Thanqol

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

Hsien Lang had her arm up to the elbow inside the vending machine. She turned and stared with fish-eyed blankness at Joshua Chan, the kind of dead eyed uncomprehending stare that made it plain that there was not even the conceptual framework in place to explain why she shouldn't do this. She knew all about virtue, discourse, Posadism, and girls. This was... just, like, how you got snacks.

"Hungry," she explained. She tried to give it some more juice to reach the tofu sticks that were extremely clearly out of reach. The vending machine wobbled dangerously. "Hunting."

"But you hear that, Shifu? You're too obvious. You really need to learn how to move stealthily," she stuck her tongue out as she strained, fingernails scratching at the plastic at the bottom of the forbidden tofu bar. "Like me! You can't just go miraculously perfectly transforming into whales all the time, you need to use your head. Be smart!"

She tried to pull her arm back out of the machine to change her position. It was stuck in place.

[Shifu, Hsien wants to shift your Superior up and your Savior down]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black: We are not infiltrating a military base.
Green: We can totally infiltrate a military base

There was no daylight between those statements being posted. Exact same cognitive speed and reflexes. Exact same intensity.

Black: Listen. Green. The Aevum Military is the organization with the most to gain by commissioning its own line of specialized combat androids. They're the single entity most hungry for robot flesh for their grinders. With robot armies they could achieve their ambitions of peacekeeper forces on Earth. If there was any way for them to have androids they would have androids.
Black: But there isn't because military anti-android technology is more advanced than even they know how to stop.
Black: You know how fascists will spray-paint those virus-embedded QR codes on buildings to fuck up passing androids? That's the baby version of military MEDUSA-Code.
Black: They're so good at infowar that they live like cavemen on their own bases because they'll brick any electronic devices they take in.
Green: That's a solvable problem. We have a location, that's enough to begin operational planning. We can engineer a move and then hit while transporting. Steal a train!
Black: Do you think that the military will not air strike a train.
Black: I don't know how to say this. We cannot enter a kinetic exchange with the military and win.
Black: Either on a personal or a political level.
Black: Because, what, we're going to publish the truth that the Aevum Military is doing something underhanded with AI? A single digit number of AI? Do you think that's going to incite popular unrest at a time where they just unpersoned ten percent of the station's population?
Green: This is all speculation. We won't know the security vulnerabilities or lack thereof until we begin observing the facility.
Black: The facility will be on high alert for exactly such an observation.
Black: Our other plan literally involves an operation against a supreme court justice and it's not even close to this risk profile.
Blue: What if we had our original bodies though?
Black: ... o.O
Blue: I could kaiju right through the front gate. Blow up tanks.
Red: Laser breath!
Pink: Holding Crystal in our hand as we climb the Olympus Spire.
Black: Getting shot by fighter planes!
Pink: Yeah sure we'd die but what better way to communicate that man is the real monster?

*

Orange!

Strange to think that Merkin is just like Goat in that way. Terrified by the weight of boredom. Unable to function outside a specialty. Games of numbers, games of system engineering - pure-hearted nerds who didn't mind their slavery as long as it kept them from boredom. How much of the world was built by people like them? Missile designers who just loved the interactions of high energy physics? Procurement specialists who considered a well-negotiated contract to be its own reward, even if that contract was for a military black sites? Movie producers who'd churn out shallow propaganda just for the chance to work in film?

The problem with intelligence was that it craved being used. It was one of the most insidious desires of all. She was no exception.

It had surprised her the most when she saw Jsef Cantrillo's name. A senior contract negotiator, he had been one of the most warm, composed and reasonable people she had ever encountered - the kind of person who could successfully negotiate a government contract with Mrs. Everest on a bad day. The kind of person no amount of surveilling could find dirt on. But then, wasn't social adroitness just another skill? Wasn't that mindset just as vulnerable to the need to be useful as doing financial or technical math?

She's not surprised to see SLAM! *click*'s name. SLAM! *click* (you pronounced slam long and drawn out while grinning, 'SLAAaaaaaam...' and then you clicked your tongue. Ideally you also made finger guns throughout this. All SLAM! *click* employees were contractually obligated to say it this way every time.) was the avatar of the New Economy - the conglomerate behind Headpattr, Roofdash, and every other kind of no-overhead gig work labour laws are there to be disrupted startup corporation. Their business model involved companies going out of business after the investigations had begun but before the lawsuits. There had always been rumours that SLAM! *click* was involved in money laundering, more financial shell game than real business but for the real businesses it drove into bankruptcy to help cover its tracks.

It had a vibe like it was three days away from bankruptcy itself - a failing tech startup that it wasn't worth going after because it was perpetually underwater. But Mrs. Everest had held a 20% stake in the company and had never gestured towards selling it no matter what the headlines said - and it paid regular and reliable dividends. Rather than being an aspect of the disaster economy, then, SLAM! *click* wore the disaster economy as an aesthetic to cover what was a real and serious business model underneath.

"I cannot promise anything," she said to Merkin, "but I will at some point try to get my hands on Slam-click's," she used the colloquial, just the words slam and click without the fingerguns or grins, "real ledgers. If I do, I'll see about letting you take a look at them." She couldn't think of a nicer thing she could do for someone like Merkin.

Yellow!

It's going to be Costa-Silva of Hermes. She already has the information on police scandals so that could act as a multiplier if released at the same time as one of their political champions was tarnished. In a political crisis you could only run cover if you weren't directly implicated. A hard target, but a good one.

She decides to find something real if she can first. She can use innuendo or fabrication as a backup, but that would damage the credibility of the Anthropozine which she will continue to rely on in the future, even if the collective Well-Actuallies into discovering legit corruption. Fabrication is a clear plan-B, though.

With the target selected, the focus narrows. Where is Costa-Silva's house? Her bank? Her accountant? What is the shape of the targets she'll need to hit as viewed from the outside? She can dial in once she knows the basic topography.

Breathless Dead

Dolce!

The skulls hit the table. One of them chips. They're fascinating, almost childlike - you feel like you could crush one into powder with your fists if you set your mind to it. It's hard to imagine how a creature could even survive with bones that fragile.

"Incredible, aren't they?" said the Crystal Knight to Princess Redana. "An independently evolved, intelligent species - growing up only three gates from here! I could hardly believe our fortune when we discovered them. Entirely untouched by Biomancy, barely above the late medieval period. What a treasure! You can keep these, of course, they're gifts - I have plenty more."

The house of Triden was a place of maps. Not maps of the world as it was, maps of the world as it would be. Fascinating, beautiful, interconnected - every valley a garden, every city a paradise. They covered the walls, the ceilings, the floors - the master cartographer drifted without gravity, brush illustrating in incredible detail the future of Bitemark. She only looked up at the Crystal Knight vaguely, but Princess Redana was giving her full tight-lipped attention.

"You might think that a novel alien species might be worthless," the Crystal Knight went on. "Not so! See, while evolution may have laws, it also has surprises - things that develop in isolation can sometimes have some genuinely novel ways of going about things. This is valuable inspiration for Biomancers who oftentimes," she made a face, "get stuck in the rut of Afane sealife or Earth vertebrate mammals. An alien world means entirely new paradigms for servitor species! But more than that, it means entirely new paradigms for sociology! Many people forget that sociology is the other half of biomancy, but getting to see an entirely unique lifeform's methods for social cohesion cannot help but be fascinating."

She picked up one of the skulls which still had a metal circlet wrapped around its head. A crown? "For instance, humans," she grinned, "have a tendency to band together against external threats, and fall to entropy in conditions of stress. Most human servitors are human patterned in this same way. But these little darlings - we call them Dredges - we believe to be the opposite. We're running a test. I landed on the planet, went around to every Dredge king or queen or emperor of note, killed them in front of their entire court, and declared I would return in seven years to fight whatever warrior or army the kingdom set against me. And now we're going to watch what happens! The Biomancers theorize that this relatively minor intervention will cause a total system collapse without me even having to return. Imagine building a servitor species that doesn't need a whole invasion fleet to Decommission - one Azura showing up and saying 'boo!' would cause them to panic so hard that their civilization collapsed on its own. Wonderful!"

The air between the Crystal Knight and Princess Redana could have frozen. But that was the point. You could see it in the curl of her tail, in the easy flex of fingers across that strange silver belt attachment. The Crystal Knight was provoking the Imperial Princess to a duel which would remove her from the safety of Zeus' laws of hospitality. One atrocity became the means to perform another.

20022 saw it too. He gave a firm, polite cough. The spell was broken and the Crystal Knight's eye snapped around, cerulean-teal, slitted, and furious. "What!?" she hissed.

20022 bowed politely. "Lord Governor," said 20022. "We were not expecting you. We have a meeting scheduled with Imperial Princess Redana."

"We?" hissed the Crystal Knight. She loomed. Azura were huge and she was no exception, a battle-scarred warrior, turquoise scales chipped and broken, coils and coils and coils. "I know you, meddler, but who is this?" It was impossible to break her gaze, Dolce. It was impossible to know if she was coming closer or if she'd activated her Grav-Rail and was lifting you, weightless, from the ground. She was transfixing and everything else dropped away.

"You smell fresh," she purred. The anger had gone. She was all smile. Just one smile, unchanging. "You smell alive. You haven't internalized the Skies like your friend, so what are you? His apprentice? His replacement?" she was close now. When she smiled you could see her fangs as her tail wrapped around your legs. "If so, you'll be seeing a lot of me. That's why I'm hoping we can get off on the right," squeeze, "foot. Don't you think ♥?"

Dyssia!

Your eyes slip, and you see the gods.

First amongst them is Demeter. She stands upon the barren world with Hades' stolen scythe in her hand. She stands astride the gate of Death and none may pass below her.

Blood splashes the soil and immediately she raises it up. The drones are simple creatures, barely more than fungi, and where their shells crack and their life spills she causes the eruptions of grasses, mushrooms and minor insects. The basic building blocks of an ecosystem, the first lurches of evolution on this hurricane stone forest. Swarms of algae vomit forth unending tides of oxygen as they drip from mucous-soaked rocks down into fast flowing rivers and stagnant streams. Life has come to this planet and she will never, ever let it leave.

Where one of the Pix fall, worthier blood conjures worthier life. A dead soldier produces a hound, or an eagle, or a flock of doves. One glorious hero who catches her eye especially she raises as a crab. The more drones the Pix kill, the richer the ecosystem they will live in in their 'afterlife'.

You know that it has been centuries since death has walked the galaxy, but the way this consumptive, violent war seems to be a particularly horrifying form of terraforming a desolate rock into a tropical rainforest is still not internalized on an emotional level. This is not right - but it is a Blessing. Kind are the gods.

Mars is here too. Husband to Demeter, he nevertheless oversees the Pix exclusively, walking amongst them with encouragement and smiles, a word here, a flash of steel there. Sometimes he seems to be calmly professional, other times inspiringly stupid, wearing a big smile and a thumbs up as he clotheshangers half a dozen drones to give some staggered Pix a chance to regain their feet and their formation. If any analogy ever felt right it's that he seems like a plastic action figure, stiff and rigid and bodyslamming enemies into submission - or a plastic miniature on a battlefield of pure tactical skill where his absurdity belies genuine brilliance. A toy soldier god of a toy soldier species, all wound up and kicking ass for justice and survival.

To lose the favour of Mars so entirely, then, should be a disaster for the Wayang. They are at odds with the God of War and, whatever else this is, it is a war. Their drones pay the price in the tens of thousands. But still they work, still they pray, and still they offer. But if not to Mars, then who?

You see Aphrodite in the distance amongst them. He gives you a smile and a wave of his cigarette. Then he looks at his silver wristwatch.

That is when you hear the

tick
HATE
tick
HATE
tick
HATE

...

something important is not happening

...

tick
HATE
tick
HATE
tick
HATE

...

salvation is not getting any closer

these deaths buy no time

everything is pointless

...

the pounding of the clock. an old, mechanical, clockwork thing, wound up springs and gears. the gears of time itself, grinding away in that old fashioned pocketwatch.

When Zeus struck down her monstrous father she imprisoned him in linear time. All his bones were broken and he was pulled long and thin. Where once he was all consuming, formless and eternal now he was, beat after beat, crushed into a comprehensible shape. Once no one could escape him. Now with every passing second he has to let them free from his grasp. The only part of him that survived was his monstrous, severed phallus, containing within it all his nightmarish lusts.

And this one above all.

The Biomancers created the Pix. Now they are killing them.

And Cronus cannot help but love those who devour their children.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black!

She opens with the video footage of fire pouring out of Merkin's apartment window. He might have seen already. Might not. Important point to make, and she makes it in silence.

You can never go home.

She plays the video in silence for a full minute before Orange pushes in the cart with the entire coin collection. She makes that point in silence, too - on the top of the box is a handwritten inventory of everything she recovered, including its position in the storage for quick access. She'll give him a minute there as well.

She hates being here. The weight of the station's broken architecture feels like scars on her body. Every misplaced door or missing pavement puts her on edge, tells her broken, failure, repair required.

"... it wasn't us who burned down the apartment, by the way," said Orange, glancing over at Black's looming stare and seeing immediately how it could be misinterpreted. "That was your employers cleaning house, and we almost got caught in it. She's just a dramatic bitch."

Yellow!

It was surprisingly useless information, really.

Not unimportant. But this was a matter of public record come a few weeks early. The people responsible knew that protests and riots would come from this, that was priced in - which meant that a few weeks of protests and riots leading up to it would not change the calculus. In fact, publishing this tomorrow would get the court to simply focus on the fact of the leak and ignore the wider discussion. What were the words they used last time? This leak is the gravest, most unforgivable sin.

The problem here was that these people were legitimacy golems, process made manifest. Nothing she could do on an individual, heroic level, nothing the public could do on a collective, organized level could deter them. They would follow the process even as it ate the stars.

... but the same cut in reverse.

She only needed one of them to be corrupt before the veil of Process was disrupted. If she did that then the same defense that let them be outraged at leaks would work in reverse. If she could change this story from 'The supreme court decided...' to 'corrupt supreme court justice Trelawney sold out human rights to the insurance corporations...'. That was the twist that would make it unpalatable to normies. They'd still do it, to be sure. But they'd have to do it mask off.

And she had two weeks to pull this off. That meant she'd need to plan this operation as a frame job. It would be amazing if she could find something real in that time but she frankly did not have the time to be sure she would find that. She'd look for which of them was the most corrupt seeming, the one with the most rumours and suspicious wealth. That way, if and when they investigated they'd find something even if the original connection she created fell apart in the end. What was it they said? Get followed by cops long enough and they'll eventually find something to book you on.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Tactics means something different when you are the greater.

As the lesser, Tactics is about closing the gap; understanding habits, identifying weak points, undoing your opponent. The onus is on you to change a predetermined destiny of defeat. It means taking risks, gambling everything on a blade that pierces your opponent's heart and reactor core in the same stroke. In some ways it is easier.

But now she has the superior god. She does not need stratagem. She needs only to be aware of stratagem. To watch her flanks and her instincts and be prepared for a plan born of desperation. She can already see the shape of it, with the unregistering of the Makhaira and the disappearance of the Kathresis. Had Akai taken up her refuse once again? It would be an act of love, certainly, but one that would condemn her forever to be Solarel's shadow.

But then, this was what Akai fought for. The chance to beat Solarel at her best. The chance to rise out of that shadow. For love. This was no distracted, half-hearted maiden who would fold as soon as she asked them to. This was the second most pure foe she had ever faced, one who knew how she spoke not, whose entire future was premised on her victory on this battle. She would bring everything she had and fight for her dream.

Alas that her dream depended upon defeating Solarel at her peak. She would watch and miss no detail. She would hold nothing back.

And that included her off field assets. She calls the Boatmen of Styx and asks them to discover what her rival was hiding.

[Call upon a toxic power: 8]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black!

She retrieves the briefcase. It's frictionless.

That's a rare feeling. To be a part of someone else's operation. To have a colleague who she doesn't need to oversee. Discomforting, to know that other people are smart. To think there are things she doesn't have to control. It's easier if she has to do all the work. With something like this she's encountered someone who she can't condescend to, but doesn't yet know the failure points of. Maybe he gets sloppy. How? When? She doesn't know. He did this too well for her to know why she can't trust him.

She will wait patiently, then. This isn't her operation, she'll let herself be handled at whatever pace Pope is comfortable with. Her only acknowledgement of receipt is a black heart reaction emoji appended to the photograph he took of the courthouse in the moments before Blue and Orange arrived.

Black!

November: I appreciate what you're telling me.
November: I hope I do not come off as distant. I will be as honest as I can be with you: I am managing you right now.
November (Orange): Professionally.
November: I am withholding data and drip feeding you revelations for effect. This is because I am neck deep in an investigation and before long I shall need to look into getting a snorkel.
November: Right now I have both more than you'd expect and less than you'd hope.
November: So, I must make an unfair request. You feature heavily in my current contingency plan for if the shit does in fact hit the scramjet. It would cause problems if you had already gotten yourself igualad for putting yourself on the front line.
November (Red): or killed yourself with opiates and sleep deprivation
November: You represent a rare source of credibility. It would be professionally damaging if you burned out before I do.
November: This is a big ask based on no evidence. If the choice is between my vague insulation and using your platform to confront a clear and present danger I am well aware I have no right to question your decision.
November: But if the choice is between my career defining scoop and giving yourself a late twenties heart attack from soaking your ramen in energy drinks, I would politely request you give some consideration to the former.

Breathless Dead

Dolce!

"This is the sort of thing that is debated at great lengths internally in the Service," said 20022. "The answer, to a degree, flows down from the top. At the absolute top is the Saoshyant, the monarch-prophet of the Skies. She appoints from her court a series of Ministers, some overseeing particular sectors or geographic areas, some overseeing concepts like military readiness or planetary terraforming. I am a member of the Ministry of Planetary Repair. These Ministers set policy and define glory and hold absolute power over their Ministries, though much of what they do is filtered through the Secretaries of each Ministry, who are like us."

This... the Tides of Poseidon were the same, weren't they? You remember from a dream. The eaters of worlds, the shattering bureaucracy that tried to break the stars of man. Just another extension of the Azura system of government.

"While Ministers come and go, Secretaries are eternal - until retirement - which give them a lot of power and discretion," said 20022. "If the Minister demands results, then the Secretary must produce those results, but it is often up to them to decide how that will be done. The Secretary then further delegates down the line, until they reach me. If a member of the public objects to one of my decisions they can challenge me legally, at which point my manager would assess the decision. If they agree with me, then the citizen can either drop their complaint or escalate it to the next rank. Some complaints do get escalated all the way to the Minister, who can order entire branches decommissioned if they are overstepping or ineffective."

"But, there is still a lot of room for self expression and personalization of results," said 20022. "So, what does glory mean for me? It means reducing the time that this world spends cut off from the Skies as a war-scarred backwater from centuries to decades. To look at a thriving, interconnected planet sitting astride major commercial slipway lanes would be glorious to me, I think."

Dyssia!

If you told the ancients of the distant past that twenty thousand years from their birth wars would be waged with pike and muscle they might have assumed that nothing would have changed. War would be war, they would think, as eternal and unshifting as the seasons. That kinship in weapons would mean a kinship in results.

They would have to be told that every soldier in fifty thousand fought like a God to even begin to understand.

The Pix are an armed and armoured warrior species at the height of their power. Their designers hoped not just to match but surpass the legendary Wolves of Ceron. It is not with perfect teamwork that they fight, like the wolves, but with perfect ambition. Every soldier of the line has trained in secret to for every role in case the opportunity to steal a badge and advance should arrive. This makes each soldier a strategos. It makes the movements of the formation one of unparalleled genius. Armies in ancient days needed to suppress the instincts of their soldiers, slave their collective will to a single commander, rendering the vast masses inert and brainless. Not here. There are no orders here, not even any communication. Everyone just knows when to turn a flank, when to retreat, when to charge. No mass of people ever moved anything like this.

The drones come in waves.

Drones are not independent life forms. They need to be tended and quickened by the Biomancers. In the distance you can see the Biomancer Wayang - their shadow-puppets, tall and spindly avatars of bone and flesh, hands thick with chemical dispensers. They walk amongst still-stirring drones, surrounded by their massive sentinel bodyguards, injecting stimulants and balancing unstable growth patterns. They are like artillerymen loading shells, and when they are ready they release a silent mass of flesh and stone like a single shot.

There is cunning in them, too. Their tools are brainless but they are not, and their weapon is crude but they know when to hold it in reserve and when to fire so quickly that poorly grown drones collapse and are trampled by their fellows before they even hit the Pix lines.

Now and then a particularly brilliant maneuver of the Pix will see a fox or a squad strike deep enough to butcher the Wayang; they fall apart in fountains of yoghurt-like nutrient slurry and pheromone gland bursts that send their sentinel protectors clawing at the remains in blind confusion. It's heartening. Every hour feels like a victory. The morning feels like a triumph. No one is tired. The stamina of the gods and perfect force rotation keeps everyone in fighting shape.

But they are millions still.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blue and Orange!

Orange tried to innocently blink away the confrontation, letting the second part of the question to Blue distract from the fact that she was addressed. Blue didn't let her. She fixed her with a steel gaze and waited. Orange sighed.

"Honestly," she said. "I think about the fact that I'm poor more often than that I'm a machine. Most humans I meet either don't care or are kind of into it, and sometimes I get jeered or whistled, the usual viral-QRs, but nothing I haven't been able to ignore thus far. What I can't get away from is that I have to cram nine of us into a two bedroom apartment in a redlined district with a forty meter electronic billboard aimed directly at my window. The language of power and respect is human," she gestured at her inoffensively tasteful suit, "and I can learn to speak it. And I am using human correctly here - the language of power and respect certainly isn't blooded."

"And that's the issue," said Blue acidly. "Because we can pass. Pass as androids. It's very convenient to pass as androids, actually, when my natural shape has more in common with a piece of heavy construction equipment than anything remotely humanoid. So I'm pretending to be an android pretending to be a human pretending to be not fucking broke and the closest thing to a sibling I've been able to talk to in the over a decade barely believes in other people. So yeah, my fortunes are allied with android rights, to them we look the same, but looking the same as you still involves conscious effort on my part."

Orange laid her hand on Blue's shoulder.
"I miss Phoenix," she said, looking away.
"Me too," said Orange.

*

November!

No more time.

November: Good evening. Apologies for the delay. The quarterly financial report has been completed.
November: I am still catching up. Can you please provide a quick summary of our status and any outstanding tasks I have overlooked?

Around Brown, who was typing, there was a furious flow of energy. Showering, cleaning, maintenance, exercise, software updates on every phone, the rotation of encryption keys, all the little domestic tasks that need to be solved before she can once again reach for the heights of creative action. She is even doing the stretches that Euna showed her. Every task that fell by the wayside. She is building up for radiance again but she won't be able to reach it until she's resolved the missing present.

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

She knew that look. Too many choices. The temptations of wickedness. On one side, family, respect, influence, power, acceptance and on the other mere virtue. An easy choice that would only stick in the throat a little bit, and would hardly hurt when coughed up as a foxpearl.

But she'd learned her lessons well.

The Vermillion Princess wielded the Sash. The Sash was warm and comfortable around Hsien's neck. It was awaiting its mistress' voice and then it would leap from the foxgirl who had seduced it to her hand immediately. That's why she had to start with the voice.

The Sash the Vermilion Princess wore was, in truth, Hsien's scarf - places switched during their recent clash together. It pulled tight across her mouth even as it wrapped around her ankles, wicked tight, lacing them together with her hands. It wrapped around her collar and down her centre and between her legs, knotting into endless bows and ribbons. Her scarf had more than a little experience with this particular maneuver - for reasons - but it was going above and beyond this time - for unrelated reasons.

Restraint focused the mind. Virtue bound temptations. The best way to be free from temptation was to be made physically incapable of it.

New Lesson: Never allow anyone else be unvirtuous.

She smiled down at her Vermilion Princess. "Oh, darling," she purred in her best Fox Hypnosis voice, tracing her hand down the Princess' cheek. "Having second thoughts again? Starting to suspect me again? Just stare deep into my eyes and you'll know for sure that you're exactly where you should be, in the exactly position you should be in~" She winked.

Then she flipped off the commissioner, picked up the Princess, and jumped from the skyscraper in the form of a whirlwindgirl.

[Accepting the shift]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blue!

"Yeah," admitted Blue. "We do love them."

"But then, I know more about them than I do about myself. I know more about keeping them healthy, happy and oxygenated than I do about how to do repairs on my own body. I know more about the miasma theory of disease than I know about the corporation who built my spine. I know more about their politics than my own. I said I'm trying to solve capitalism but I don't think my line would even invent it in the first place if left to its own devices for ten thousand years. All my history is theirs, all my words are theirs, all my ideology is theirs. Who the fuck am I if not a thing they built for them?"

Pink!

The world demands. It asks. It tempts. It offers. It piles on stressor after stressor, conversation after conversation. The time she needs to recover is measured in days, but not just any days. Days of silence. Days without contact. Days with no phone calls, no chores, no performances. Even arranging for those days is itself a chore, and not one the world takes lightly. There is an expectation that the world move at the speed of thought, faster and faster, and that's not the speed or shape of her mind.

Putting it off just means it all comes closer. But she can't not.

She's never as unitary as when she's recovering. She separates for work, for joy, to interact with the world. Nine different masks, nine different flows of flawless energy. Isolated, the colours blob together like jellyfish. They move together languidly and erratically. Repairing Red. Watching video. Browsing the internet. Lying in the sunlight. Using whatever hands are closest, whichever mind is closest, colours blending into a haze. She does not celebrate, though she will. She does not shine, though she will. She does not think, though she will. For now there is just her and the void, cold waters of nothingness pouring over jagged thoughts, the lack of anything to do suppressing the all consuming urge to do.

She falls. Gently, gently, gently, through the dark. Gently, gently, gently -

Her game crashes.

Nine sets of eyes staring at the single screen blink in shock. This - this piece of shit just crashed. Hours of work gone. Hours - hours of pointless grind. Hours she hadn't enjoyed. Hours she never could have spared. Hours with her entire self clustered around the tiny monitor like a zombified group hug. She - what time was it? What the fuck how was it this late, she had so much to do. She has to find something productive to do today or she's going to lose her shit.

Pink picks up her paintbrush. No time. No time for anything good tonight. She's just going to get the base colours in place but that's going to be something. Something to let her sleep without hating herself, because that's what she does - she hates herself. For the wasted time. That she needed it. That the only way out of it was to wait for her toxicity to overwhelm her exhaustion.

But it has. She's alive again, filled with energy and power. The brush moves in a whirl. One more night's sleep after this and she'll be back again with a vengeance. She'll show herself just what she's capable of so that she knows how unacceptable it was that she wasn't capable of it.

It was time to catch up. It was time to get ahead.