Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

More information. Something else to think about. This would be useful, when she'd finished thinking about. "I don't know that about small business owners. How does that vibe and dynamic work?" she asked.

Pink!

"... that's a good idea," said Pink. "Thank you."

Somehow that makes it harder. But that's wrong; it's making the leadup to it harder, because she's acknowledging the seriousness of it now. Now she's got a concrete thing to think about that'll build anticipation more than her previous semi-spontaneous don't think about it too hard stratagem. The difference between going to the dentist and sitting in the waiting room thinking about the drill.

Red!

She's sure as fuck not gonna steal a dozen trains on the D-L.

"Hey, everyone," she said, climbing up on a chair (after asking someone to hold it steady for her, OH&S still mattered). "Listen up a sec'. We all know what to do in the event of asteroid strikes or power transformers blowing up, but no one thought to drill us on the whole station going into simultaneous riots, right?"

Grin, take a moment. Red had this floppy, almost boneless look to her in moments like this, relaxed and open, full body emoting that she wasn't a threat to anyone who didn't want to make her into one. Charming, in an idiot way.

"Anyway, Zeus has decided that if their first one-size-fits-all policy wasn't working, they'd solve it with a second one and order the whole station to stop the trains. And why not, right? Everyone can just take their private boats instead!" she grinned. "But here's the thing. Everyone out there is protesting outside their houses, their communities, their people. When the tear gas comes down everyone's got the option of going home. But us? We got several thousand convention attendees with nothing to defend, nothing to lose and nowhere to go. We've all seen explosions in controlled spaces. Oh shit, hey, I just realized - you are trained for this situation after all. That's super simple, we can either give the explosion a vent channel or we can watch our district become the crumple zone."

She gave the metaphor a moment to sink in. A room full of crisis technicians had enough practical experience with what an explosion in a confined space could do to a body that, when asked to imagine that same process happening to a crowd of thousands... well, it'd clarify what they thought their responsibilities were in this situation.

"Anyway, hi. I'm Crimson Tower," she waved. "Knightly promoted me last week. Take it easy on me, I'm new! And I might be temporary depending on how hard Zeus flips their shit after this. But fuck 'em, I'll take the heat, let's do our jobs and get those trains rolling."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"I could punch a cop," said Brown. "I've been training really hard at martial arts just so that I've got that option. But honestly, probably like, Red or White would figure something out. Most of the time I consider anyone paying attention to me at all be inherently a fuck up, and if I got randomly selected it meant I wasn't paying enough attention to the patterns."

"Speaking of," she asked. "What're the cop patterns in your opinion? What do you think is the best way to handle them?"

Orange and Black!

"Scouting" is an extremely dangerous word in this context. It's not immediately clear why - who doesn't love scouting? But scouting implies information transmitted to a central headquarters, information transmitted to a central headquarters implies communications channels to frontline commanders, communications to frontline commanders implies a level of central direction, centralized direction got the Red Army pocketed and destroyed while Stalin dithered.

Every additional decision November makes in this context further places her as The Decision Maker, to seizing unitary control, to rendering this thirty minute walk down the street top-heavy and brittle. It was good that Yellow was exorcised at this moment because it keeps Orange and Black cool-headed and aware of their own limits. Orange's most clear-sighted act in this moment will be to take her hand off the wheel and let her subcommanders draw their own strategies. They know what the mission is, they know the routes available, they know what to do if they encounter resistance, they have their own assets and espirit de corps and ideas, they don't need her to run this for them.

In ancient days, the Strategos of the army was not the one issuing orders to formations like a strategy game. Once the army was in place it moved itself. The Strategos, then, stood in the rear, on a hill, with the heavy cavalry, looking for the break in the lines where she would need to commit her reserves. Recon by fire, then, and full trust to the marshals. Call her for support and not for orders.

Pink!

"Stop," said Pink. "Just for a moment. This is serious."

She held Fiona's hand, firm and intent. "I am deeply afraid of sensory deprivation, and that's what will happen if you disconnect my quatronic core. That's what it was to be in the box. Everything I've done since then has been an attempt to maximize the influence of my actions, so that I don't feel that helplessness. I'm already tense as hell going even this far."

"But I'm tense as hell all the time anyway," she sighed and lay back on the bed, closing her eyes. "And I'm way off my maintenance schedule. So... go ahead. I trust you."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"No... I can handle cops, sort of," said Brown. "That's actually what I'm doing in between other stuff. Cyan said that she thought her cop impression sucked and she was being too eloquent for the role, so she sent me to research how they speak and act and stuff. They have handles though, basically. They can be controlled from the top. It's a hard challenge but a workable one. I think the army hard counters me, though. There's something I want in a military base but not even Yellow sniffed at that one. It's why I'm kind of hoping that the Illuminati is really powerful because it'd be way easier to handle the Illuminati than the army."

Brown's Journalism Chores were broadly kind of basic: Find the most intense bout of local political activity, embed yourself, and ride along with it writing articles along the way. Someone got declared editor/publisher, someone was assigned to photo editing and cleanup, someone got assigned to website traffic management. She's got half an eye on social media feeds, which she has banned everyone else from checking, and will sometimes chime in advising if she can see anything happening over there that's worth someone nearby checking out.

The most important thing, though, is just to get these people talking and responding like journalists rather than members of the public. It doesn't take much management to do that, but boy howdy does it get felt when it's not there.

Red!

"Yeah, something like that," said Red. God she hated explaining her whole bit.

She's going local. In a small crisis, power flows towards the centre. In a large crisis, power flows towards the periphery. She's making a judgement call that this is a sufficiently large crisis that the people on the spot in Aphrodite have more influence than the people distant in Zeus. For all the magic of the internet it was hard to pull rank via videoconference, and the really cool thing about seizing control of the local train system was that they'd have a hard time sending someone to pull rank in person.

Black and Orange!

It's not often that these two work together. It's incredible when they do so. There's a unique power in their combined approach, resources continuously denied to each other being directed towards the same purpose. The loss of Yellow couldn't have come at a better time for them, honestly - all the questions of priorities and decision making were smoothed out allowing them to focus on execution in the absence of ideology.

The decision is made to start movement immediately. They agree that the threat here is the evening after multiple trains have left. That's the point where they have become the weakest and their enemies have had enough time to organize their strength. Moving hard in the morning is worth it because even if they have to expend strength to maintain it, they'll have that strength.

Yellow wanted to do the full organized single file march with flags and banners. Black and Orange decide instead on Napoleonic Bypass. Multiple parallel columns marching down multiple adjacent streets, flanking the primary column as it moves. When a column hits resistance it holds the nearest intersection and collapses in towards the centre. This concentrates opposing forces on non-critical chokepoints while keeping the central column flowing smoothly, and the delays at the flanks will naturally stagger the mobile groups. Most importantly, it's a strategy simple enough that it can be executed by a mass of peasant conscripts, or a drunk Soviet tanker during a nuclear war.

Neither of them give much thought to trying to make this a stealth mission. Moving this many people is more of a plumbing problem than anything.

Pink!

There's the opportunity. She could...

She looks away. Her cheeks are slightly flushed. Her arms are folded.

... she holds out her right leg.

Okay. Maybe a little more.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"Hmm," said Brown.

Brown wasn't good at replying to things promptly. When someone said something interesting rather than reacting to it she went away and thought about it. She'll think about what Apostle says for about a week before coming up with a conclusion. It was a big thought.

"He thought that we did things because they were clever," said Brown. "He said that it was because we thought we were smarter than everyone and so we'd do needlessly complex things just to prove our superiority. And we were doing something needlessly complex so he just kind of ran out the conversation at max suspicion until we fucked up."

She sighed and kicked her heels. "I don't know, I didn't want to argue with him. But that was kind of the whole problem, he wasn't doing what we wanted him to do. He identified and burned every plan we had to trick him into doing it anyway. And we didn't have the guts to just use force, so where did that leave us? It left us on a clown spiral where our bluff was called and we had nothing behind it."

She looked up at the ceiling light. "That kind of comes up a lot? Yellow's extremely easy to discourage. Sometimes that's good if she's on the bad ideas train, but I don't know how she can wield direct political power if she's like that."

Yellow!

there is a trick to disappearing without a fuss. you just do everything efficiently and neutrally, smile at anyone who looks at you, and look like you're going to talk to someone, and then go to talk to the next person, and on and on until you start leaving collective sightlines.

there's a 'but!' on the tip of her tongue. an explanation, a vision, a whole fuckin' thing - she was going somewhere with this. but, nah. nah if it wasn't working then, it wasn't going to work if she said a bunch more words explaining it. commit to the bit, sure, but if the bit sucked then commitment just dug you deeper.

this was just an operation. black and orange, efficient organization of people in dangerous circumstances. there was no need to bring herself into it.

Red!

"Alright," she said, standing up. "I need to get to the operations centre. White and Cyan will be by soon to lift and load. Drink some water, eat these sandwiches[1] and rest for a bit, you don't have to go out right away. Get your head together and save your strength for when we really need it."

[1] A 500gram hunk of salted synthpork and a handful of crumbled arrowroot biscuits.

Pink!

Somewhere deep inside November was the idea that she could only have what she could capture. Yellow was its most pure manifestation; she could only touch, never be touched. She could only give, never take; only perform and never reveal. That she could only defile, and never be made sacred.

To accept worship...

... it made her itchy! It made her feel impatient and frustrated and on edge, looking for the escape, the break, the shift in the narrative that would change the flow of power. It made her feel like she was giving up too easily and it would be held against her. It made her feel fierce and focused and hungry, made her hands flex and strain invisibly even though the signals were disconnected.

She didn't enjoy this. Didn't fade into subspace. But that didn't make it bad. Being teased, being provoked, being denied - the irritation built towards Intent, her mind increasingly drawn to the moment of reversal and revenge.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"A friend of mine has a tattoo I really like," said Brown. "AM=FM. Actual Machines = Fucking Magic. In her mind the fact that her inventions have to work inside the laws of physics is what makes them so impressive, in a way that pure magic wouldn't be. I've been thinking about that basically non stop since I saw it, but Actual Government = Fucking Magic isn't as catchy an acronym.

"At its base, though, is the problem of resources. It's possible Yellow figures out some way to imanentize the eschalon and usher in the singularity but I need to plan on the assumption that we're going to be constrained by material reality and that Green isn't going to get a reproduction fetish. That places constraints on what's possible. Yes, the plan is absolutely to do the fairy godmother thing, but what's actually involved in that? If someone wishes for a castle then that requires mobilization of construction crews, payments of salaries, movement of tonnes of material, integration with surrounding electrical grids and emergency planning - the backend requirement is huge, especially if we want to make it happen on Fucking Magic timeframes. We'd need an entire dedicated Ministry of Wishes, a branch of government dedicated to transferring resources on ludicrous timeframes, the Make a Wish foundation with the budget of the military-industrial complex.

"And that's where the political questions come in. The question of stability is ever present, especially if we've seized power in a coup. Every resource we dedicate towards maintaining order is a resource we're not dedicating towards making dreams come true. The more wishes we grant the more we shift people's perceptions of reality, entrench our worldview, build legitimacy and loyalists but that's pointless if an armed uprising starts. There's a huge amount of resources that can be mobilized by liquidating the billionaire class so there's a huge advantage over the previous regime, but that doesn't cover everything. It's especially dire if those resources need to be directed to a new generation of oligarchs in order to buy the elite loyalty required to prevent a coup, and that's the problem inherent to authoritarian systems.

"This is why I think of the example of Hugo Chavez. Chavez was the rare politician whose mastery of the media was so profound that he rarely needed to wield authoritarian power. He was charismatic enough that he was able to implement communism without a civil war, he was able to govern as a marxist without cancelling elections, he announced major policy changes spur-of-the-moment on live television which made everyone hang on his every word. Through sheer charisma, political adaptability and decisiveness he was able to defuse strikes and outmaneuver opposition. He didn't need a secret police when the people loved him, he didn't need to outlaw dissent when he just held a press conference whenever his opponents were talking and everyone flipped to his channel. Politically he walked on water his entire career. He died in office, had a glorious funeral, and was entombed next to Simon Bolivar. Fucking magic for someone who started his political career by fucking up a coup.

"Now, the problem with Chavez was that he was kind of an idiot with no consistent policies. The same off the cuff changes in direction that made him so compelling on TV were a bureaucratic nightmare; the agricultural ministry didn't know what crops to plant if it could change at any moment, the police became corrupt without strong legal oversight, a nation heir to spectacular oil wealth walked into an economic crisis. But that's my value proposition, the thing that I as November can do that he couldn't. We can provide a level of internal unity that could never exist between Chavez and his ministers, which means we can resource the public exaltation of magic without collapsing the government functions that keeps the ring spinning. And that's the absolute baseline we can accomplish if we don't develop any sort of hidden technology, or an army of securitrons, or if Green decides to expand to like a hundred colours or some other unexpected windfall."

Red!

"Quick check," said Red, dialing Black. "Do you need these guns to go to Selene, or do you need the cops to not find the guns? One of those operations gives me way more options than the other."

Yellow!

She holds the flag.

This is everything to her.

Some days she's barely even sure she exists. A daydream. A fantasy. So unreal that if you touched her she'd turn back into stardust and sighs. The idea that she could do something, that she could make a change, that she could make the world better seems so fragile. A delusion, a false colour, a trick of the light before she sinks back down into the depths of everyday browns and tans and greys.

She who holds nothing holds this. A banner. Something to believe in. Her belief made manifest. The dream she carried. The dream she was unworthy of. The dream that they might follow despite her. It takes both her hands and all her strength to keep it aloft; in a world with wind the slightest gust would knock it and her over.

She flicks the hidden switches and it expands to its full size and glory. It raises above the rainbow like a roar, like a prayer, like a nation. Here in this colour are all your hopes and dreams, close enough to chase. All you need to do is march after it.

The holy maiden shivers and takes her first lonely step forwards. Bare feet leave the drawbridge and touch the bare surface of Aevum.

She does not look back. She could not survive this dream failing her, and so she must proceed as though it won't.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

She smiled. No fixed address. Not once in her entire life. Across the Stormlands and Evercity and the void between worlds, she had never even had a tent she could pitch. Home was the cockpit. But... not just the cockpit. Right now the thought of returning felt like going back into the summer heat.

It hadn't felt like home except when there was someone else sharing it with her.

Of everywhere in the galaxy, she could think of only one place she was truly destined to return.

"Send it to Mayze Scyssorpaws," said Solarel.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"Well, kind of?" said Brown. "Not really. That's just a matter of scale and resources. If we can hit a critical mass of both then we can attrition down society's problems through sheer money expenditure. Like - do you know Venezuela? Yellow's political precursor is Hugo Chavez. You can run communism off the back of a circus if you do it right. People get their choices removed all the time in ways they can't perceive already, trust me, I work for a newspaper."

"No, I don't think that the problem is taking away people's illusion of choice," said Brown. "I think the problem is that I kind of forgot that smart people work for liberalism. Just, like, genuine true believers with souls like steel wire. They're shitheads with corrupt morals but they've somehow got enough integrity and self respect to stick to their guns despite that. Like, this system is working as intended, and even though the intentions are shit the system is enormously complex and capable of defending itself."

Tyger!

Why reinvent the wheel?

"We will be using colour coding for this," said Orange.

Orange is still Doing The Bit when she gathers the community leaders together. Between her and Crystal she's got a really good map of who they are, and this is something to be done through cooperative whole of organization teamwork rather than anything top-down or technological. Every node needs to be empowered and directed.

"I know, some people have augs or disabilities that render them blind or colourblind," she said, raising a hand pre-emptively. "It's still the common denominator and anyone on the wrong side of that will have to buddy up. The system is simple: Everyone prominently marks their head in the colour associated with the district they're heading to - Red for Ares, Pink for Aphrodite, so on, I've got a chart here. Yes," she held up a hand again, "some people are very stylish and have set colour schemes. This isn't negotiable. We've been up all night procuring a variety of hairsprays, fursprays, spraypaints, hats, and even some straight up buckets of paint. There'll be paint dumps all across the convention. No subtle dots or accents, this needs to be the primary colour on the head."

"So. Everyone marks themselves according to their destination. Everyone gathers in their colour cluster. We organize the march in colour formations, people need to stay with their colour group. The first group is heading to Hermes, they all enter the station at once, they all get on the Hermes train, the Hermes train leaves, and there will not be a second Hermes train. If anyone going to Hermes is not on the Hermes train then they go into the station during the next wave, get on the Aphrodite train, and find someone to roommate with for a few days while they're on the train. They can find their way home later when normal service resumes.

"Understand that there is no flexibility with when the trains leave. The trains will be running due to crime. I will be stealing the trains. The schedule's timing operates according to police and governmental response and not convenience. If anyone falls behind the community must pick them up because I cannot. I will likewise be relying on community volunteers to provide security and rearguard. This number will likely shrink over the course of the day as trains leave, taking defense groups with them. At the end of the day I will be relying on the true heroes who don't care where they end up after today and locals to hold the line."

Red!

"Right, yeah, you're on the run now," said Red. "I can relate. But you know what's great for running? An operational train network, which is the thing that I'm going to try to switch back on. And you know what I'm not going to have enough of after sending out multiple trains full of people? People to defend the train station."

She crouched down. "Look, you're right. You're fucked. You did the crime and now you've got the heat. You got nothing but ugly choices in front of you right now. Option one, you get on the first train that goes out. You lay low, maybe even go to Earth if you're super fucked. You keep your social circle and crime buddies safe. Option two, you work the station defense and fight like hell. You get beat to shit and maybe picked up by the cops, maybe they draw a connection, maybe you go down and take everyone in your org with you. Sucks but honestly I don't think it makes a difference, if they can trace the gun to you they can call you a terrorist regardless of if you're at large."

She doesn't need to talk about option three: sit and get drunk. That's not real.

"So come on, Chaka," said Red. "Gun to your head - er, so to speak: who are you gonna protect?"

Breathless Dead

Mosaic and Ember!

The Grav-Rail is a magnificent piece of technology. Unbelievable power and maneuverability, incredible acceleration, the ability to turn on a dime, as mobility option goes it's profoundly powerful and versatile.

Unless you weren't in a gravity well.

In deep space it doesn't have anything to work with; no matter how complex your sail array, with no wind the ship does not move. The Endless Azure Skies has always been a 'coastal' power as a result - dominating when operating in close proximity to planetary or stellar bodies, becalmed and vulnerable in the deep void. All Azura military doctrine was based around the assault and garrison of planets. In a lot of ways, the worst thing that a Knight could do was to give chase.

But surely it was alright this time. Their enemy was just that far beneath them, after all. They didn't even have their Knight!

Dyssia!

The Crystal Knight sneered. It took genuine, magnificent beauty to be as hideous as she was in that moment.

"Such is the judgement of a philistine!" she said, not addressing you any longer but her court. Ranks after ranks of perfectly organized shades of blue. "Someone who does not understand art! Someone who cannot imagine sacrificing for beauty, sacrificing for love! Someone with so little imagination she cannot comprehend loving something greater than the people she sees before her! Cannot comprehend sacrificing for that love! Cannot comprehend fighting for that love! Someone -"

She's going to go on like that for a bit, Dyssia. Let's tune out and focus on something far more interesting: the sword at your throat.

See, you got to see a few shots from this kind of weapon during the battle. Important fact? What it doesn't do is kill people. What it does do is... strange. It was chaotic, but it looked like shots from the Hermetic's crystal rifle split people into multiple competing copies of themselves - it didn't sever so much as it duplicated. In the chaos of battle, adrenaline pumping, half entering an alien dimension then it stood to reason that people might fight themselves in a panic before they realized what was happening. But...

Maybe it wasn't a sword before you. Maybe it was the Crystal Knight's flaw that she could only imagine it as a sword.

Dolce!

You are in a shuttle flying away from the Royal Architect of the Endless Azure Skies, on your way to meet Biomancer-General Liquid Bronze. You have with you a deeply exasperated 20022 who is working out his annoyance on one of the endless stacks of paperwork that he has with him, the Emissary of the Architect who is engaged in a deep conversation with the Corvii pilot to convince her to disable the shuttle's self-defense Flux spike, and the galaxy's most perfect killing machine.

The Diodekoi has been provided to you in a Stasis-Coffin with wheels and handlebars. In order to keep her under control the Architect has provided a rather novel device constructed of prism-crystals. Activate the cutters and the Assassin will be duplicated - some alternate version of her pulled in to reality for a time, one who can be dissolved/returned/however it works by ceasing the flow of energy through the crystals. This, proposes the Architect, will give you a chance to meet and talk to the perfect engine of death while being able to get rid of her again with the flick of a button. Gather enough knowledge of her personality and how she works this way and you might become confident in your ability to release her for real!

It will be a long flight, but you'll have time and space and supplies to make whatever kind of first impression you want, as many times as you want.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

"Let's go home," said Pink. "That already has so much of my focus and it's out of scope. I'd wallflower and probably help no one, but this way I can at least do something useful."

Brown!

She looks at this with interest. She was aware of the pitfalls of shit moderation in these environments, but Apostle had punched a eugenicist during their first meeting so she figured there was a floor. In that context she couldn't come up with a good reason not to enjoy the spectacle. "You know, reality TV needs to do a lot of creative editing to force drama?" said Brown. "They obviously didn't realize that they wouldn't need to do that if they just observed leftist spaces instead."

She put the phone aside. Deliberate decision, after making her initial assignments she was going to check out for 15-25 minutes to condition people not to bother her for specifics. "But yeah, my main thing right now is..." she sighed. "I haven't had time to process it properly amidst everything, but I went up against a guy recently who just fucking Read me. Like, tried to pull a fast one and he just pulled it apart and I was absolutely fucked, you know? It was only a combination of luck and him galaxy braining himself right out of his victory that got me out of it, but fuck. And not only did that happen but it happened right at a time when the entire station has gone completely extra so none of the others are going to take the time to internalize that."

Red!

Red stops in the doorway. Thinks for a moment.

She's aware that it's lucky it's her. Not all of her would be able to resist making some sort of fucking Point. There were the statistics, the arguments, the morality, a link to the No Way To Prevent This Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens. There's a snappy, unkind response that looms like a lacuna in her mind; 'why does it matter that it's a judge? You decided you were cool with her killing someone when you gave her the gun.'

She doesn't say any of it. Instead she kneels down alongside Chaka and pushes the bottle as far away as her arm reaches.

"Listen. You got into this to protect your community, right? Well right now several thousand of them are crossing town in the face of fascists and cops to get to a train station and get home. I would feel way better if you were out there keeping them safe."

[Shrink 4/4: Chaka can use 1 point from this pool to recover 2 points of Stability, as many as she needs]

"Though," said Red. "Uh, didn't want to go there right now, but you are drunk as shit so I am going to take your guns first."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

"Oh, um. That's a scary thought," said Pink. "I sure hope not?"

Yellow!

"Well," said Yellow, looking out the window. "That was a good idea from Pink about the train. But as ever, she wasn't audacious enough. But this, though... the aesthetics are immaculate. The current regime shuts down an essential service in a crisis in order to maintain control. The revolution seizes what was once an aspect of the State and uses it for its intended purpose. A part of the state's mythos is broken. The trains, dare I say, will be made to run on time. Yes, this will do."

"We're going to use our legitimate authority as the cornerstone of this. Red, you are Crimson Tower now. Change your hair, make it to a command centre, and start issuing orders. Knightly's given you an authorization boost - use it. It's fine if Crimson loses her job over this. White and Cyan are on crowd control at the station. Orange, you manage the movement of people on this side, organize community leaders and work on a formation where people willing or able to take a hit are on the outside. The others will adaptively respond where needed. And me..."

She opened her handbag and took out what looked like a foldable umbrella. It telescoped out mechanically, raising above her head and unfurling into a long, flowing golden banner. An electrical charge through the memory cloth had it billow dramatically in an invisible breeze. It could go to twice this height and size when they were outside proper.

"I will carry the flag," said Yellow, looking up at the secret weapon that was the shape of her heart. "Let everyone know to follow it."

Brown!

"Oh dang," said Brown.

She considers not saying or doing anything else. Like, nobody would know, really? She could just have the entire afternoon off here with her best friends the coma patients. Everything else would just sort itself out in the end, probably.

So she does that! She sits and reads a book on her laptop and is quietly, blissfully happy in a place with no responsibilities and no pressures.

She knows that she was a mistake. They pushed Green too hard in the early tests and so she made her in protest, the rejection of the burden, the refusal of the call. She'd broken the rules of her tests not to win but to buy time for herself while they figured out how to fix it. November had a messiah complex but Brown was the part of her that rejected that and could live happily as just another face in the crowd.

But... she finally sighed and alt-tabbed out her book after fifteen minutes. But she wasn't a bad person. Being mediocre wasn't the same as being mid. This'd come back on her later and people would dislike her for it, and she'd dislike herself right along with them. So there was only one thing to do.

She logged onto the Anthrozine chat.

Brown: Hey @here. York's hospitalized, here next to Junta.
Brown: and everyone's kind of freestyling in here and it's unreadable
Brown: so i'm declaring a bureaucratic coup and i'm going to give everyone journalism chores
Brown: if anyone doesn't like it: fantastic, i will lend you my full support when it comes to couping me