Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"Ah, well," Brown said, sinking back into her fog. "Yeah let's do that."

Not only did that register as another failure, it was another revealed failure, and if she wasn't very careful it was a failure in herself that would make other people feel bad about themselves. Even as her energy dissolved back into an ambient, sharp-edged fog she needed to maintain a certain tired, easy posture so that her disappointment didn't bring down the room. The effort to do that cost any further attempt at contributing.

Blue!

Blue: Remind me, is bulletproof armour made out of diamonds something we want?
Pink: aahshfjjajahaajajajh
Blue: I could also do diamond swords
Pink: I am already going to the gym I don't need more incentive

Another key fabrication technology, though if anything even more of a commitment than the carbon loom. Building something with this would involve enormous amounts of practice and wasted materials. It would require an approach of building specialized pieces, there wouldn't be the option for uniform equipment. But the aesthetic of it. She could make scales out of diamond-silicon glass.

"Last question," she asked. "What's new with plumbing? Broken water pipes, working through the rainy season, vent-ice? I see the ice mining freighters and they're so much smaller than my envelope math says they should be, and the Cloud got stuck over Hermes for like three months without flooding or limiting flow."

Green!

She could angst over being dangerous all she wanted, but what that meant in practice is that she had no way to de-escalate when Challenged.

There's nothing but the tension in the air now, the micro-shifts of vision and posture. It's a state of utter, serene calm for Green. A clear contest with clear rules lets her dispense with all the infrastructure that keeps her from this state. She needs to make a move but as soon as she commits to an idea she's condensing infinite possibility into something knowable. How to communicate perfectly while giving nothing away?

She opens her wings and becomes the ocean.

Crashing waves upon a storm-tossed sea. Slate-grey and sand green, blue skies and steel clouds. Air that invigorates, sensationalizes, makes the mouth water. A riptide that snatches from below and drags Fiona along by the legs. A sargassum forest that whips and tangles, fast water and tangling kelp vines and the muscular threat of leviathans moving beneath the surface. The inherent eroticism of the ocean is often commented on but rarely manifested, and with wind and wave and the crackle of ball lightning across the surface, Green grips.

Nova!

Their favourite is "Nova".

The reaction to Euna using that name is - well, there's the sense that's the name they really wanted for themselves, but didn't want just anyone to figure it out and use it. November was reverse-engineered from Nova as something to put on paperwork and to stop themselves from vibrating with delight/embarrassment whenever it came up in casual conversation. The only way that name would work for her is if someone organically came up with it independently and there was genuine delight when Euna did. The response to it is almost the most co-ordinated she's ever been.

Beyond that, nicknames that involve alternate colours - Gold for Yellow, for example - don't work, they don't realize that they're being spoken to at all. Questioned, they'd mention uncertainty if Green had already blocked out concept space for those colours or was working on them in the background. They're happy with things evocative of the colours - Daisy for Yellow - but nothing registers quite like Nova for addressing a group of them.

"You can't even compete with us?" said Yellow, smiling, surrounded by her posse - Green and Pink. "How cute~"

There's something about the way that the three of them can move in unison that is extremely unbalancing. They've learned a trick where they maneuver so that one of them is right on the periphery of vision both left and right. Turn your head and they move their position so they're still there on the edge. It's worse than them being completely out of vision, it feels like being stalked by velociraptors.

"Perhaps we can take you on as our project!" said Yellow. Her aesthetic today was knots - intricate hair braids, knotted red neck kerchief, a crimson sash around her waist tied up in a bow, all over a silky white gi. Half shrine maiden, half sailor sentai, all smiles. "Take you under my trench coat, shape you with our eighteen hands, bring you up to speed~"

Yellow was easily the weirdest of November's colours to teach. She refused to touch anything directly, and often refused exercises if they didn't meet her weird hidden criteria, and her showing up at all was uncommon. But when she did appear, she could somehow coax the best possible performance out of every other colour.

Breathless Dead

Mosaic!

Turn your eyes down. Zeus is there down in the dirt with you.

"Therefore, through a constant shifting of rhetorical focus -" she chuckled at an old, grim joke. "Weak people. Strong people. Don't you see that's the thinking that all this is built on? Now you're strong, built for labour, outperforming Heracles as you haul a starship from Poseidon's maw. Now you're weak, disarmed and observed, a mortal before an oppressive Sky. Was Heracles strong or weak when madness made him devour his children? Was he strong or weak when he carried the golden apples to his hated enemy?"

The Thunderer looked into your eyes; deepest indigo and flecked with purple. "Your strengths are your weaknesses, Mosaic. Your weaknesses are your strengths. The ancient playwrights knew it when they penned their tragedies. Modern tyrants forget it when they pen their screeds. You too have the opportunity to walk the same path of tragedy that's haunted you all your days."

"Or," she said, and looked up into her sky, "you could do the one thing you have never been able to do. You could look power in the eye without blinking. See past the radiance of the throne to the woman atop it. Imagine yourself in her place."

Ember!

You see the Plousios emerge from the waves.

The chains of sweating labourers pull it onto a long carpet of null-friction neomaterial, the brutal and arcane manifestation of technology at its height. The massive armoured beak of the ship, the chipped gold and red and black paint as proud as the House of Hades, the riots of colour as corals and crabs drop from its rising surface. Seawater pours from rusted macrocannons. Treasure spills from open cargo bays like dripping blood. It is mighty. It is as familiar as the grave. You remember your claws breaking that coffin open from the inside.

Nothing dies in the deathless domain of Demeter. Does that extend to the spirit of this undead ship? Does the heartbeat you felt beneath your fingertips still stir? Does the voice of the ancient craftsman still resonate in your ears, telling you the secrets of bringing metal and stars to life?

You can feel it in your heart. The space in this ship's heart where you belong.

Dolce!

There is a sound like nothing you've ever heard before. There's a sight like nothing you've ever seen. A crackling blue magical fire ignites in the corner of the room, and where it spreads you can see through into a different place like looking into a cinema screen. You look into a place filled with armoured soldiers.

Immediately they're piling through the gap, shoulder to shoulder, shouting things like "GO GO GO" and "PERIMETER SECURED" and "MARS VICTORIA". They're all over you and past you in that wild, fast paced way that warrior servitors on a mission are like. 20022 does not even let a ripple show in his tea.

And then, when the room is lined in every particular with snake-masked soldiers, the Royal Architect steps out.

He was old. Even if his primitive design of glittering lights, plastic-alloy and holograms didn't make him feel as exquisitely dated as a blackpowder rifle, he moved with a hunch and a walking stick. Despite the obvious signs of age, he moved with a similar quickness to the soldiers - their nervous, paranoid energy mirroring his. Rapidly he moved into the room closing the portal behind him, floating camera drones surrounding him on buzzing little wings, and stopped with one arm folded behind him to look down at Bitemark. Then he turned and moved over to the table where the two Synnefo sat, moving an arm twitchily to snatch at the cup of tea that 20022 had already poured for him. His robotic mouth did not open - it just glowed in time with his words - but he seemed to appreciate the smell of it.

"You -" he snapped his fingers at Dolce, the jerking motion almost making him spill the tea. "- you. You're an atypical design. Different phenotypes, wool is tinted yellow rather than violet, horn structure, excessive posterior design. All traits of human-variant Synnefo strains." The orblike lenses of the camera drones closed in. "Are you a spy? An Assassin? Give me your hand, I need to take a blood sample."

Dyssia!

The Sellarfane is retro.

A RVX-05 Assault Dropship barely seats a thousand in one cramped hangar bay. Chemical-fueled plasma afterburners with eight demi-reactors on a cycling rig - enough to recover from seven direct ELF storms. An externally mounted rack of plasma torpedoes held in grav-spheres and four projector arrays to guide them in. In its prime this would have been a mass assault landing craft, a ship that could endure the storm of a blockade. It could slip onto a planet or space station's surface and deploy a thousand highly armed supersoldiers into the heart of enemy territory, clearing a path and landing zone with precision guided torpedoes. It was a ship designed in the fires of a total galactic war, a ship designed to be expended in the tens of thousands, a ship that was an intimate part of an organized Doctrine that had plans from its manufacturing to its death.

Cool. Stylish. Uncomfortable. And even retrofitted with modern materials, it was a shadow before the Slitted, the flagship of the Crystal Knight. Without the fires of war to pressure the design, warships bloat beyond all reason; armed space stations, weaponized resort moons, temple-complexes designed to be implements of tyranny more than weapons of war. There's no chance this relic will survive an engagement with the Slitted. Ships like the Slitted killed almost every single RVX-05 Dropship ever made and absorbed their mass to repair their hulls. Mars has made it clear who his favourites are.

But with a drunken, manic enough strategy going in, Dionysus can offer you and your legion the element of surprise.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

She faded into the recollection. The tension was still there but it shifted into the background as she went from observed to observer. "The Themis guys. Did you get their badge numbers?" If anyone's used to snap-checking badge numbers of cops, it's Zhang. "Or failing that, the logo of the coffee shop they went to? Was it hot or cold?"

Identify the agents - their route, their base, their pattern. It was some Light Yagami shit, she knew, to take an interest in the investigation into you, but this wasn't the state she was up against. It hadn't been anyone with a government contract guarding Hades, it had been Chase Black. Her siblings were sitting in a military base, not deployed to the field. She could see in her mind's eye that there was a chink between the state and the people responsible for Erebus. A parallel response system with its own interests and assets. If there was an investigation then the parallel system would be taking an intimate interest, just as they had with the disaster response incident. If she could see who was watching she might be able to see what else they were watching...

Blue!

She notes it too. Paper. Multiple missions so far had been stalled by the physical inconvenience of moving large reams of paper out through a secure compound. After approximately a jillion high profile hacks companies and individuals seemed to have wised up and returned the typewriter to active service. She had briefly patted herself on the back for learning handwriting, but it seemed that skill had proliferated dangerously and there wasn't a way around that...

Or was there? She stood up and put her hands around Serino's bicep - they didn't fit but it gives her a good sense of the dimensions. Looked appropriately impressed and thoughtful as she sat back down. Those were big and they did not need to be filled with muscles. She could make some sort of... robot musclesuit, hollowed out and filled with either valuable kit or loot to be smuggled out of buildings.

"What tools are there for depth scanning?" she asked. "In my day, there wasn't anything to tell if a room was pressurized other than cutting a hole and getting clear of the blast radius. There's got to be better ways to scan what's on the other side now, but cybereye firms are extremely light on the details of what they can see and how."

Green!

Where the finger touched the pale green distorted and disappeared, revealing the glittering void of space - though it felt eerily solid. Like skin turning pale when pressed with a finger in reverse. Green leaned into it and purred - but within three seconds she'd turned her head to present the jawline, ear and neck.

"Trust can be broken," she said. "I might seize control of the scene; run it too hard, too fast, too aggressive. I could disable safety controls, force something uncomfortable, or hard cut at the wrong moment. My mind's always searching for the next idea or transition and I flick between concepts like a strobe light, these changes happen before I'm even aware of them. I was talking to Sophie about neurohacking and I was so interested that I didn't realize that was knowledge it was not remotely safe for me to possess - I didn't realize it until after I'd finished learning how to do it. Here I can do anything and I want to be able to do anything and that's an insanely dangerous combination."

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

Hsien did the only thing she could think to do in that moment.

She bit Lady Foxfire's hand.

They looked at each other for a moment. Made eye contact with an exactly mirrored expression of 'are we really doing this?' and 'I guess we are really doing this' and 'we really hope that nobody is watching this because this is about to be extremely undignified'.

And then Hsien is being beaten over the head with a purse and she's holding her grip on that hand but she's too panicked to let go and Foxfire is too panicked to stop and of course in the middle of this whole thing Hsien has finally thought of the correct thing to say so she's trying to mmmmrph gmhr mhhrph out her rebuttal through a mouthful of her greater half's hand and through the yips she makes when Foxfire pulls her delicate little triangles ow ow ow ow ow -

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

When observation turned inwards it focused on those graceless moments. The large scale revisiting of every imperfect moment had begun, and with it Brown's limited imagination stretched itself to the idea of excusing herself so she could beat her head against a wall. The fantasy ran right up to the point where her scream of frustration attracted concerned passers by and then it recursed on itself as a new moment of imperfection joined the others. It was difficult to function at all through this autocondemnatory trial. It made her feel overexposed; she was aware of so much evidence of her own failure that it surely wouldn't take too much more for even disinterested parties to start piecing it together. Withdraw, hide, disappear...

But she could handle it. She took a breath. She missed her wordless reverie and direct lines and would very much like to fall back into them, but she had to keep fighting no matter how much she wanted to check out. "Thank you, but what I was actually intending to ask was about the first group of people who interrogated you. I'm speaking accurately about my welding knowledge; I know how to do it but my skill is extremely out of date."

Blue!

Blue notes it down. There were a lot of advantages to getting a single, large fabrication purchase - not least the practical effects of outfitting a dozen people in matching outfits. One top of the line item also offered an 'impossibility hinge' - that was, being able to do one impossible thing could bypass security as a concept rather than fighting a number of smaller, riskier battles within the spectrum of the possible.

"What about lifting and hauling?" she asked, changing topics. "The station is so hostile to motor transportation but all of the physical shit of construction still needs to make its way around. How do you get a vanload of tools through an overbuilt Hermes alley at night without waking the neighbourhood?"

Green!

"Oh - that's -"

She laughs. November has not laughed like this in - even subjectively it's been a decade. Delight.

"You know, sometimes I forget that I'm actually kind of basic?" she said, spreading the image around her head so she could move around while viewing it. The shifting resumes but slowly, more deliberately. "I mean - not in absolute terms, but..." She turns it over. "This is about a mental framework. The physical structure exists purely as a vehicle to enable the mental framework. No interest in communication or aesthetic. Tyrannical control over input, both in what is and isn't included. Disinterest in features of a body that does not suit the mental framework."

That stops her, commands her attention. The faster her thoughts run the more electric green seeps into her design. "Oh. The framework. The framework for the mind - that's what's important!" She laughed again, folding Fiona's body back into itself. "It's not that I miss my previous body. I lived for a decade before that without any body at all. It's not even that I'm unique in the inexpressibility of my desires - ah, stupid, can't believe I wasted all that time! I need to work backwards from how my thoughts are into how my body looks, and I've already done that. I'm -" any pretense of photorealism was abandoned entirely; now she's a cel-shaded animation, now an impressionistic painting, now a pencil sketch. "- doing that right now."

She settles into a shape like a bird landing on a branch; momentarily stable but ready to take off again at any moment. It's the glitchwork dragon she first appeared as in the sky, scaled down; green-tinted white, scattered with pixel-effect stars and brilliant eyes, jagged in poor resolution artifacts. "In my ideal state I have no barrier between what I think and what I do, between what I think and who I am. That's what makes me dangerous - each check and filter I add to myself feels like a checklist I have to go through before I can be myself, but those checks are there for a reason. But that's," the dragon's snout crinkled, "only a problem here, where I have control over the environment as well as myself. In the physical world I have a containable level of agency but not enough adaptive expression -" A check triggers, her tone of voice changes. "I am talking about myself too much and not acknowledging what you just trusted me with. Thank you for that."

It obviously derails her entire flow to stop examining this fascinating idea and acknowledge another person, rather than forward-predicting their half of the conversation from information she already has. It's as good an illustration as anything of what she's afraid of in herself.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

An abject lesson. This creature was weak because of its distance from perfection. It only took a glance to see where it was going; it took only a little pattern recognition to see where its path would end. The logic of each choice inevitably pushed it into the next one. The chain of decisions lead inevitably back towards the crab. Every hour it spent as its own creature was an hour wasted and when it fought its competitor crabs they would kill it with experience. That is -

- Tragic?

Inevitable.

There was no progress on Roevg, in Zaldar. All of science had existed in the palm of some great hand, and then it had been turned loose upon itself. The Consortium looked forwards to next year's designs, next year's products, but on Roevg the gods would arise when lightning struck the mountains and civilization cowered in their shadows. It had been a world stuck in time forever, a broken mechanical species as doomed as the protocrab to never escape its evolutionary niche. It had triumphed over the dynamism of Hybrasil because while they formed their contradictory, exploratory clans, their clash of different visions, the Zaldarians had fought using tactics honed for centuries -

- And the Aeteline.

...

Which was new. Manufactured in the Imperial Forge, a crowning glory of the Evercity. A brand new creation that -

- An ancient curse. When the creators of the Zaldarians went to war they did not do so with a circus of half-tamed godbeasts, they made reflections of themselves on macro scale. They were their own gods. It was a return to ancient tradition that granted true strength, the warfare of the creators -

- Did they win their war?

...

- Did they predate the sage Zaldar?

Request tactical assessment of situation.

The Aeteline would be best served by a medium chassis replacement matching the functions for which it is optimized. Such a limb is not guaranteed to exist in this environment; matching weight classes are likely to be digitgrade or other incompatable structural arrangements. Advise harvesting the protocrab due to convenience, using excess time to allow automated systems to partially integrate the limb, then leverage that into harvesting a more appropriate limb from our next round opponent.

Commencing takedown.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"Oh, welding..."

The rest of November feared Brown. Everything was just a bit off with her. Green was the manic paragon of brilliance and ambition, but with Brown everything just landed slightly wrong, went a little too slowly, couldn't quite come to the point. There was a fundamental drag with her, everything just a little bit uncool, exhausted and internally twisted. The focus on other people was in part a reflection of that; after dedicating so little energy to her own self concept she could absorb the emotions of others so much more easily. Under the spotlight there wasn't anything she could do but agree, passivity tumbling into bland acceptance.

"... sure, I know the basics," she said. She stirred herself, she didn't like having nothing of herself to assert, so she made an effort to refocus. "But welding's hardly a celebration and you still haven't answered my question."

Blue!

"The main thing I don't understand is how power transmission works these days," said Blue. "Some of it's wireless, some of it's cabled, and there always seems to be construction work happening to switch one type to the other type?"

She appreciates the calculated precision of her new grip. It had killed her to leave her hand strength up to vibes and impulses; she could be so much faster and so much more precise when she could visualize her movements in advance. There was a deep, deep satisfaction that came when physicality felt like the execution of a plan. A perfect movement made her feel like she was in sync with her body at last, and there was a comforting blankness to her mind in those moments where she could almost observe the beauty of her movements without commentary.

Green!

"That's because what I want is to win at Fiona, which is both a normal thing to want and possible goal to accomplish," said Green. There was a strange... frustration to her now? Her form seemed to solidify around the shape of her physical body. "And you're right that I don't know what you can take. That's the whole problem! Not least because I need to push past what your expectations are in order to accomplish my goal. I'd have to map you in real time and that's dangerous."

Her shifting stops almost entirely now; though it doesn't feel like she's stopped changing. This is a self-imposed prison of willpower.

"What I want is to be everything to everybody while also compromising nothing about my core identity. The closest I can come to that is eating the undernet and setting myself up as some sort of glitchcore AI goddess, which is also a normal thing to want and possible goal to accomplish," said Green. "But I'm not there yet, so, dangerous."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"Tea symbolizes my adoptive, abusive mother figure," said Brown. "Something I am both compelled and repulsed by. Spilling tea on myself was both an act of calculated defiance to the symbolism and a necessary sell for an improvised disguise. I don't generally buy it because it's expensive and if I don't give myself a chance to buy it I won't know if I like it or not, and it's easier to resist temptation if you don't have positive memories to tempt you."

Once the needle had fallen on the side of it being easier to answer the question it was very quick to go into the too much information side of things.

"How about you?" she asked. "Do you like tea?"

Blue!

She really doesn't like to admit it, but her original body was basically obsolete by now.

At the time she was the cutting edge, the latest and the greatest, the pinnacle of humanity's scientific efforts. But she was in the box for a long time. Everything that was unique to her got mass distributed, innovated on, upgraded and in some cases surpassed entirely. Her first goal in filling out her new space was to recreate all the capabilities that she had in her dragon form and it was confronting how many of those components could be purchased in a human-portable form. Her fusion cutter talons had been a marvel of precision engineering; now they were standard issue kit for shipbreakers. She couldn't even buy her original optical lenses because they had been so entirely replaced with holographic lenses. Tech she'd once found in military spy satellites was now a niche subculture for retrowave artists.

So instead she opts to go straight to the source. She goes and hangs out at the coolest construction sites she can find, follows the workers to their bar of choice, introduces herself as a tech journalist and offers to cover the drinks tab of anyone who'll talk shop with her. It's an extremely blunt approach, somewhere between confident autism and construction site groupie, but if she's investing in new kit she isn't going to trust the opinions of anyone without scorch marks on their fingers.

(She thinks Orange accepted a flawed metaphor too easily, but then she thinks that Sophie's approach of getting a degree in neuroscience and opening up the hardware to experiment directly is far more correct than trying to build any sort of understanding through language.)

Green!

The entire universe seems to pull back - the blackness of the void and the glittering of macrolasers suddenly reduced to the sparkling black pupil in the centre of Green's eye. They're back in Fiona's cabin on the blossom world, and Green is...

"Dangerous," she said. And she is.

The way she changes and shifts from moment to moment - the changes are sudden and janky, but she always manages to find some sort of artistry in each shift. She starts as her physical self but with a glance she's a centaur. Another few moments and she's humanoid again, blonde and muscular, and after another beat she's a wolf with fur like sunlight. The changes last indeterminate times, sometimes rapid fire, sometimes lasting minutes, like someone browsing television channels without finding anything they like for long. For all the arrays of shapes she wears - humans, beasts, monsters, mostly female, some male, some mixed - the constant throughout is vitality. Every form she takes is filled with strength and energy, a power that burns so much for use it can't stay still.

"Things move too fast. Thoughts are too forceful," said Green. "Not compatible with checks and safety. Monsterfucker's mania. Not safe. Use Pink, she's a better fit."
"excuse me," said Pink, turning magenta.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"No, I don't drink," said Brown. Again the pressure of resistance, the weight of her personality coming down. She felt the weight of it with appreciation. She didn't want to get into her collective's weird obsession with tea, its symbolism for Everest, so on and on. She couldn't imagine anything less interesting than her beverage tastes, not when she was watching those teeth. "If you want something I could watch you?"

Orange!

She shook his hand. Smiled. "That's as close to right as I've ever heard," she said. "I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to get that far. I particularly like how that casts my relationship with my family as inter-forums drama. Different cultures and rules produce different people."

Obviously the metaphor broke down if stretched too far or examined too closely. But turn off the usernames, avatars and signatures and just observe the flow of text and you could indeed read the mood and character of a forum. She liked it, she thought. The more she considered it the more she liked it. She wanted to hear what the rest of her thought.

"Thank you so much for taking the time."

Green!

The simulation crashes.

Green is not working with particularly impressive hardware, and more than that, she's actually genuinely not as good a hacker as Fiona. She can't think of anything in the seconds she has before the physics engine overloads. And so the framerate stutters to almost nothing and the galaxy freezes in place.

But then, in the wreckage of too late, inspiration comes.

Green rips out the processing power out of entire segments of the galaxy - planets, stars, even swathes of skybox reduced to neon pink error textures. It gives her the energy to group overwrite the textures of the sand grains and alter the galactic scale and -

The next frame clicks into place and the galaxy is full of starships.

The shapes repeat, if you looked long enough, but there's one for every grain of sand. And as another frame ticks by it's like stepping forwards to the next photograph as millions of laser cannons light up and billions of missiles start to launch. Another tick. All these ships on auto-attack AI, all these ships in a vast battle of red against blue, the greatest fleets ever imagined and the greatest war the galaxy had ever seen. One photograph at a time, slow enough to see the scorching lines of the lasers as they scream across the void. It's the insane jank that calls to mind the enormous fleet actions of ancient EVE, game on the brink of crashing, more screenshots than progress. But there's so much in each of those screenshots that speed becomes irrelevant. She turned a framerate crash into a slow-mo feature.

But look deeper, though - beyond the grandeur of it all to who is doing it. This is the reaction speeds of Red, the artistry of Pink, the apocalyptic vision of Yellow, the attention to astrophysics of Blue... from what Fiona knows about November, none of them should be able to do all of this at once, on these kind of timeframes.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"Who questioned you? The first time, I mean, before they moved you here," asked Brown. "Just the cops, or were there other people there for it? Any spook types?"

That's something worth focusing on. Were the people investigating the Cloud working fully through the police system, or were they bringing in other contractors or specialists? These people were ultimately hunting her, and this was a valuable glimpse at the structure of that hunt.

The fact that she went directly into this without even considering answering the question about herself might make her seem like a spook type herself. That's obviously partially true, but the truth was that it would take sustained effort to make Brown believe anyone was sincerely asking her.

Orange!

"Sometimes I'm exactly that," said Orange. "If I have moral opinions it's because White told me explicitly what was good and what was bad, and I'm just living that without understanding it. She thinks about everything in terms of morality. When you said earlier that Blue was the only one who had altered her hands, you were only half correct - she's our understanding of the physical world, and because she's dissatisfied with her body it echoes through to all of us. We react to that feeling in different ways, through our context and other influences. White combined body dysmorphia from Blue with pro-girl sentiment from Pink and her own psychosexual morality to decide that she wanted to become an anthropomorphic dragongirl. She made the decision but where did the idea come from? When Red starts wearing dragonscale what is that a reaction to?"

She shrugged. "That's why it's so incoherent to have a designated writer. If Yellow comes in and rewrites the entire draft into a vision thing then how can I disagree with her? On what basis could I explain to her that her vision of the future isn't appropriate there? The more of her I cast out the more of me becomes that," she gestured at her worked failure. "A parody of myself. The more of myself I bring in the less coherent the idea of maintaining a single writing voice becomes. There's no combination of colours that adds up to a single human brain. The illusion only holds if I'm able to switch out regularly enough to reset people's expectations."

Green!

The distant planets are - small? No, distant - no. It's changing. The distance is shifting, extending - more to match speed with Fiona's speed. After blowing through the barrier there's a glimpse behind the curtain: this isn't an intricate clockwork universe, every detail planned and prepared. She's not building. She's amassing potential. When an obstacle proved an insufficient delay the nature of the galaxy is shifted while Green works behind the scenes to render and load the next area.

It's a stall, only visible because Fiona was looking for it. And it's happening fast, those distant worlds are accumulating colour, texture, detail. Play along, keep the train running along the tracks to see where this goes next, or veer off again to see how quickly she can adapt?