Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

John reminded her a lot of Monk. It made him a lot more relatable to her than most humans, they often changed their colours without doing anything nearly as convenient as altering their expression.

"I'd never hurt these lizards!" Pink protested in a way that did not address the subtext of Fiona's complaint. "I just..." she trailed off, wilting. "No. You're right, there's no way it'd be safe. Thanks for reminding me." She gave a determined smile. "But if I work hard, I'm sure I'll get there!"

She was trying her best not to make Fiona feel bad. It wasn't her fault that Pink had no idea how to handle any amount of pushback. Nobody had a responsibility to humour her unintelligible ideas and drives.

Yellow!

"I think," said Yellow, "that any drive that is so profoundly basic as to have a one-word summary is unworthy of the individual and the world. It's such a childish concept, to make everything the same colour, and promoting that kind of weak shit is why you keep getting eugenicists showing up no matter how many times you punch them. You think a better world is basic? Can you even articulate what a better world looks like?"

She's fired up again now. "Tell me your definition of 'better'. Do you define it as the presence of Taco Tuesdays? Do you think the world with free Taco Tuesdays is better, and that is boring, and so that the very concept of improving the world is therefore boring? Have you put any thought into the bureaucratic structures that provides the tacos, the ability to finance that project in perpetuity, how to stop corporations from inflating away minimum wages using the justification of free tacos and thus rendering the entire paradigm an entirely subsumed aspect of the dominant society? Do you think that committing to the ideal of beauty and covering everything in rose petals absolves you of the greenhouse-industrial complex you'd need to commit to the production and maintenance of those roses? Do you want a true machine god to solve existential problems, divine problems or do you want a blundering idiot deity who you respect for processing you into a paperclip?"

Red!

She half considered flinching. It would have been really cool to see Crystal pounce. But that's not quite the right move, so she discards it and stands firm instead. Luckily she has a filter for that too.

"Sophie? She showed me how to become a monster," said Red. Synthmuscles bunched in her legs, colour darkening a shade, deep as Blood. "You want to see?"

Her hands spread out to the side. Her illuminated joints smoulder. Her fingernails twitch and curl into talons. She's neither predator nor prey but something weirder, something mythical and perilous. In the intensity of that stare is the implication that she's thinking about getting through that armour with claws and teeth. A monster cannot be hurt even by the forest's king, only a paladin with heart full of fear and courage might stand a chance.

Breathless Dead

Mosaic!

"It's hard, isn't it?" said Hera.

She stood beside you in her full panoply. An ox of gravity-bending dark matter, a peacock garbed in golden jewelry, a paper umbrella set with a ring of emeralds, a face that might launch a thousand ships. The Queen of the Gods, offset in the side of your eye as you watch the champions ride to war.

"Zeus gave you her lesson below," she said. "And you embodied it well. You did the impossible, lit up the night like a thunderbolt, and everyone followed you out of awe. And now you stand here aboard the docks and watch your lover fly away on that same thunderbolt. Today it is because you are injured. Tomorrow it will be because you are old. Zeus is glorious, to be sure, but she's never had to grow up. For a long time that frustrated me."

She stepped into your vision proper, unfolding a paper fan as she does to cover her lower face. It's an impossible stance; full of tension and also entirely comfortable; a mask of glory worn until it has become one with her.

"Today you do battle with gifts of ribbons -" she touched the peacock's head, it leaned into her hand, "- and armour." She touched the ox, it lowed softly. "The only weapons you have to bind wandering eyes and distracted minds. Do you think they will be enough?"

Ember and Dyssia!

The Cable is a magnificent invention. Through this miracle of arcane materialism the once-mighty mecha of the ancient world can persist in this liminal state as Plovers, bound to life on the Cable's life support.

The Cable is, at its most basic, an almost infinitely extendible length of thick wire that transmits energy along its length. With one plug into the Plover suit and one plug into one of the many power ledes on the exterior of the Plousios, the suit can draw on the infinite well of energy generated by the Engine. This inures it against the omnipresent danger of the Electromagnetic Flux; whereas a single short-range thunderbolt might render a chemical or plasma drive overloaded and inert, properly Cabled a Plover will experience only a short interruption.

Severed from the Cable, a Plover is vulnerable. Drawing from the Engine, a Flux strike is a splash of water on a bonfire; a hiss of steam but no real damage. Severed and relying on its own emergency batteries, a Flux strike is a splash of water on a lit match - enough to render it cold and dark. Mecha combat, then, becomes a ribbon dance, where each warrior must be constantly aware of their long tail. An enemy might dive between a Plover and its ship to sever its Cable. Expert pilots moving in unison might cause two Plovers to tangle each other on their Cables. The further away from the ship you draw the longer your vulnerable tether. You might fight as gods so long as you preserve the delicate astral thread binding you to life.

You face ten times your number. They are entirely untethered, operating entirely on their reserves so far from home, and so a single Flux strike will disable each one. They are no fools and have trained extensively for exactly this scenario, and already they scatter, charging long range energy beams and arming railguns and other primitive weapons. They will give you war, and you need to drive them off and not merely delay them. How?

Dolce!

"Of course it's not my preferred title," snaps the Royal Architect, but there's more tiredness than anger in that. "But it's what I need to move about in this society. Accepting their titles, playing by their rules, shows of obedience to the right title - you do these things and the Endless Azure Skies will have a place for you. This society can accept anything so long as you do it in the proper manner. The polite knives of assassins are a far improvement to the open warfare I suffered before I learned to play the game. And so the Royal Architect I must be."

"But I did learn to play the game and - oh, look up, you ridiculous creature," said the Architect as his vast screen shifted to digital recordings. "This was the first one, an Ikarani assassin showed up under much the same innocent disguise. Offered to decorate the exterior of one of my bulkheads. I agreed and they wove a pattern that was quite beautiful, but especially beautiful to the children of Poseidon. I spent years fighting off an unending tide of voidcrabs that wanted to mate with me before I made the connection. Slide!"

The screen changed again. "Another guest, a Diodekoi. Swore every oath of allegiance and hospitality imaginable, and then just fucking jumped from where you are standing now directly onto my processing core and started breaking everything. Have you ever tried to fight someone standing on the surface of your own brain? I wound up performing a stasis lobotomy." The cameras blinked and showed a monster of bone and talon, frozen in place atop a pile of shattered bones. "She's still there," said the Architect. "If I lose power to that section for a second she'll escape and continue her rampage."

The screen blinked back to the enormous eye. "And these are merely two. Do you understand what is meant by the existence of the Temple Assassins? They mean the defiance of every law and norm and custom. The assassin pays for their monstrosity with their suffering, death, and damned afterlife but they pay the price nevertheless. The Diodekoi did not know that she was an engine of murder until she was activated. No scans or tests I did could discover this about her. And after she was I could not stop her without great cost. You look at me and think me mighty? Fool. Let me tell you about the mighty."

"The Biomancers who sent these monsters against me did so as jokes. They challenge each other with these monsters as part of their games, testing each others reflexes and defenses, all in good humour. They express their affection in this way, coming up with ever more deranged monsters in the hopes of getting a laugh from their colleagues. They sent me these gifts as signs of respect and affection. I am beneath them, but the only thing I dread more than their friendship is their enmity."

"Oh, speaking of!" said 20022 brightly. "That's actually why I came here. I need you to transfer me to Master Biomancer Liquid Bronze aboard her flagship, The Cancellation of Florence Nightingale. There is a servitor insurrection that the sector government failed to contain and I need to co-ordinate the decommissioning."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

"I don't... want to bring people here," said Pink. She was thinking aloud. "That's not it either. If I tried to hold an event here then the guests would be the exact Zeus-segment neighbours who you've been so righteously keeping out. I might need to bring a couple of people here to accomplish the project, but... I don't need witnesses." She hummed as she contemplated.

"What about a feast for the lizards?" she said. "A professionally cooked meal, the best I can make. Music, lighting, more terrain for them to move about in instead of these huge empty corridors. Interior decorating, but for the benefit of the reptiles. Aesthetic pools of heat and shade. I want to make their home beautiful, as beautiful as it can be. If this place is a reptile sanctuary now please let me make it the best reptile sanctuary I can create."

She glanced down the corridor at Fiona's call. "Did Paul make it?" she asked. She'd gotten a chill, like ghostly fingers around her neck.

Yellow!

"Allow me to quickly reassure you that my claims of universal superiority rest upon the clarity of my vision and not the circumstances of my creation," said Yellow. "I can barely bring myself to mention my unique capabilities in the first place. I have many siblings, see, and if I tried to rest my legitimacy in things that any of us could easily do then they'd make fun of me forever. How about yourself? By what right do you lay claim to world domination?"

Red!

She pulls against her own hair. It's an expert demonstration in total helplessness. "Fuck, I always forget how strong organics are," said Red. "I just kind of internalized the super strong robot arm bullshit along with everyone else but that's -" she heard the click as Crystal's horn touched the wall behind her, felt it brush her face and ear and jaw like a knife. "- oh jeez okay okay that's kind of what I was saying about filters. I, oh goddamn - okay, okay, so, Sophie helped me set up these perception filters so I could suppress my baseline hyperawareness panic about everything. It made sense in space when there wasn't that much happening and tracking everything was possible, but it's been fucking me up ever since I moved down here. So she helped me, like, medicate my hyperwareness to help me focus on only things that matter, and that's made me more chill and more aware at the same time. But -"

She's actively shaking now.

"- so, uh. I was thinking yesterday that I was doing everyone here wrong, right? I mean, the predators specifically. If I filtered out all their danger parts then I just kind of treated them like ordinary people and I got the feeling that I was ruining it for them. Breaking keyfabe, right? So I got Sophie to adjust things so I could feel good-fear and... uh..." she looked down at Crystal. "Unicorns are herbivores, right?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

Some embedded routine suggested to Pink that she should be genuinely concerned by how much she related to John. Liking him was easy, everyone liked him probably, but more than that she adored how committed to his vision he was. He was like... what she might be if she had Yellow's confidence and influence. Covering the station with lizards and damn the consequences, fuck anyone who complained. Yellow would cover the station with reptiles for John, but...

She's in the kitchens. Her vision whirls. All of these cabinets, all of these refrigerators, infrastructure to cook for a hundred. How could such a large space condense down into a three step, four ingredient radius? What kind of person had a room that could have made a decent skate park when what they used was so tiny?

"Please don't put me down," she said, gripping tight. Just in case.

"Thank you for saying, John," she recovered. "I came here because this place has a lot of bad memories for me. Part of me wanted to just burn it all down... but that's not it. I think, from up here... I wasn't angry at this place. I was angry that this place never got the chance to be alive. Never got the chance to do what it was built for. Thirty guest rooms, always empty. A library, never touched. This kitchen, used exclusively to make," she took a steadying pause. "Cucumber, mayonnaise and cheese sandwiches, served on white bread, crusts cut off. The owner had her television in her bedroom and could watch all the anime she wanted from in there and so never needed to explore the rest. And so I feel like this house never got the chance to live."

She smiled down at him. "And like I said, I love what you've done with the place. But even now there's something missing. All the traps. This place is still shut off from the world, from it's full potential, and that's still breaking my heart. I just want... I just want this place to be everything it could be, everything it should be. Even just for one night, I want to see every room shine."

Yellow!

"Excellent points," said Yellow demurely. "I think my underlying problem is that I don't understand human fears as well as I'd like. I know the traditional answer is to share one's own fears around but I'm afraid - ha ha - mine are too weird to easily translate. And so I think I have a tendency to rant from the thesaurus, as it were, when I start reaching for spooky symbolism. Can you provide any pointers?"

Orange!

Orange takes the Flynn costume and she wears it well. She's always had the most masculine presentation of the colours, the kind of clear eye contact and firm handshake that gets co-opted by the untrustworthy. She more than any other colour always, always has the appearance of having her shit totally and completely together.

But she still curls up on Bondi's lap, watching the screen horizontally, letting herself be gently pet all through the movie.

Red!

Red walks in and shoots Crystal with a gun.

"Oh - right, sorry, I was meant to text you first," she said apologetically a moment afterwards. "I just got my filters adjusted - sorry, let me take a look."

She helps Crystal sit up and taps the dent on the centre of the chest, right above her heart. "Look, see? You're bulletproof." She grinned. "I checked out the armour specs beforehand and overclocked this magnail gun to - nevermind. It was meant to be a gift but not so much a surprise - sorry." Red could do this impossible thing where she was genuinely sorry without being down on herself about it at all. Like, she felt bad and was going to do her best to be better, but she was also somehow aware that if she started to hate herself for being stupid she wouldn't get anything else done today.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

"Good morning, Mr. Snake-In-The-Eye," said Pink, curtsying as best as she could from her position atop Fiona. "My name is November, formerly the maidservant of Mrs. Everest. We have met once or twice. I simply love what you have done with the place."

And... she did. She was looking now. It was as simple as not being on her feet any more. This position atop Fiona's shoulders was so alien to her experience with this place, the fact that she was physically higher in the air meant that her intricate gridmap of the building didn't apply. She was astounded at how different the view was from up here.

"I am genuinely glad to find you here, actually," she added. "I was actually your most vocal champion in the matter of Mrs. Everest's will. I cannot claim credit for her decision, but I did introduce her to your name in the first instance, and spoke when I could about the advantages you would bring to her fortune."

Yellow!

"During the revolution they beheaded the King."

She was talking to... someone. Monologuing, really. She wasn't really paying attention to that part, she just needed to get this out of her head so she'd found someone to listen to her.

"Beheaded is the operative word," said Yellow. "Because the King was more than a man. The king was the highways and the people who taxed them. The king was the navy. The king was farmlands and workshops, the king was muster rolls and vaults filled with gold, the king could say "The state, it is I!" and in no way be wrong. So when the revolution came for the king they decapitated him - they decapitated the man - but the state, the King lived on."

She paced back and forth, twirling the idea in her hands. She'd written a version of this for her blog but she somehow hadn't captured something essential about it. "And then came the legislature. In a grotesque act of necromancy it grafted itself onto the headless body of the King. Hundreds of people standing where before stood a single man, a single mind replaced with competing colours - red and blue, and then at the fringes green and brown and yellow and black. Parliamentary systems and their shifting coalitions and rainbow colours; I view them as my ancestors. But they only ever stood astride the State. In its depths, the King's heart still beat."

She stood pensively, looking out the window. "The King. Chief judge. Chief priest. Chief general. A holy title, granted by God, with the crown symbolizing the connection to Heaven above. When the Greeks slew their kings they parceled up his organs into magistrates; symbolic kings who could intercede with the gods on behalf of a people who were no longer emanations of the one. When the Roman tribunes rode to war they could go where they wanted, help where was required, the personal Imperium of Romulus spread over the width of the Republic's armies. The power of the King carved canals and tamed rivers, built empires and annihilated civilizations, bought its people to glory and to ruin. But what happens when that mighty body grew sick?"

She spun, raising her finger. She was deep in her flow. "What happened when cancers arose within the royal corpus? When its strength atrophied, when the ideology of markets and liberty bound its hands? The new aristocracy fought the King as only aristocrats can. They undermined and suborned his power. Every time he did not act they stepped in. Every time he struggled they fed the cancer, bled him with knives, spoke of drowning him in a bathtub. As the king withered so too did man's connection with the Heavens, and the skies boiled and raged. It was the last, dying act of the King to forge a ring," she traced the shape above her head, "to provide a refuge for his people. And as he fell into torpor it was the aristocrats who rose to carve his ring up between them."

"It is the aristocrats I battle," said Yellow. "But it is the cancer that scares me. When the body of the King twitches and begins to act of its own accord, when the hand acts without command or restraint... what could that be but possession? When the legislature is too divided to control the Leviathan it sits unsteadily atop then demons can enter through the cracks. These demons cannot be predicted; they may put the King's might at the disposal of criminals, of aristocrats, or in service to their own terrifying ideology. That is my enemy: a Dark King, the shadow of the State."

So tell me: Who did she say all this to?

Orange!

Orange: That's kind of the thing.
Orange: Everyone was going to start hating her as of 5pm today because she's scheduled to do some heinous shit to some vulnerable people :/
Orange: I mean. Again.
Orange: I don't - I mean, I can relate to what they're feeling. When your mother is - I -
Orange: ... I think Tangled is an excellent idea.
Orange: ...
Orange: Can... can we watch it first? Together?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

There's a whole lot there to process in the manic energy soul read, but right now there's not even time to figure out if she agrees with it or not. She's being bodily carried to the next location and could no more step in the way of Fiona's boiling energy than a locomotive. She's got the stunned, vaguely guilty expression of a cat picked up by the back of the neck, and so she just holds tight as things happen around her.

But Black had this feeling earlier, when Singh through Remoil's bags. The feeling of being the receiving end of an act of love so stupid she couldn't intellectualize her way out of it. It's one of those rare moments of her life where she completely gives up her agency as a matter of choice. She wants to see where Fiona's going with this.

Red!

Yeah sure, take a look. Help yourself even. The way I figure it there's, like, the prestige animals, right? Dragons and unicorns and whatever. But there's also the adaptation animals. Like, what if we have an underwater mission - like the skullboat whatsisname, Adrian Dudebro? So I stocked up on mermaid parts. Or if, like, a station cascade drops temperatures below our operational range - which is shit fyi, we're designed for air conditioning - what if we need to go fluffy mode? Or what if I want to wave to attract a hot girl's attention but she says my hands are too small - BOOM! meter long crab claw! Chicks dig meter long crab claws.

Black!

Black: Thanks. Send it through, anything you can trivially get.
Black: I'll tell you how it connects soon.

It is the nature of Black that she doesn't internalize this as a valuable lesson about reaching out to others and the power of friendship and so on. She just opportunistically activated an embedded Orange routine when the possibility came up, and if anything regrets that it worked because now she'll have to tell Orange about it and she'll be insufferable. But the regret is outweighed by satisfaction; she has a name, she has a face, she has a target who's a civilian and not an operator. Informational blood spills from her lips. She shifts from hunt to stalk.

She starts doing research. Who is this guy publicly? Company, connection, family, life story? What's the story he tells the world, and how well does he tell it?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

She smiled. She couldn't help herself. That question dragged her out of herself. She couldn't resist it; Fiona had aimed it perfectly. "I'm not the vision for the world," she corrects as she thinks about the world. "That's Yellow. That's actually why we don't get along. She's The World - in the tarot sense. I'm the Knight of Cups."

She opens her eyes as the thought filled her. "Green is the Magician, obviously; she conjured the rest of us and it's her on the journey. Red is the Fool; a lucky disaster. White is Strength, the lion's jaws held shut by the noble woman. Blue was Seven of Pentacles before she was the Five of Cups, diligence turned to despair. Brown is the Four of Cups, disconnected observation. Orange is the Three of Pentacles, the wealth and joy of teamwork. Black is the Seven of Swords, cunning and strategy."

She's seeing without seeing; her eyes not processing visual data but instead... "Yellow's vision is beautiful. It really is, you should see it. It's selfless. Pure. Loving. She loves everyone and everything so much that she'll become everything; every heart and story, perfectly reflected. But I... I want to live in the world. I want to be reflected. I want to take, not just give, to have and not just sacrifice. I want to watch things and appreciate things and be a part of things and have the time to figure out what's in my heart. I want to learn how to do useless things just because they're pretty - not even because they're pretty, but because they're pretty to me. Yellow will find out what you think is beautiful and show it to you, but I want to show what I think is beautiful even if nobody else understands it. That's..." she deflated in the end, her eyes dropping. "I'm the selfish part. We're so close to doing amazing things, and I want to take time off to read books, to bake food we don't need, to risk my life in this haunted mansion for some sense of artistically appropriate closure. And I know I'm bad for wanting those things, but I can't stop myself from wanting them."

Black!

Black, in this hypothetical argument that will inevitably happen later, is of the opinion that Fiona has confused cause and effect. Yes, the weakness of the rich is that they must rely on that which they do not understand, but the ideology of the day is supremacy through technology. We are powerful because we have the best technology, that is the source of our power and our legitimacy. It is why coders are paid hundreds of thousands and baristas are paid minimum wage (though in time capital will consume every source of legitimacy for a quick profit). Attacking technology directly is attacking their pride directly, something which is tempting for certain personality types. She, though, would prefer to work in the shadows of their arrogance than under the blinding spotlight of their glory.

She regrets that Brown is off station. Brown is her favourite asset, willing to put in the long hours required to get the perfect information and results she needs. Green is far more of a throw of the dice, one she'll allow for now for lack of better options. She's not satisfied, though. She's still hungry.

Unless...

Black: Can you get Junta to go by the Trajan train station really fast?
Black: This guy [Attachment1]
Black: I just want to know where he goes.

Red!

Red is in charge of shopping.

This is a mistake.

She follows the instructions of 'five hour shopping bender' to the letter, held in check only by the fact that she doesn't have the forethought to get a cart and instead lurches around the vendor booths hunched double under the weight of her swag.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Alright, Solarel. Take a breath. Figure it out.

She was being roped into an anime. An anime was, as everyone knew, a visually distinctive subspecies of the TC species. Just like how there was a wide range of visual difference between Zaldarian scale colours and patterns there was a broad range of skin types amongst the TC; they ranged from brown to pink, from rough and weatherbeaten to almost perfectly smooth. Many Zaldarians had initially thought that anime was just a form of makeup but Solarel didn't buy that. The eye structure was just too different.

What was clear was that the animes were the TC warrior class, with some wielding spectacular power over the spirit world. It was the threat of them that had prevented the Empress from offering peace to the Terenians without even a ritual raid. It was a true show of their power that none had attended the Tournament. They had looked at the might of Zaldar and decided they had nothing to prove, and had sent their merchants to do war in their stead. That was enough to send a chill down any Zaldarian's spine - and a thrill down Solarel's as she considered the possibility that she might get to meet one - to fight one!

<Ah of course!> she signed <I am to be the "Monster of the Week!" -> she cut the movement when she realized the Terenian couldn't understand her and instead nodded stoically. Very well then. No words were necessary, she understood her role already.

Already she was looking at the distant radio tower. That would be an appropriate first target.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

"I'm only like this sometimes," said Pink at some point in the rush of precise blurred time. "Some parts of me didn't mind. Some parts of me enjoyed it. It wasn't even like we weren't well paid for our time - not in money, maybe, but in skills. Influence. Hardware. Stealth alloys and scan-bafflers, jilt-faces and snap compartments, music skillwires. It's not like I'm ungrateful."

That world makes the whole world revolve around her. She's not ungrateful. She got taken out of the box for this. She hadn't been properly alive but she wasn't stuck in that space with Black. Black, growing larger and darker, Black extending her jaws to devour the sun, Black gnawing away at everything they were. She was born into this world. She never knew anything different. Never knew the touch of a loving hand, never knew family as something unconditional, never knew a smile as more than a weapon.

Black was grateful. She could feel it here, everywhere around. It wasn't Everest's ghost that haunted this place, it was Black's. The shadowed part of her that could look at this place and accept it on its own terms. Who could tell her that she was lucky; that she might have wound up running a factory like Monk, that she might have wound up running Aevum like Goat.

"Blue is dead, did you know? She was dying for a long time. She was the part of me that remembered the time before this, the part of me that wanted everything to be as black and white as childhood. She hated it here, but she hated it even more when we started to like it here. The more we did the further away she got. Green can't remember her enough to rebuild her now. Am I next? We're coming to terms with who we are as people, part of human civilization, how to use the skills that she taught us to change the world. And I'm just the damaged node that's throwing a tantrum because I didn't get enough smiles and headpats. She never pretended to be anything other than what she was, so why do I...?"

Yellow!

"Yes," breathes Yellow. "Yes, yes, yes." She walks around the image, examining it from every angle. She can feel the Vision change to accommodate this. It's breathing in inspiration, something that she couldn't imagine on her own. "I can be this."

She doesn't need to say it; there's enough mutual understanding that she could let the moment pass as that between two artists. But she says it anyway, because she's with White, because she's impressed on a level she rarely is: "This is incredibly good work. Thank you for showing me this."

She sweeps around it again, practicing the stance, the authority, the presence. She understands her role her on a level below words; to Hazel she is a component. She is the mind and the voice that will bring this body to life; she cannot allow herself to be the weak link. "Here is your starting budget," she said, and White cast the information to the screen, "and the workspace. You may stay there if desired. You will have complete creative autonomy, though I will sometimes ask to prioritize certain mission assets if they're essential to my other projects. There is also a wishlist of various nice to haves - a sword for Pink, crystalline dragonscales for White here, and so on. But we hope to be friend, collaborator and patron, not taskmaster. We understand if your vision leads you in other directions. Above all: always do what is right for the work."

She does not make that offer lightly, but she is already convinced. Hazel saw Yellow's face before she did; one does not place restrictions on a visionary like that.

Black!

This was not a time for technology. Technology was a money fight; you line up your pile of cash against theirs and see if you can spend smart enough to overcome the sheer amount they spent. No, the weakness here was the weakness all libertarian technology oligarchs liked to pretend that they were above: that their existence was utterly reliant on the unceasing efforts of tens of thousands of government bureaucrats who form the invisible backbone of every human endeavor.

Black scans herself in to the rail office using the Crimson Tower ID. She's decided to commit to that identity until the operation is over, accepting that the retaliatory investigation might well render the cover blown. She was dealing with serious people here and if she gave them too much of her real face and methods they might look for names other than Crimson's.

Once inside the plan is to talk shop with the engineers and eyeball the big transit map up on the main screen. If she needed more granular detail she'd try to steer the conversation into activating the transit cameras for the relevant sections she needed.

In the meantime, she sends Green to Zeus on the first available public train. That's a pure gamble, but a calculated one given skullguy's inability to settle for substandard sushi. If she's lucky she'll be able to pick up the trail while it's still warm.

Breathless Dead

The Plousios!

An Imperial-era warship. They don't build them like this any more.

It takes almost week to realize the ship is being harassed by system patrol craft. These are mere ants, chemical powered in system interceptors, but like ants they've formed a column towards the carcass of a dead horse and in a constant flowing stream they ship across what primitive chemical and atomic warheads they can muster. It is instinct that drives these responders more than the instructions of the Crystal Knight - this obsolete species of voidborne fighter pilots, once a terror of the Skies, now reduced to traffic cops firing their pistols at an aircraft carrier.

It's only when an outer bulkhead finally collapses after what might have been the fiftieth atomic warhead and floods a recreation deck with void and voidcrabs (who immediately set to war with the ocean crabs already in residence) that the problem reaches the command decks of the Plousios. Getting any sort of understanding as to what's happening is extremely difficult; the shrine to the God of War is not only in total disrepair but is so old it shows the historical figures of Athena and Ares, rather than the modern Minerva and Mars. Useless in other words, the ship is blind and deaf, you might as well be praying to Thor. So despite the total mismatch in size the Plousios is at the mercy of the system patrol craft as they work away with the bloody-minded determination of ants.

The leadership contest of the Silver Divers has immediately aligned around this problem. Whoever can solve the problem of these swarming fighter craft will be the alpha. Mosaic's light touch means that both Plundering Fang and Sagetip are empowered to take their own methods - Sagetip in reconstructing a defensive ELF array, Plundering Fang in reconsecrating the temple deck.

The plan that remains is the simplest and the most daring: To board one of the ancient, rusted Plovers and go out to fight the enemy directly. Mosaic, here you are king and lady, Ember, you are knight and champion, Dyssia, you are commander and wingman. You stand on the launch deck in the regalia that suits your status as maintenance crews roll out these relics of a brighter age, plugging in cable-leashes that will transmit the Engine's power to the war machines over hundreds of kilometers. It is a moment for salutes, oaths of moments, vows and salutes and promises.

Dolce!

"Nonsense!" snapped the Architect, enormous eye narrowing. "This is not a roadside tavern, this is the greatest remaining monument to the glories of the digital age and an essential component in the reconstruction of the galaxy!"

The eye-screen shifted and flowed, a trillion tiny lights changing colours to show a galaxy wounded, scarred, bleeding. The bloody remnant of a divine spear run through it's heart.

"Over fifteen hundred habitable planets destroyed!" cried the Architect. "Shattered to pieces! Asteroid formations! The galaxy has shrunk and no life will ever bloom there again - unless I make it so! It is my job to haul the wreckage, ignite the cores, form the continents and the plate tectonics and dust the surface with life! And in between me and this most laudable of goals, itself in service to the Gods themselves, is a shattered remnant of civilization who thinks that I am a mere tractor that they can use to plough the fields if only they can find the correct key! You come here waving the flag of Zeus crying, hospitality, hospitality, and expect to bring this compromised creature into the most delicate of sanctums? If I open those gates to you then I shall in the course of weeks be flooded by every spy, assassin, technomancer and saboteur in the galaxy! No! You get food, shelter, and the termination circle until such a time as you decide that you are done and kindly fuck off to your next destination."