[b]Euna:[/b] It’s so good to have you here, you always know how to draw a crowd. A lot of the common map apps have pins you can put down, like how Fiona marked a below-ground shielded play area filled with lego. Euna could have placed that for the gym, but she can also just… answer some of them. People flagging turning points, people caught out. One’s just a guy asking for milk from the store since he can’t get ouf ot her apartment and his baby’s hungry. Current top comment is “just learn to breastfeed, idiot” - he’s reacted to it with a laugh emote, so it’s probably a friend and not a random asshole. Still, while Euna’s gym isn’t a center of protest, it is a center for the kind of people who are going to be singled out for this. Non-human presenting androids are targeted even more than organic furries, for that same intersectional logic that makes it harder to be BIPOC [i]and [/i]queer than just one or the other. If Euna wants to [i]go out[/i] into this, that gives her a social media feed for people she can go to and liberate. Because it’s okay if people are [i]asking[/i] for help, right? Sure, this one, this android that comes to the gym every Friday morning before work, barricaded in a convenience store just two blocks away when a group of about three protestors found her and pinned her in there. Probably just wants someone to distract them so she can sneak away through a staff door or something, but they don’t say you [i]can’t[/i] solve this by doing a flying spin-kick through all three at once. [b]Fiona:[/b] Alright, core, head, adaptor plugged into outlet. This should give a lot of senses back, and speech. Still, the way Pink just toggled again is giving her Thoughts. “I’m going to patch some of these drivers, while you’re disconnected. Since, internet.” She says. “They’ll download but they won’t install until you’re connected again. So you’re not going to connect all at once, it’ll be like slowly waking up, like you said. Probably sound first, then voice, then feeling, sight last. It’ll take about two minutes to go through everything.” She doesn’t need to do this, and if she was going to do this she could keep Pink hooked up to the phone as well while she did. But sometimes you stand at the edge of the pool because you want someone to push you in. [b]Crystal:[/b] “Diogenes, a moment?” She asks, and pulls at the robe so it goes over the back of Eli’s head like a wimple. It’s not particularly nun-ish but then again, neither is Eli. “Good enough. Forgive me Sister, for I am about to sin.” “Hot.” Eli says and makes a solemn sign of the cross over themselves, pauses. “You know I’m Jewish, right?” “I believe in a more literal kind of higher power, myself.” Crystal pushes the temporary bundle of wimple back. “Do you mean ‘myself’ as in, you’re the higher power you believe in, or-” Crystal: I would have her every fantasy met, her every indulgence, her time with my every competitor, so at the end of it she would come back to me and tell me how I was better. Crystal: That every moment of weakness I feel about someone else, she would have something ready to say about how I was superior Crystal: I would have her know there were none better, just so she could tell me Crystal: And I would get to that point without any of the middle steps, where each foray out into experience is a risk that this time is the one I am inferior. Crystal: All without being willing to sacrifice an ounce of who I am to better suit her. I have so far been lucky the person I want to be is the person she wants to be with, but if that were to change I’m not sure I could change with it. “I am included in what I mean, yes.” Crystal says. “You can write that one down, too.” [b]Cyan and Red:[/b] The poker table plays on. “You think they’re actually going to get IT on us?” “Probably.” The comms cop shrugs. “Don’t know how they’re planning on getting everyone else to change their routes at the last minute, though. Whistler is a stupid call, smaller and easier to bottleneck, it’s two lines instead of eight. Just ride it out and wait for someone more senior to figure out we’re getting bad orders, don’t bother arguing. Yes sir, no sir, three of a kind sir, eat shi- Huxley you do not have a full house, you wanker, stop lying. Crap.” (Don't you just hate it when a pair drops in the flop and you have a third card, but they had a pair in hand and got their third on the river? Bullshit.) [hider=IRA_Glass and SapphoOfAphrodite get back in the game] [b]Meanwhile:[/b] IRA_Glass, a raggedy middle-age cyborg, and Sappho, an exhausted former con-artist wearing an evening dress to a riot, watch the exhibition crowd move all the way across from Modern Aphrodite, two eras ‘round so the crowd hangs high over their head - it’s a better angle than being directly across, less of the axle gets in the way. The streets they walk in T-S Eliot are calm and placid by comparison, a cityscape taken from Norman Rockwell paintings, or Nighthawks by Hopper, a fantasy of 40s Chicago. It’s quiet here, the unnatural quiet of 40s Chicago when the men with fake instrument cases are seen coming out of the alley. T-S Eliot is a district in the eye of the storm. The big crowds draw people from neighbouring areas, depopulating them of the fighting types, and the people who stay behind are self-selected stay-out-of-its, forming low-and-high pressure zones. The raggedy cyborg in a tan canvas jacket thinks about that as he walks the street. “I never tell you if ye drop a ten megaton bomb righ’ in the middle of the place, by the time the blast hit the sides it wouldn’t even break a window?” he asks in his thick scotch-irish accent. Black Irish is usually a confusing term, it usually just means Irish with black hair, so just to be extra confusing IRA_glass was black black Irish Scotch. “No, you haven’t.” Sappho says. Her voice is a little bit mongrel, overlapping tones of Northern Irish and Australian. It’s its own accent, that impossible to narrow down sound of ‘British, but not English’ actors and actresses. “I’m going by what the radius was on Earth. Sealed container like this,” he clicks his tongue and shakes his head, tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk. “No one’s ever tested one like it here, to be sure.” “You’re workshopping on me,” Sappho scolds. “Comparing the blast to Earth, how it’s more closed here. The literal effects of a bomb compared to the social blast of a riot. No language barrier, far more connected.” “Aye, that’d be clever.” IRA_Glass snickers. “Yae too kind to think of it for me. Meself, was just thinkin’ of bombs.” Sappho’s picked walking along his right side just so she can slug his arm when he says something like this. The left one’s made of metal. She crosses her own over her chest as they walk, after. “Liar. I’ll steal anything but ideas, Donal, it’s beneath my dignity.” “My ideas are beneath your dignity you mean?” “Yours least of all.” She laughs. “Even you don’t want to take credit for them, or you wouldn’t be all coy about it.” They’re old-guard, old-friends, and it’s been years but it’s almost like no time at all. The Anthrozine keeps itself young by mostly paying in exposure, it might as well be Logan’s Run for how many people over 30 last in its ranks. After that people either find better pay in the industry or, more likely, can’t afford to do the work for such low pay anymore. IRA’s just past 40, now, and Sappho’s so close it burns her. “How’re the sprogs?” IRA changes the subject. Sappho groans. “God, that plural still.” She laughs. “Sometimes I wonder if they’re the best things in my life because I’ve got no life left for anything else.” “Cute, though.” “Monsters,” Sappho laughs. “We had a moment where-“ and she stops and realizes she’s never said this out loud, because it happened after she became respectable, settled down, had kids, someone who can’t afford to be arrested anymore. Being around Donal again, a switch just flips, and she’s like this again. “Well Michelle and I wondered about aborting just one.” She admits. “With the twins. Since we thought two was enough as it was. But then we thought about having to explain that when they got older…” she trails off, and Donal nods to her. “Aye, you think they’d have felt unwanted, maybe?” “The opposite, we thought it’d make them into an ego monster. If it were me, I’d have spent all of puberty running around screaming ‘I lived, bitch!’” Donal barks a laugh at that so hard he has to wipe tears out of both eyes, the real and the prosthetic one - not that you’d be able to tell the difference. “Christ, I’ve missed us, Sapph.” “And I do love them both!” Sapphire pushed on, “All my heart, could never make that choice now.” “Aye, I know. I’ve seen the pictures of Joan and Dorothy, I could dip their little fingers into my tea instead of using sugar they’re so sweet.” He laughs at that. “Look at us, relaxed enough you’re puttin’ pictures of the little ones up on socials, even private ones.” “Maybe it’d be easier if we’d had a son, just to break things up a bit. Three girls.” She snorts. “But then neither of us have a Y chromosome, do we?” “Michelle’s cis?” Donal’s shocked by this, raises both eyebrows, and Sapph finds that so funny she misses her next step and he reaches out to grab her arm lightly to steady her by reflex - the last time they’d walked this street like this they’d been snookered drunk. “Yes, Michelle’s cis.” Sapph says. “Has been from the beginning.” “Really now?” Donal asks suspiciously. “Don’t that beat all. Send all my love.” “She’ll laugh harder than I did,” Sapph says. “I mean you can tell her yourself. Thanks for walking me home.” “Dinnae worry aught.” He waves it off. “Not going to stay out here, for auld lang syne?” She looks at him curiously. “Donal, are you jealous?” “Me? Nae, hardly.” He rubs the back of his neck with his good hand, and he doesn’t know he’s lying until he’s already said it. “No regrets or anything as such, just feels like I missed me window on things, got it out of order. Find someone now, that’s two or three years. Making the kid’s another to that. I’ll be past sixty before the first one’s out of highschool, and that ain’t fair to the either of us. But it wasn’t safe before, neither, was it?” “No, it wasn’t.” Sapph agrees. “It’s why I was thinking, if this is anything like the android riots, I’ll probably be coming back out in a few days when everyone else has worn themselves out. Maybe do some meta-journalism until then, read the reportage.” “Doomscroll, you mean?” Donal teases her, and she punches his arm again. “You’re not allowed to talk to Michelle anymore, she’s not allowed to know you said that.” Donal grinned, then furrowed his brows in intense concentration. “Ah, whoop. Just be a moment.” He tapped the zip on his worn biker leather pants and jerked a thumb towards an open 40’s-style diner. “I know it’s not far but I’ve been holding it in since Ares.” “Go for it.” Two thumbs up from the cyborg and he ran for the diner, and SapphoOfAphrodite leaned against a lamppost and waited. And waited. “Come on, ye aul’ git.” She imitated him, badly. It just made the Australian notes in her accent come out the back of her nose to try it. She hated this. This fucking dress. It was lovely, she looked incredible in it, she needed it to be doing press coverages all morning from the wrong side of the camera. If she wanted to deal with that she’d have actually run in an election. No, after her wild oats gonzo years Sapph had tried to go as legitimate as humanly possible and had worked her way into a role second only to the Chairwoman of the Aphrodite Communications and Media Authority, or ACMA, censoring the journalists she used to get into shitfights with over social media. That was meant to be obscure, respectable, something that got her kids into good schools and meant people didn’t ask where all the money had come from. But then she had to be caught with one foot in each world. Thrown under the bus by her boss to be the one at the conference, having to spin bullshit about how curtailing press freedoms during a riot wasn’t really curtailing them, while having her old chatroom haunt on the other hand saying they don’t care that everything they were doing might be illegal by the end of the day, that just meant there’d be less competition in doing it. And she was so busy thinking that, because she didn’t want Donal to see how jealous she was of how much more uncomplicated his life was, that she didn’t see the short man with the knife sneak up behind her until it was already against her back, keeping her body between him and the street to use her as cover while he robbed her. “Do I look like I have pockets?” She said. He was frisking her, though being surprisingly chaste about it. He poked with the knife a bit, not enough to rip the dress, more to push her. “Handbag then. Purse?” “Afraid not.” “Hi!” Donal yelled from the diner across the street. "Hi, yirsel with the lugs for days, yuv got the look ae a man ae culture. Howsabout, howsabout a chat about the radical influences of that Rabbie Burns, aye?” The cyborg made wild gestures with his arms pointing to the mugger, then back to himself, then back to himself, and then some where down the street as he let out the stream of nonsense Gaelic. “Cunt loved hissel a bit of revolution, ran guns tae the fuckin French when they were aw havin at it, blethered on aboot the rights o man whenever he wisnae plowin through lassies like a Viking. Mad cunt incorporated the, the fuckin whit's-the-name, the Tennis Court Oath intae—" And then he’s right at their feet and in one smooth motion, without breaking stride, runs the top of his head directly into the middle of the mugger’s face and he collapsed in a pile beneath the streetlamp Sapph had been leaning against. “I had it under control.” Sappho says, looking down at him. “Aye, but then I dinnae miss a chance to give a gowk a Glasgow kiss.” He spits on the mugger before offering to take Sapph’s arm and keep walking her home. “Been an age.” “If I had my jacket,” she starts, stops. “Well he’d never have tried it if I was in my jacket, anyway, it’s this dress. When’s the last bloody time I’ve been mugged, anyway? I didn’t think that sort of thing happened anymore.” “All the little piggies accounted for.” Donal pointed up at the sky around them, especially at the march from the Castle Exhibition across from them. “Scallywags taking punts they normally wouldn’t.” Sapph looks to the streets ahead, and the fact that her house is really not that far away from here. “You’re not going to be able to get back to Ares tonight, are you?” “Snowflake’s chance.” He agrees. “You think you could save journalism for tomorrow, and maybe just stay the night with Michelle and I, and the kids?” She asks, what she hopes is subtly checking his forehead for bruises. “They’ve learned how to talk since you last saw them.” “That’d be grand.” Donal agrees. “Reckon you’re right, might play tortoise while everyone’s hare brained.” [/hider]