Apostle:
“Yeah sure, uh. Lemme think. Hey, Junta, you awake?” Apostle asks mostly as a joke.
Junta, in his sleep, slurs, “Fuck. Sorry.” Quiet and barely legible. Then he’s still again, so still you can’t even tell if he’s breathing.
“Holy shit.” Apostle stares for a few seconds, then shakes his head. “Well, fuck. Uh, anyway. It’s a kind of sheep that cop-brain can still think is a sheep when it gets shitty with them. Because it’s like… I think they see the sheepdog in them? Like, small business owners are like toothless cops. So you’re not one of them, but you’d get invited to the same barbecues. Kind of like scientists and science fiction writers. Mutual respect, one’s got more authority, but when the writers argue stuff wrong the scientists actually have to correct them instead of just thinking they’re idiots, they actually want to be on the same side. Maybe. Does that help?”
This is really stretching the limits of Apostle’s knowledge here, but they vibe Brown so hard they’re enthusiastic to keep the conversation going before it inevitably needs to drift off into ‘gotta think about this for a week’ mode. The more they can get in here now, the better it’s going to be to hear from Brown in a week, they figure.
Fiona:
“Why don’t we do this the opposite way, and start now then. So this gets easier rather than harder as we go.” Fiona unfolds a gorilla-grip mount from the back of her phone casing to attach it to the steel bars of the bedframe, so the camera is aimed at what she’s doing. “I’ll do your head first, and then we’ll see if I can run that off an external power supply while I do your body. You uh, won’t want to feel that.” She giggles, in spite of herself.
“It’ll be nice though.” She promises. “You’re very expressive, and there’s about 40 points of failure in that face that you’ve been pushing through their paces. It’s about to get a lot easier to smile.”
And that’s it, no wait, no waiting room. Pink just needs to put the tether in herself - Fiona won’t do that, one last act of affirmative consent - and then she’ll start.
There’ll be a few seconds, maybe only three, between the senses of her body disappearing, and the connection to the phone replacing them where Pink will be back in the box, though. Not long at all. How does she experience them?
Meanwhile:
Zhang tries to cut and run when the cops encircle the group she’s instigating, when the Echidna crowd crashes into the lines she’s been false-flagging inside. One of the bricks she brought for windows got co-opted and taken out the shoulder of a typhon, an android with large dragon wings and a serpent tail, and now the typhon’s wing hangs limp and twitching on that side. She hates it was her brick that did it.
An anti-trans activist named Crenshaw stares at her suspiciously as he catches on - this is the kind of guy who’s primed to look for traitors in the ranks as it is, it’s almost just coincidence Zhang is one this time. He levels an amateur-make microwave gun at her, something that fucks up androids but mostly just hurts like hell for a person, and fires it.
It’d have been better if he slammed her with a baseball bat - The metallics in Zhang’s subdermal armor sears the flesh beneath her skin like a skillet and she screams, and Crenshaw backs off a step. “Terminator!” he screams back at her, pointing. Android in human skin, infiltrating the group.
But Zhang has a few seconds, because he’s shot her through the crowd, and there are more people still on their feet pissed off about having been hit by friendly fire than actually want to check what Crenshaw’s saying, and they’re going to disarm him while Zhang, prone, crawls off the street and across the broken frame of a window display and hides in the blacked-out clothing store. Her armor mod does protect her from the shards of glass she dragged herself across, but the burns are agony.
This group is not going to hit the exhibition, no, but now that people know a crowd like Echidna’s is in the area doing this, others rally to take more of a fight here. If the trains from Hermes to Aphrodite weren’t shut down this could have gotten a lot worse.
Moving fast and early might prove the right choice.
Meanwhile:
Pope sighs and checks his phone, between the camera rounds, and doesn’t even bother to read most of the Anthrozine backscroll past Brown’s updates before commenting.
[IAmWhatIAm]: If I may? The importance of this moment is that it has happened, and now it is done. The path of Aevum history will not diverge for your presence or absence in the riots, but it will shape the course of your life. There is nothing to fight for here except for the fight.
[IAmWhatIAm]: There are only so many doctors, nurses and ambulances. There is no shame, no cowardice, in helping by refusing to put yourself in a place where you will do harm or be harmed. Look, but don’t touch.
Some people start replying but he ignores them, because they’re all likely to be yelling at him and that isn’t his audience.
[IAmWhatIAm]: To say otherwise is to say that York is better serving you unconscious in a hospital bed. You are all of you too useful to waste on bravado.
And then he logs off. The Anthrozine is one of the few groups he can talk to, their paranoid server architecture and the burner phone make it safe to message from here, but he doesn’t want to. They’re good people, and that’s the whole problem.
The good people care, and froth, and rage at injustice. That is needed when the patient is alive on the table, when there is a chance of resuscitation, but the patient is already dead. It’s too late to intervene.
No, Pope just wants to grieve.
Meanwhile:
This will be anything but obvious to the people on the ground, but it is true that:
- For all the violence, for all the threats and weapons, very few will die in the riots. Only 25 died during the Floyd riots. Nobody died at Stonewall. Probably the best comparison might be the Cronulla Race Riots in Australia, 2005, when 5,000 racists fought their way to Cronulla beach to attack any non-white person they found there. For all the assaults, stabbings and arson, for all the hateful motivation, it’s hard to find an official death.
- “You’ll probably only get really badly injured” offers very little comfort to people who did not want to get very badly injured, especially not for their identity. Death is not the standard that we should hold the legitimacy of fear to. All the same, it’s nice to know.
- Now that this has started, though, it’s not likely to end soon. While Cable Street, Cronulla and Kent State are all examples of this burning bright and blowing over in one really bad day, they’re unlikely to be the model. Stonewall went for 5 days, the Zuma riots in South Africa went 9, Floyd went 14, Maidan in Ukraine went 93. It’s a battle between anger and fatigue, and it’s hard to predict when fatigue will win.
- It’s easy to predict who it’ll hit first though. The anti-trans side won, they get to go home. The pro-trans side didn’t, they’ve got to keep coming out. Today the cops work to beat the two sides apart. Soon they’ll just be trying to control order by beating the pro-trans side into going home, sustaining the riot from being the remaining source of conflict even as the pro-trans side loses the antagonist that made them sympathetic to moderates.
- The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar. This will be as true now as ever. More true now that fires on a space station are infinitely scarier than ones back on Earth.
Meanwhile:
Parvati the dancing snake-girl approaches Crystal from behind, near the still-drained lobby fountain, and clears her throat. Crystal turns in surprise and blinks.
She really is quite beautiful. She understands at once why Fiona was so taken by her. She suppresses a moment of intense, burning jealousy. “Yes, dear?”
“You wouldn’t happen to know where Ms Fiona Weiss is, would you?” She asks. “She said she was one of the organizers, with you.”
“I do.” Crystal says cautiously.
“It’s just, I would feel a lot safer with her right now.” Parvati smiles nervously. “I just can’t find her anywhere.”
“Ah, yes.” Crystal adjusts her funerary hat and straightens. “She promised to help a young lady deal with a traumatic experience today and was not in attendance. I’m sorry.”
“Of course she is.” Parvati sighs and wrings her hands, the frustration that you had wanted someone to hurt you for bad reasons just so you could deal with the hurt. Forgiveness is harder. “I’d just thought…”
This is not a situation Crystal is very comfortable with, even though she’d helped set these two up. It’s the difference between letting Fiona explore her options and helping her keep that option open. November has been making her rethink a lot about how she handles these things. Still. “We can only ever be in one place at once.” Crystal says. “You’re from Aphrodite, yes? Your stay can be extended, and I’ll let her know she is to escort you home tomorrow night.”
Parvati looks immensely guilty for how reassuring she finds that. “Thank you.”
Crystal feels overwhelmingly possessive.
As Parvati turns to leave for the elevators, Crystal messages Yellow: “I know today has been unkind to you. I’ve decided to propose to Fiona, and I feel it is a necessary use of your talent to plan the perfect way to do this. I would like you to feel as included in this as possible.”
No, she’s not jealous so long as November is shared. It’s different.
Black and Orange:
It’s been ten minutes, the teams swell from stragglers pulled from hotel rooms and finishing packing the vendor halls. Some now carry backpacks of snacks and meals taken from the food court, ready to feed people on the other side if there’s delays at the station.
The doors open again for Ares to move out.
Don’t worry if there’s nothing for you to do here, yet. It might just mean you’ve done your job perfectly.
Red:
[November spends Human Terrain to make a DC 4 check on this]
This works - again managing not to strain the credibility of the cover identity by getting authority from Knightly, you’ve argued that your actions are covered by your remit effectively.
But.
“Shit.” A young android, silver-haired with a purple french beret and bangs that cover her right eye, pushes herself out into the walkway in her wheelie chair and looks up at Red grimly from knee-height. “I think we can get the trains, but the stations are under lockdown. Police authority supercedes ours in a riot, even if we get the trains they’re not going to let anyone on. I’m Corday 01-18 by the way, Ms Tower.”