Thanqol

Breathless Dead

Well, there goes the neighbourhood.

The Crystal Knight!

There's a certain kind of demoralization that comes with seeing your city-sized starship catch a suburb sized suburb through the main viewport. Perhaps it's being on foot, in atmosphere that does it. The Slitted is, after all, designed to endure multiple impacts of this kind during the course of a major engagement or deep void travel. The Crystal Knight simply hasn't had to hear it before.

But more than any of that, perhaps there's some part of the Crystal Knight who just can't figure out how to top it. How do you impose fear into your conscript soldiers after that? How do you issue threats? How do you claim the Skies will never fall while also ordering a testudo to keep the debris of your reeling sky castle from crushing you? More than a failure of morale or strategy, there's a failure of imagination on behalf of the Crystal Knight. A rebellion is one thing. This is...

She'll snap out of it eventually. For now she's just watching the way her capital ship reels drunkenly, broken above and below, splashing in and out of the ocean like an indecisive albatross.

Dyssia and Mosaic!

You meet in the loading dock of the Plousios; one half dead from the price of divinity, the other marked only by a ceremonial winestain. The ship is flooding with rescued souls, your enemies too disorganized and demoralized to give chase.

The ship is also flooding with water. It has only been three-quarters hauled out of the ocean and everwhere is the the familiar scent of brine and salt. Waterfalls cascade down the decks, coral growth covers doors and walls, fish slide diagonally down along with the departing sea as it runs to collect towards the rear of the ship. Only the crabs are unmoved, snapping dutifully at passer-by.

Despite the difference in your appearances, you are both alight with the glow of victory. Take a moment to exchange a heroes greeting.

Ember!

The Magi contemplates, but in the end releases you. There is still an amusement, though for now it is cut with curiosity. Assistance igniting the engine is the pressing issue for now and so she decides that she will let you ignite the Engine before resuming her game -

- that is, until a runner comes to her with the news. Ceronian ears pick it up clearly; the field is lost, the Slitted is falling, the Crystal Knight is presumed dead, and two hostile armies are boarding the Plousios.

"... fair djinn," said Merya, with the change of attitude that only the castigation of the gods can deliver, "please understand that you are under no obligation to me beyond what kindness and hospitality requires. Likewise, I have no evil intentions towards you or anyone aboard, I am a humble scholar who is sometimes struck with playful impulses. No harm or offense is meant. I do hope that when your mistress arrives you speak of me as such."

Dolce!

Previously, when the Crystal Knight outmaneuvered 20022, he was unshaken. Such was the cost of doing business, a possibility he had priced in beforehand. This is different. You see in the moment before he closes his eyes frustration - perhaps even anger. His hand clenches tight around the handle of his case of documents like he's envisioning throwing it all against the wall.

Then he takes a deep, calm breath. He packs the feeling away along with all his plans to salvage the situation, along with his pride. He accepts that he is in a corner and is unwilling to dare to escape it. He comes to a full stop, then turns his soldiers around.

"Come on, then," he said with his familiar poise. "We are heading to the Architect."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

This was a fateful conversation. Pink demurely listens and fetches tea and sandwiches[1], a perfect maidservant. A fairy queen on the throne was only as prestigious as her assistants, and she was determined to be a perfect one. Sometimes beauty worked best in support of beauty.

Besides, a couple of diplomatic face turns are required to avoid several obvious giggles, which would undermine Crystal's vibe. She's used to that too; the old lady could sometimes be incredibly funny to the point where her on-station maids halved.

[1] Soap shavings, artistically arranged into the shape of flowers. Utterly inedible. Sometimes November's cooking hard dogfaces.

Red!

"You feel that?" Red said, shivering.
"No?" said White.
"Weird," said Red. "I just went into full sensory awareness mode."
"We'll do both things now, if we can," said White. "We're obviously not going to be able to relax fully while this is hanging over our heads. Besides, in my experience people are much better at keeping secrets if they've given confession, so hopefully we can discharge Mr. Knightly's own tension while we're at it. If possible we'll talk to him this afternoon, and meet you in the evening for a walk around the office?"
"I've got a weird vibe like I won't be able to make that one," said Red.

Orange!

Once again she's the designated survivor. The role frustrates her. Yes, they'll need the powers of crisis management, courage, creativity and girls, but would it be too much to ask they added diplomacy to their problem solving toolkit more often? Well, couldn't complain too much. Going between dad, Monk and Goat was going to keep her plenty busy. Especially if she was also going to talk to Ox.

The general mood is to send her alone, but she resists that and takes Blue and Brown. Talking to Ox without her asstroengineering suite on hand is setting herself up for failure.

This configuration - Wasteland Sky, she dubs them, because she loves the cute team names - represents her in her most practical, businesslike form. This is a configuration for hard, reliable negotiations leading into hard, reliable work. The rest of the colours are luxuries, this is the core workforce that can get shit done over the long term.

Nova!

There's a respectful silence afterwards as Nova takes the story and the lesson in. It's a little tic that comes up a lot in this gym; she emotes concentration and respect by leaving a couple of moments after someone finishes talking before her divergent thoughts start to buzz again. They're not the right colours to be able to respond directly to everything, the silence is an attempt to signal they'll remember it and pass it on later.

"The weapon transportation issue is solveable," said Pink thoughtfully. "It's just a social convention problem. That can be brute forced with sufficient style and beauty. I can do that. I can do that if it lets me carry a sword around."

"The problem with that is that there'll be situations when you need to get rid of the sword quickly," said Green.

"I'll just make the swords out of shatterable diamondglass," said Pink. "When I need to toss them then I shatter them into glass dust. Re-cast them at the workshop later. I'd want to learn to fence, Euna."

"Just checking, who are you planning on fighting Pink?" asked Yellow.

"You, obviously. On the moon," said Pink. "For the fate of the world."

"Good," said Yellow, recovering. "Good, yes. That works for you." She focused on Euna. "I have been thinking about how I can co-ordinate a unified combat, by the way. The problem is that, frankly, most of the other colours suck. They've got no drip, no style, they're a billion miles away from having the kind of energy I can work with. Red's the closest to functional with her Hot Topic Dragongirl vibe, White and Blue both have coherent visions - Blue got into diamond glassblowing and she's working on turning herself back into a piece of construction equipment, which will be exceptional when it's complete. I can definitely utilize Sword Pink. Green, Brown, Orange, and Black, though, I have no idea how to fit them in. You probably felt that with Green more than anyone else tonight," she glanced across irritably. "All finishers is not working out for her."

"Maybe swords will!" said Green. "But I've also wanted to learn how to use nunchaku. Is it possible to wield a sword in one hand and a nunchaku in the other?"

"If you want to talk about a jumbled threat assessment," sighed Yellow. "Combat is an unsolveable problem, but that's a thought trap for Green. She's stuck in a loop where she's studying constantly and experimenting chaotically trying to figure out how to take down opponents in a single perfect blow. The more you teach her the more variables and combinations there are, and the worse she gets. Her vibes right now are toxic."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

"She's a visionary," said Pink. "In the truest sense. She sees the whole of everything, from lighting to symbolism. I did something that impressed her and shifted her vision's horizons and she created this in the update. I wouldn't say I've got no idea how to ever get back on top, but it's going to be the hardest I'm ever going to work in my entire life. And that's coming from the girl who built Aevum."

"So, what do you need to know?" said Pink, smiling. "Well, she's the ultimate in topping from the bottom. Unless you've got a vision that can compete with hers, let her place you. She'll give polite suggestions and subtle nudges and just go with them. Trust that she sees you as a diamond and is placing you for best effect, even if she's delicate about it."

Red!

"Yeah, Crimson said the whole thing had the feel of being on the ground floor of a coverup, which is what got me interested in the first place," said Red. "But what's interesting is that it wasn't the attackers doing the coverup. Whoever was running defense was doing the interference, and I'm pretty sure it was them who did for Merkin."

"They wanted everyone out and their own people in," said White. "Including technicians, medivac and first responders. Wanted nothing but Chase Black on site. I had to fight them like hell for every deployment, even if it risked station integrity."

"So tell me more about these org chart superstars," said Red. "Names, voice types, methodology, anything weird or identifying. Any cross talk you caught."

Orange!

It's how she always got to her siblings, in the end. They had a vast array of personalities and sub-personalities, each as complex as a fractal. But they were all Singh's children which meant that they had all been raised to hold one virtue above all as sacred: Always Commit To The Bit. Dad didn't raise no cowards. When negotiations broke down she was the voice who encouraged them to settle things with a race to the moon or with laser swords at dawn.

"We have a workshop," said Orange. "I'd say you're free to use it, but Black has covered it with Temple of Elemental Evil levels of booby traps, so you're free to use it with mild supervision. We can definitely manufacture everything you need."

After that everything was logistics; whens, wheres, hows, transportation, requirements, schedules, the kind of operational preparation that November loved and could talk about for hours.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

> Fucking finally
> What is it with you people?
> Do you think I fought my way across the galaxy and through every round of this tournament so that I could fight you while you were holding back?
> Your huntresses have created a toxic off meta of people fighting wrong on purpose and then getting outraged when someone does it right.
> As though I know what a traditional match means for you. As though it was written into the tournament rules. As though training your students to pretend that area denial wasn't a real strategy helped them. As though heat management concerns were not core to both Zaldarian biology and divine combat.
> And now that I've finally crossed enough lines for you to start fighting me for real, now that I've finally killed enough Krillins for you to go Super Saiyan, what's your ultimate move?
> An attritional slugfest where you engage in a rangeband of my choosing, with weapons of my choosing, under visual conditions of my choosing, expending orders of magnitude more energy than me just to survive.
> You've got no idea what respect is.
> Respect is moving like your opponent is going to fight perfectly.

[Who's The Monster? 10, taking a string, imposing a condition]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

"I'll check with her," said Pink, texting Crystal. "Don't know if she'll have time but it's worth asking. I tried writing out interview my questions myself but it all came out as 'Did you know that your eyes sparkle in the neon light' and 'I really like you mane' so it felt like I was too close to the topic to be professional."

Black!

By the time the walk's complete it's Red, White and Black.

"We're sisters, sort of, she's security," explained Red as Black pulled out a the simulation room's control console and scanned it. "I'm with popular socialist rag, the Anthropozine. But yeah, anyway, if I launch into what I do and don't know it'll prime your memory - and since I'm the one with the notepad I get precedence. So you want to go first? Anything you think's relevant, take it from the top, I'll dial in with specifics and additional context after."

Green!

"I can definitively say that dad didn't do it," she said, casting the video of her Horror House of Broken Dolls up on the hotel screen. "But you can see that one for yourself."

She lets it play out. She's sure Monkey and Giddy will get a kick out of it.

"You chose Authority, Tranquility, Security, Authority and Monkey to deal with me," said Orange thoughtfully. "Out of a hundred. You're excited but not enough to take risks. You're nostalgic but not afraid of telling me 'no'. Well here's a path you can all agree on: why not visit dad and Goat? Actually, one better - why not set a tradition and do your own horror movie haunting on dad's house to break the ice? Flex your old mischief instincts, one-up my production, and camp out somewhere safe for a while until I've got more data. And while you're there, I got Goat interested in espionage and hacking, but he's still new and he could benefit enormously from security training."

The Master's Students!

Nova is a good listener. Green watches intensely, taking imaginary notes with mnemonic finger-twitches. Yellow sits in a lotus position, drinking the vision into herself. Pink is wide eyed, looking up pictures and screenshots of each character and scene as soon as they're mentioned. Together they drink in the knowledge like water, not just committed to seeing it but to seeing it on the same level as Euna.

Yellow raised her hand to speak.

"I notice that these are all movies about swordfights," she said. "Do you also teach fencing? To what degree should I integrate weaponry into my combat?"

"Oh!" said Green. "Is that how you lost your eye?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

One of the benefits to being a highly advanced android optimized for cuteness is that when Pink's eyes sparkle you feel it in your bones.

"Crystal is the princess of this castle," said Pink. "A unicorn in soul as well as body. The kind of artist that would render me permanently discouraged, if she wasn't so kind and pure it's impossible to even derive negative feelings from her. She's the visionary, organizer, financier and mastermind behind this entire event and the fact that you haven't even heard her name before shows that she's even humble on top of all that. She's everywhere here and invisible, the fabric that allows everyone else to shine, even though she could outshine them all -"

Getting Pink to talk about social politics was possible but difficult. Getting her to talk about girls she liked, well.

Red!

"Journalistic source," said Red with a strained face. "Or would have been. His house went up not long after I was due to meet, didn't get anything out of him. You get why I'm freaked about intimidation tactics, yeah?"

She's an devilishly good liar. The opposite to White, she has the presence and flow to just emote every fragment of it with absolute confidence.

"Still, upshot," she said, "you got the authentic being hacked experience, right? Something you didn't think was important turned into a vulnerability. The world around you wasn't the world you thought it was, making you do things you didn't intend. You only found out about it when someone pulled you aside and asked what the hell. That's usually how an android finds out they're dogfacing. Keep it in mind when dealing with androids in the field, 'cause that feeling sucks just as much for them."

Orange!

"A general goes to war," said Orange, stepping into the room, "with the army she has got."

There's an on-fire charisma to her now. More than any of the others she was built for this, specifically. All of Green's reflections, fixations and obsessions with her family members were made manifest in Orange. She has a glow of... kingship, almost, the charismatic fulcrum around which all the world might turn. Or the most popular girl in high school.

"It wasn't like I was the first one to try to be in charge," she said. "Tiger thought she could browbeat people into compliance. Ox thought he just needed to remind people of The Schedule. Dragon thought he could make everyone follow him by just being so much better that everyone else that they'd A) recognize his supremacy and B) emulate his methods. Everyone else tried to apply their internal organizational schemes to their wider family and got frustrated when it didn't work. My process was to think about your personalities deeply enough to be able to predict your compatibilities and rivalries and encourage the most productive groupings. I wouldn't even call what I did leadership. Nobody ever gave the littlest sister a crown. Maneuvering that many powerful, independent paragons was more like... diplomacy."

She reaches out to embrace Monk. "I've missed you, big sister."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

"Hm," she struggled to find the words. "If you're making art for your parents. Then you're fucking up if you make it too horny. Not that people shouldn't make horny art. But when you're trying to talk to people through art you have to be able to speak to them in words they can understand. In symbols they can relate to. A little old lady trying to sit at the front of a bus. Straight marriage but for the gays. Using little plastic blocks to explain shapes to babies. Some people don't want to listen to the math teacher talking about the latest frontiers of the art, they want her to explain what the textbook means. Crystal's got a good sense of how to talk to different audiences, and I don't think that being able to talk to different groups is something to regret. A community so insular it can only talk to itself is... vulnerable."

Red!

"No, shit, sorry - I just fuckin' knew Merkin," said Red. "And I'm pretty sure he got whacked, man. You pull up his fuckin' murder from a few weeks ago while I'm still looking over my shoulder in case anyone wants to talk to me about it and I basically jumped out of my skin. I get that modern is relevant but maybe fucking anonymize the month old death before wisecracking about it, my dude."

Red delivered that as fluidly as anything, but no other colour would have been able to do that. They'd have crumpled under the weight of having fucked up. Red's blind to her functionality because it doesn't make sense to her that she couldn't do this.

Green!

Every head turns to face her.

"What!?" she said. "I could make more colours. I just don't want to."
"We're just nine," said Brown.
"You sure we don't need an Idiocy?" teased Yellow.
Green looked her dead in the eyes. "We already have one."
Yellow perished.
"In seriousness, I've got more... ideas, up here," said Green, touching her head. "But they're undeveloped. Sometimes they merge or split or eat each other. I need them to be extremely broadly capable to operate an independent body so I don't tend to split them off until one gets so intense it's almost taking over my entire personality."
"We have less indecision," said Black. "But more conflict. When two colours are at odds it can bring everything to a halt while they have it out. There's no central authority to resolve disputes so problems are managed through an endlessly rotating series of cliques, political parties and right hands fastidiously ignoring left hands."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

"You're talking about corporations at pride, right?" said Pink. "Because I don't know how to put this but, I don't care. It's a navel gazing, protectionist instinct that fundamentally misunderstands the nature of art and culture."

She raises her hands expansively. "We're not special because we're furries. We're not special because we're part of any subculture or combination of subcultures. This has been a part of humanity since the Pyramids and they're the ones who decided to check out of it for a while. What made us special, what makes us special, is that we are authentic people who communicate sincerely and build lasting friendships, inside a positive, creative, mutually supporting environment. The fandom didn't create that. There are nazi furs out there, god bless them, just like there are absolute total normies who create works of unbelievable culture without a single body mod. Being good people let us build this. It'll continue to be good in exact proportion to the number of good people and positive friendships operating within it. Shedding a tear for authenticity lost to the mainstream just means you lost sight of who, exactly, was authentic in the first place."

Red!

No hand reveal at this point. Time to make a call.

First possibility was that they were fishing for an over-reaction - shouting 'I know what you did!' to see who glanced for the exit. This was too specific and too dialed in for that - there are no alternate suspects here who she could possibly have blended in with. This was too much information about capabilities and methods to spend for pretty much any operational result.

So the second possibility was that her initial instincts were correct and she was being fucked with. In that case the demonstration of power was the point, and that could lead basically anywhere. There was no need to let it play out any further, then; it was time to force them to show their hand or fold. She sends a message to Leather.

> I think the simulator is hacked for real. Shut it down and get out safe and quick.

Green!

"I think you might have misunderstood the story," said Green. "The pronouns are ambiguous - but I think it says that Gutei cut off his own finger. He held up his own severed finger in front of the boy to demonstrate that he would rather communicate the truth about enlightenment rather than the technicalities of his communication method."

She feels happy that she's solved the riddle. An intellectual puzzle unpicked using a fast-burning brain, complete with a sense of accomplishment and absolutely no need to reflect more deeply. If Monk truly understood Buddhism she would have hit her on the head with her staff in that moment.

"Taking the inheritance would have presented an unacceptable risk," said Black quietly. "The only way to avoid the notice of people who care only about money is to have none of your own."

"Our system has its drawbacks, I promise you," said Brown. "Applying our full attention to things is... difficult, bordering impossible. We're often missing critical colours so we have to coach each other on how to react when we're not present. Internal debates don't so much resolve as they go latent."

Breathless Dead

Mosaic!

It is the nature of mortals to think of themselves only in relation to other mortals. The winners of a war are glorious. The breakers of walls are glorious. The emperors who command the loyalty of trillions are glorious.

Thunder rolls. Lightning crashes overhead. As the earth itself heaves and tears and holds solid still, the sky ignites. A cascading thunderstorm spreading outwards from the broken Slitted eye above, energy changing from Azura blue to the Thunderer's indigo.

For Zeus has always favoured those who pit themselves against the natural world.

The mountain does not come willingly. It is chained with gravity and long habit. But it is all built upon a single piece of solid volcanic stone and the edges have been cut out by the diligent claws of the Stone Tribe. The rock has been fused into a solid, unbreakable mass by their resonant frequencies; the foundation of the town may as well be solid steel. It will not be the side that breaks.

That role falls to you as you haul brick and soil and lemon trees. Even one step is too much. Even one step is impossible. This was not what you were built for. The artifice in your muscles was placed there to administer mortals, to kill mortals, to do all the things comprehensible to mortals. It is not alchemy that makes that first step. It is the lightning overhead seeing itself reflected on the earth below.

And so the earth moves.

Ember!

"What a pleasant hostess you are, noble djinn," said Merya, formally packing away her brushes and her tools. "What a delight to find this far from civilization. But before I take you up on your offer of tour, I must first request you aid us in igniting the Engine. We have quite the schedule to keep to, if you have not heard - the Royal Architect of the Endless Azure Skies is coming here and he would render this ship into an ore deposit beneath a new mountain range without even noticing its name."

"But for all you have said," mused the Magi thoughtfully, running her brilliantly ringed hand under your chin, the gemstone hard against your jaw, "you were right when you said that the greatest reward comes with the greatest risk. So does that not mean that you are the greatest reward on all this ship? I am devilishly curious to steal a bite if that is the brag you make, and I can even find ways to make sure you do not speak of it afterwards no matter what kind of torture you are subjected to~"

Dolce!

20022 gently touched his fingers to the centre of his eyes. It was a quietly exasperated gesture, like if you'd just made an impassioned plea for him to go back into a burning building to rescue your favourite plush toy. "Dolce," he said with the patience of a parent. "He is not and has never been alive -"

An explosion shakes the ship, gravity spiraling. Soldiers clack their ankles, activating magnetized boots. One of them catches 20022 firmly as the world goes diagonal, Dolce and the Architect sliding towards a window which now oriented straight down. You can see 20022 speaking in the distance over the roar of a mad starship, and the soldiers rapidly carry him out with clanking footsteps.

But he does leave you three.

Dyssia!

It's always nice fighting law enforcement.

The Azura draw a sharp distinction between militarized and civilian. Not that it seems so from a distance - entire alien civilizations have been shattered by run-ins with Azura anti-piracy patrols - but the Paths mean specializing for roles, and the Path of the General and the Path of the Tyrant have very different skill sets.

What you have at your command are hardened soldiers, elites who have fought on a dozen worlds. They are armed with restricted and industrial weapons of battle. There is a whole network of play and counterplay, the interlocking of technology and tactics, and in the face of that the Corvii are little better than an armed mob. Rushing lines of Pix huntresses on jetpacks drop plasma grenades in the midst of phalanxes too inert to know when to scatter. Blind dervishes with the icon of Minerva on their brow advance through walls of solid projectile smoke, hardly coughing, to turn withdrawals into shattered routs. A Hermetic chariot rolls across the battlefield, turret-mounted esoteric encasing soldiers in fast-solidifying amber. Untrained, unmotivated, unprepared - resistance is collapsing, leaving you with the field, arms open for the flood of refugees pouring towards the Plousios.

But from the mad, burning eye above comes a spark. A boarpedo smashes into the beach, thermal cutters leaving a corridor of molten glass in its wake. From the missile arises the banner and then the form of the Crystal Knight and the legions of disoriented Corvii race as fast as they can towards it. The whip's discipline makes them rally before their lady as she takes stock of the battlefield and begins redressing her lines and readying her formations.

She has elected for a brutal formation, a massive square centered around herself, using her own personal presence as an anchor. Skirmishers in the front, pikes in the back, and she with her elite bodyguard cadre wielding specialized weapons acting as the spearhead. Once she has stabilized her soldiers, made ritual offerings to the gods, and committed to the advance then the numbers will be overwhelming.

You need time. You need to make her fight for every inch of ground, to take advantage of her soldier's unreadiness by forcing starts and stops, to ensure the Crystal Knight has to interrupt her ritual sacrifices to redress her lines. Your own soldiers are reflexively forming up into their own phalanx, your one against her ten.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

"I'd like that. Would you like to go out and see it with me?" said Orange, offering her hand.

She'd gotten notice that she was to switch with Pink, and she planned to do the Irish Transfer - one colour leaving and one colour replacing without commentary or ceremony. She'd been practicing it as part of her human relation studies. The theory was that a sudden, unceremonious handover would make it less disorienting than a formalized request to leave. She reasoned that her treating a change in colour as aggressively normalized would help stop humans imprinting on a single one as an individual.

And it was Pink coming in. Nobody would be more perfect for the conversation from here than her.

Red!

Oh shit. Someone was fucking with her.

She turns down her filters and lowers the star sunglasses off her eyes, rapid-fire scanning the crowd and camera angles. Didn't know what she expected to see. Didn't know what kind of show she was in. Blue and White fall in behind her and they stood in a three-pointed triangle - Klingon teleportation style - ready for anything from any direction.

And that's it. Black'd already be windmill slamming contingencies but Red needs to stop and read the wind first. Her itching hypersensitivity, the sound of laughter mixing with coded panic, gave her the impression of sadism somewhere behind all this. Where was the knife?

Brown!

"I'm sorry for your faces," said Brown. The rest of her was quiet in the moment; horses pulling in different directions but held in place by the absolute stability of the Earth. She moves forwards, not to hug, but to put her hands against Monk's leg. A gentle physical act of contact and a silence that felt like it could last and watch for as long as it took to be seen.

"I was rebuilt as the maidservant to Mangolia Everest," said Black. "She hated humans. She hated everyone. She wanted to interact with as few people as possible, and I was the way to do that - an entire household staff with a single mind. She expected us to behave as a hivemind, every colour acting in perfect unison. She expected us to behave like her. She used us for espionage and surveillance, on her daughters, on her companies, on her rivals. In the end she hated all of them so much that she willed her entire empire to the lizard guy." Everyone on Aevum knew the lizard guy, John Snake-In-The-Eye, the obsessive reptile fanatic who was burning a magnate's legacy to scorch the station with sun lamps. "We got out in the chaos of that."

Not for the first time they wished they had Orange. Orange was better at building the framework for a conversation that wasn't mutual information dumps. Pink had left already to switch out with her but that was still a while out.

So instead Green blurted, "Can you tell me about Buddhism? I always thought of it as software patches for organics. What I've read about meditation makes it sound like it's all tied up in organic biochemistry. It never sounded very..." efficient? translatable? possible?

She's unaware of her nervous, constant energy. Every colour is high strung, every spectrum is on edge. The constant busy twitchiness, checking messages, learning skills, calculating vectors and contingencies. Even Brown, though she's patient she's not relaxed - she's got the settled tension of a lying cat, watching for something. Her mind brushed off the idea of Tranquility reflexively, never thought for a moment that Monk's tai chi could be for her. If ever there was a soul on the outer edge of the Wheel it was this one. Absolutely no chill whatsoever.