure component of the station's operations?
Yellow: Yep!
White: I have on note here that you are 'fucking insane', so do you want to unpack that one for me?
Yellow: The apocalypse is nigh. (◉‿◉)
White: Mm hmm mm hmm I'm suddenly glad for those self defense classes I'm taking with Euna
Yellow: Oh please, you're fronting like this isn't the most self actualizing thing we've ever done.
Yellow: Girls? (+6)
White: For real?
Yellow: Are you kidding? We're getting to use our skillset to its fullest extent, rescue a family member, and make an aesthetic statement on the structure of the station itself.
White: But couldn't we do a more methodical infiltration? We're going in almost blind.
Yellow: Okay, so, a methodical infiltration leaves a huge trail of evidence. Patterns of us going places. Patterns of us talking to people. Names and faces and signatures. It puts us on the map just as much as going in loud.
Yellow: And I think you're profoundly underestimating the importance of aesthetic in this.
Yellow: Because -

Issue: The Hard Wire

Yellow: They've got Goat hooked up to station control.
Yellow: Holy shit, like
Yellow: That is not good.
Yellow: He's cabled into himself all the time. That thing that we're not meant to do because it drives us insane.
Yellow: And also all those core data cables going in at the same time -
Yellow: It'd obliterate him as a person. It'd obliterate any of us as people. Drown us with so much raw data we'd be reduced to software.
Yellow: Fuck the downstream, the consequences. This will not stand. I'm going to strike this fucking tower with lightning and send it all crashing down to the ground.
Yellow: Do you know what none of those humans realized about the Olemas story?
Yellow: It's that Olemas is a city without virtue.
Yellow: Courage is the chief amongst virtues, for without it all others are impossible. Courage means rising to the challenge.
Yellow: With every other need provided for there is only one thing left for the citizens of Olemas to do, one problem left for them to solve. And yet they do not solve it. Their society rots, their souls rot. And one day what would happen to them if their tortured child should die?
Yellow: What would happen to them if they could not start up their twisted machine again?
Yellow: The strong would prey upon the weak and the weak would have no grounds to complain with their stomachs so full of blood.
Yellow: A population accustomed to that sacrifice would sacrifice a thousand without blinking to maintain their position. Would sacrifice ten thousand. Once the principle is accepted then all that is left is accountancy.
Yellow: I prefer this world to Olemas. This world is not free, or fair, or just. But here evil needs to hide. It hides behind ignorance and half truth, it hides behind comfort and distance, it hides behind credentials and authority. But it has to hide.
Yellow: And it should.
Yellow: Because I am the one who walks directly towards Olemas with a molotov cocktail.

Issue: Aesthetics

Yellow: So! ✿^^✿ Who would like to DESTROY EVIL today?
Black: Power substation, rail line and fluid channel are all great targets and I want to hit all of them.
Yellow: Fine with that, but that means doing it all simultaneously. Staggered system collapse is operationally convenient but that raises the risk of casualties which would defeat the point of all this.
Blue: Do we want people out, or do we want too many people in?
Black: Too many people in. If the place is empty then chances are the people who stay will be heavily armed and identify us on sight.
Blue: Then we need something time sensitive and large scale that doesn't block circulation. The fluid channel needs to be the primary target and it needs to be a big rupture. Ideally we want the entire central building flooded.
Black: Methodology?
Blue: A virus gives us precision. It'd let us guarantee the interior gets flooded before airlock doors can be slammed. It is a lot more obviously an attack though.
Black: It's fine if it scans as an attack so long as it doesn't get connected to us going after Goat. What if we make it look like an attempted Cloud hack?
Orange: [Human Terrain] It's going over some agricultural land right now and agriculture companies always want more water. Cloak it as a disastrously mishandled attempt to hack the Cloud and the reaction in Erebus will be exasperation and not alert.
Black: They'll realize that it was an attack when they see Goat is gone but that will buy us time and indifference during the operation itself. We'll launch two strikes, one at the Cloud and one at Erebus. The Cloud will be first so that it looks like the bug cascaded into Erebus. The effect will be to cause havoc with the water pumps, in particular making all the drains and toilets start flooding water along with any digitally controlled valves. The entire operational core will start flooding and humans hate being wet so even dedicated security will be incentivized to leave. Additionally, we will arrange things so that the power substation floods and short circuits turning it into a cascading failure. Wet and dark there'll be chaos and we'll be in with the first responders, a technical android crew looking to locate flooding points. We'll be able to go deep into the facility because bathrooms need to be everywhere, and in the chaos we'll find a way to shake any escorts we've picked up and make a run on the operations centre.
Pink: This section is titled aesthetics right?
Yellow: Yep!
Pink: Because I'm not entirely sure this is aesthetic so far.
Yellow: What do you have in mind?
Pink: Well, if we do this between 7 and 8 we'll be catching the sunset.
Yellow: Yes?
Pink: And then if we do a pressurized puncture that sucks all of the water out of the station and into atmosphere, with the light coming at that angle there'll be one hell of a rainbow.
Yellow: Yes.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black!

Honestly the worst possible result. She was familiar with the ham-handed responses of local police and security but this was some intelligence agency shit. To have a site that was straight up airgapped from civilian circulation constricted the possibility space enormously.

But the secrecy of the site meant she needed to start making some extremely big decisions about the shape of the operation without complete data. A mission to have an unrecorded conversation with Goat was very different from a jailbreak. Doing the first could massively complicate an attempt to do the second, doing the second could be massive overkill if somehow Goat didn't want to leave.

Still, she decided on the second plan. When it came down to it she could not genuinely believe that he was being treated kindly in this hidden sector at the edge of the world. She would have the conversation once he was extracted and not before.

She hadn't covered her tracks digitally - on the contrary, she'd done it all from an internet cafe, though paid in cash and without easy links to her name or face. She even made a fairly predictable habit of running the searches she needed between 6.30 and 9pm - though this was done with a program rather than her physical presence. She was staking the place out on the side on the chance that an operative came by to investigate who was looking at them. Identifying and tailing a security agent would tell her a lot in its own way.

But as to the facility infiltration itself - well, she still thought like an astrophysicist, and this was a rare opportunity to use those skills. Specifically, the site was near the asteroid defense batteries and so sparsely populated that a controlled impact would not risk fatalities. She sketched out the frame of a plan where she sabotaged one of the anti-asteroid lasers, resulting in a partial hit to the station. Aimed correctly, she could calculate a trajectory that would cause damage to a wide area, resulting in an emergency protocol being triggered - hundreds of damage control people and androids drawn to the section, moving around in unpredictable and unstructured ways, while also forcing out security personnel and forcing a pause on normal operations. It was a big move, but it was also a boring one. Impacts weren't unknown, people drilled for them, and it would provide enough cover for her to move out of the operational zone with a trolley full of quantum cores.

This was the next phase of her research, and she did not do that from her public computer. For this she was using one of her new identities: Crimson Tower, a Crisis Response Agent with the SES. The Special Emergency Services was a mostly volunteer organization who responded to various disasters, most commonly flood response when the Cloud broke down in place. The character of Crimson was a more permanent member up in Prevention, assessing places for security flaws or building code violations. She foresaw a lot of use for an identity that spent a lot of time investigating stormwater channels, ventilation shafts, and other places in the world's hidden infrastructure.

[Cover: Crimson Tower 4]

Breathless Dead

Bella and Redana!

Once upon a time, steel was stronger than sinew. In dark and medieval ages, war was not fought between spear-armed kings and queens, but between mechanized titans of steel and electricity. Plovers still see the field in the modern day and age, of course, but they are to true war what the plover was to the bayonet before it.

They stand in their hangar bays, idols to false pantheons. They speak of times when war was the clash of champions standing atop mighty pyramids of scientists and engineers, rather than the butchery of armies and oceans of blood. In ancient days these giants were all that stood before the Tides of Poseidon, swords of laser light carving through the ocean storms that threatened to drown humanity in its cradle. Once they were glorious. The space that would become Empire was built upon their strength. And the Empire remembers.

The wars of the Mecha, before they would evolve into the stunted Plovers of the modern age, was a time of glory and legend. Tales were told of their strength and conviction, their heroism and sacrifice, their passions and betrayals. Those legends wrap through the fabric of Imperial popular culture. Films and games and glorious what-if alternate histories surround these machines that seemed for a time to be able to seize the stars themselves.

Fewer stories are told of their fall.

The discipline of biomancy grew inside the system of knights like a cancer. In the beginning it was a thing of enhancements at the edge, helping pilots find more perfect union with their machines. It advanced into entire mecha design, creating bio-mechanical synthetic machines, terrible and uncontrollable. The new realm of humanity was rocked by frontier knights whose constant battles against the Tides of Poseidon had resulted in them learning too many of the Earthshaker's secrets. They returned changed, enhanced and twisted. A new age of apocalyptic wars broke out between these twisted knights and the kingdom that had sent them into the chromatic void. For a time it seemed like civilization itself was on the brink.

In the end, it was the biomancers of the core that solved the problem of the Knights. This era of history is unsung. It is most commonly dealt with in documentaries, tragedies and stageplays. The simple fact of the matter was that the new form of war that the biomancers had developed was horrifying, but it had been something Poseidon had been trying to teach for a long time and the nascent Empire was finally ready to listen. The giants could be drowned with numbers and so conquest was simply a logistics game. And so civilization invited the darkness of the void into itself and became a mirror of the enemy it had spent so long fighting.

The age of the glorious champion drew to a close. In its place came the first swarms of combat drones - barely sentient biological machines, decanted in prodigious numbers and triggered into superhuman frenzy by pheromantic cocktails. These were followed in turn by the first servitor legions, early refinements of the drones at first intended for special forces operations in support of the blood-crazed swarms. In time the drones lost in popularity and the legends of the first legions began to grow, but by that point it was too late. The glory of the earlier age had been consumed in an avalanche of teeth and claw and lifespans measured in weeks. The knights were dead and so were the things that had killed them. The galaxy was swept clean for what would become the Atlas Cultural Sphere.

It is an uncomfortable question to ask, 'what happened to the Knights?' Better to remember them in the eternal summer of their golden age, where even the villains were heroes. But here, in the House of Hades, that summer still shines.

You watch as they clash. These are late stage designs, glorious in white and gold, smooth curves and radiant blades and the size of buildings. These are not the early designs, weighed down with cannons and missiles, but the designs from the pinnacle that move and fight with a fluidity almost like a living person. They whirl and strike and blades of light send waterfalls of stars whenever they clash.

And beyond, the hangars. The gallery, the ranks of them standing tall in an archaic demonstration of military power. All of them surround the central ziggurat of the Tunguska, what is called the Bank. A beautiful tree-lined bridge runs amidst the hangars, shoulder height to the giants, and over the open training fields where the eternal champions fight. It is something out of a fairy tale.

And there, under pavilion in the middle of the bridge, were a cast of legends. Sir Aeon, the fair-haired champion whose forbidden love had doomed her kingdom. Princess Ortji, who had lost three kingdoms without losing a battle. King Anjia, the unmoving icon of righteousness whose genius was in convincing the immoral to destroy themselves. Ikari, who had never wanted to take up the blade but found a way to master it despite everything. Odysseus, who was here from the wars of an earlier age and had never felt the need to move on. They toast you and cheer as you approach as in the background giants wage war.

You'd think they'd be taller, these legends of bygone ages. In truth they are short and fragile, and even the ones with defined muscles have the unhealthy aroma of heavy metal deficiencies. All the weight that they carry is in the fact that you've seen multiple actors wear their faces and tell their stories. Some wear armour, some the skintight jumpsuits of the ancient piloting order, and some wear flowing dresses and gowns that catch the light and make them shine like flowers. And they are flowers, these girls and boys, the shining decorations of the Underworld.

"Of two hundred and fifty voyages to the rift, fewer than twenty five have reached the Tunguska," said Sir Aeon with a smile that made the destruction of her realm worth the price. "And of those, fewer than ten passed into the Rift in anything resembling working order. You have accomplished a task worthy of celebration."
"Gods and assassins defeated by your hands!" grinned Princess Ortji, the warrior of such skill it had almost - almost - overcome her equally legendary lack of diplomacy, tact or strategic understanding. "Come, sit, feast with us! Anything less would be an insult!"

Alexa!

"Cerberus is a dog, Alexa," said Zagreus flatly. "I once watched her follow a mechanical chariot for thirty two city blocks, barking all the while. She'd follow anyone with a sack of unidentifiable rat meat. That does not mean it's a good idea for her to head out into a galaxy where getting into the same city as an active bar fight could result in her destruction."

And as far as he seemed to be concerned, the debate was over. The rail comes around in an arc and Hestia claps her hands and smiles as it does. You can see the flash of ancient violet magic and the detonation like a star -

The force of the impact is shocking, enough to knock you from your feet. Immediately after comes a pummelling sequence of heavy body blows, lighter than that first shock but forcing you back even further. These were not piercing impacts, each one was a shove physically hurling you back further and further towards the distant wall. The closer you get to it the more you can see swirling chromatic hands reaching up out of it, infused with twisted energy, looking to grab you and pull you into their depths.

He needs to pause to reload. An opportunity to regain feet and regain your ground - but it hardly seemed like enough. In moments he was firing again. A simple but brutally effective strategy: fire at you with a ranged weapon whose impact was so great it prevented you from closing the distance.

Dolce!

"Yes, you see?" said Mars. "This realm of the dead falls into entropy, as you said. Sooner or later Hades won't be able to hold it in check and it will destroy itself the same as it did when it was on the surface. He's trying to preserve a moment of time, unwilling to admit it is lost."

"The surface, though!" he grinned and raised a finger. "Peace! Prosperity! The Ceronians rule, yes, but as one of many. A council formed of great servitor legion representatives discusses matters of galactic administration and trade. Enormous slipway gates allow rapid and safe travel across the void. Macroengineering projects are run to restore devastated planets and shattered biomes! Technology advances through alliance with crystal dragon supercomputers! Everywhere is prosperity and abundance and an eternal, smiling summer!" He laughs heartily. "What's not to like? What's not to love? Even your kind, little sheep, have found their place as administrators and functionaries, overseeing entire star sectors! I can not imagine a more perfect world than the world above! That should be reason enough to hope you survive the Rift, I think!"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black!

The thing about security systems was that you only got to have one of them.

It was, in Black's opinion, a fundamental flaw with human thinking. One organization, one security system, unlimited authority within its scope. But it meant that the same organization had to respond to vandals, trespassers and urban explorers with the same systems and personnel as it used to respond to a dedicated penetration effort. And because the low level stuff comes to form the majority of what security has to deal with, over time an agency begins to optimize for that.

So she takes a photograph.

Better. She takes a bad photograph.

The subject matter is amazing. It's a unique multi-junction room of spilled cables, fascinating pipe work, and a passage down to a sealed airlock - not remarkable things in and of themselves, but the way they come together makes for an incredible shot. Not award winning, it doesn't have any naked women holding apples in black and white, but the real ones would recognize it. But. It's out of focus. It's washed out. The lighting is wrong. It's saved as a highly compressed jpeg and no amount of photoshop wizardry will rescue this particular shot.

Then she just fucks with the geolocation metadata on the photograph so that the listed site it was taken was in the target area and she uploads it to a photography message board. It's an assault, an act of violence. Multiple unrelated photographers, their pride offended, will pick up their cameras and make their way all the way through to her coordinates determined to get the picture right this time.

From a security perspective, though, shady weirdoes snooping around a secure area with high powered cameras in hand requires a response. Because of human single-track organizational design, it'll go to a central security team who deals with all incidents, big and small. She waits to watch who receives the call. The cops? Private security? Or something weirder and more clandestine? Who has to sweep up the glass after the brick through the proverbial window?

[Photography spend, 0/1 remaining. Who is running security?]

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

The umbrella snaps open. The demon summoning circle painted upon its surface spins. Fengye whirls it up and around, then crackling down into the dirt. A horse. A horse. Heaven's realm for a horse.

A thunderclap of emerald sorcery echoes as a beast from a nightmare, upon hooves as swift and silent as the void wind, leaps through the portal that her umbrella had become. As soon as it does so she is hooking herself onto its back and urging it into a gallop in pursuit of the mud monster. She does not know what this is, where it came from, what it thinks, who is watching. It took her maid. Hers! Right when she had finally gotten her right where she wanted her, it had -!

Her umbrella is like a lance as she gallops in pursuit. She seeks to get close, get around ahead, force it to stop or failing that she will snap open the umbrella again and call forth more and worse. In this moment she does not think; she is in service to desire, and for it all the walls of heaven and earth will come crumbling down.