[b]Orange:[/b]

Starlight smiles supportively at a happily burbling Sarah when she watches for approval. Whenever Sarah turns back to vigorously conduct her masterpiece, though, the smile tightens like piano wire, and she rakes a finger through wavy black hair that shines red where it catches the light. 

When Sarah’s performance is done, Starlight gives an enthusiastic applause and scoops her daughter up in a big hug, and her daughter burbles in absolute delight. Whatever ulterior motives you might have, so far this has been a genuine kindness. 

Still holding her daughter in one hand, Starlight pulls her phone from her jeans and confirms the ‘ten’, then turns it around to show you. “I know it’s been a long day,” she apologizes, “but you’ve been so good with Sarah. Could you stay until after dinner? Can you cook? I can do double-rate.” Her phone is back in her pocket already, and she’s holding Sarah out in front of her, smiling. “I never like separating her, from people she likes.” 

This would be surprising to hear, if you only knew that she was an easy tenner. But now you know she doesn’t bring herself to check on her babysitter’s work, and Sarah’s still too young to say. That performance was the difference between being a good babysitter, and being [i]known[/i] as being a good babysitter. 

“Sorry,” Starlight apologizes before you can answer. This is why she’s been running her hand through her hair, this is what she’s been rehearsing since the moment she saw how happy her daughter was. “I’m having some colleagues… some [i]friends[/i],” she corrects herself, “over. I know how long you’ve already been working, but it would mean a lot to me if you would stay a bit longer?” 

Headpattr wouldn’t let you, officially. Work apps that try to skirt labor laws get shut down very quick. What she is asking you to do is illegal, and she knows it. This means she is asking you not as an employee, but as a person who would do this as a favour. 

[quote]Orange smiles and curtsys. She likes the gesture; she has the poise of a ballet gesture as she makes it. "I regret to inform you that I cannot do so in my capacity as a Headpattr employee," said Orange. She lets the moment linger for a moment before making a play: "Section 14.3 of the Android Relations Code prevents me from working outside the legally mandated human maximum."

It's an unexpected argument to use in this situation and it reframes the entire scenario. By referring to that particular piece of legal code Orange has just demonstrated that she's got an understanding of law that goes beyond the basic. She's also made the point that she possesses the endurance and willingness to continue working long hours, and so the request is not considered an imposition. This is not an exhausted girl at the end of her shift, this is an intelligent AI doing her best to operate within a human context.

"In my capacity as family friend and house guest?" she said. "Entirely different scenario. There are but two complications: One, you will have to set out an additional table space so that one of my sisters might join you for dinner, and two, you will have to lend us some proper clothing."

This is the connection in Orange's mind. Upgrade herself from contractor maid to untrained but brilliant legal mind who can double as a babysitter.[/quote]

Starlight flinches. It’s a lot of mental work and a very short time to do it, especially with Orange waiting on the answer. Still, Sarah makes an argument on your behalf that is impossible for her mother to ignore. A quiet, happy burble while pointing at you. 

“You’re free to help yourself to anything in the wardrobe, of course. Your sister though…” she trails off, looking at her daughter. “Sarah’s only vouching for you. Maybe another time? When it’s not such short notice?” 

Listen to the questioning tone; she’s worried [i]you[/i] will walk away from the table. She’s still haggling, but right now a stranger at her dinner table is outside her price range. 

Orange can either take the clean win, here, and her guaranteed place. Or she can press her advantage to try to get Starlight to accept the whole bargain, with the risk that comes with pushing. 

[[i]Charm or Bullshit could both work here - either making Orange’s word worth more, or by making a good case for the sister you want to bring. Starlight is more Clever than Cool, so meet-or-beat 9 or 10 respectively. Roll + Cool. 7 and lower would mean Starlight balks, she walks. Otherwise she just holds firm.[/i]]

[b]Persephone and Pink: [/b]

York moves his lips for a second as he translates the ideas in his head. “Okay. I hear what you’re saying. But I’m with Persephone. I want my interview [i]first[/i]. We have until he wakes up to prep for it, then I want six hours of footage.” He shadow boxes while he thinks, focusing more on practicing dodges than punches. “Keep it in our pockets of course, like good little children, and start off with announcing he’s offworld and untouchable. Even if it’s not true. Maybe work on making it true, depending on what he says.” 

He drops his fists to his sides and shrugs. “Six hours of interview, because I’m with you on Earth. Probably only going to get one chance to get everything we need to get. Sorry, Persephone. Journalism like this broke a country once, back when that was a big deal. Author named Zola broke France over his knee, and he wrote an entire book about how he did it. Brought down an antisemitic conspiracy, upheld by the highest courts of the most antisemtiic country on Earth, and he fucking won.” 

“This guy’s our Dreyfus, the knee that Zola broke France over. We have to make everyone know it, which means [i]he’s [/i]got to tell ‘em. That’s what the interview’s for. Don’t show what we really got, yet.  Just give the story a protagonist, and make everyone talk about what we [i]could[/i] have. Let the counter-narrative start. Zola wrote the playbook here.” He holds up three fingers to both of you, and starts counting them off fingers. “First they’ll try to take our guy down. There’s going to be nothing for him here, on Aevum, anyway.” One finger down. “Next they’ll try to make the story the story. What I mean is, they’ll talk about how everyone feels about the news, and that becomes all that matters. This is where guys like Snowden tripped up, it’s why the P-Papers didn’t count for jack shit, and it’s why we hold back. Like I said. I hear what you’re saying, Pink.” Second finger down. Middle finger raised over his head. “That’s when we take this to court.” 

He lets that ring out. “That’s what[i] J’Accus[/i]e was. Dreyfus got accused by a secret military court, so Zola publicly accused everyone involved and made that accusation front page news. He knew he’d get sued for libel, he said it in the accusation. But to sue him, they had to unseal the records of the Dreyfus trial for him to use in discovery. That’s how he won. Hundred years later, Watergate didn’t work because it changed public opinion, ‘cause it fucking didn’t, it worked because Nixon got impeached.” 

York massages his jaw until it clicks like a billiards break. An old MMA injury that goes off when he talks too long. He’s starting to feel it. “That’s where I’m at. We need to build the story first, so the courts feel people breathing down their neck. We only reveal what we know during the trial, for maximum impact, at which point they’re going to invent whole new laws to prevent us reporting on it. We break all of them and broadcast anyway. I’ll take the fall, personally, to keep The Anthropozine free to act. Then…” he trails off. “The masters tools [i]will[/i] dismantle the master’s house. Doesn’t matter what the law is. What matters is making them realize what the law needs to be to stop Aevum burning. And that’s our gift of fire.” 

There’s a squeaking yawn as Marco sits up and stretches. 

[b]White:[/b]

Two up at the bar near you. A white unicorn with hair like a cascade of fortified wine, and her girlfriend, frustrated eyes peering out through round-rimmed glasses at her ereader. You assume girlfriend. She’s going off about something she’s reading, and the unicorn is actually listening with more than feigned interest. 

The unicorn has a physical charisma that’s impossible to ignore. She moves like an actress who has been perfectly cast for her role, like she knows all her lines by heart and she all the ways to sell her character in every gesture and small movement. She is who she was born to be. 

On the other dance floors, a wild-eyed ferret with a spray of blond curls twitches in time to the beat as his partner, a sleek lioness half-again his height, moves with a fluid grace. She’s barely dancing at all, more wiggling her hips and flicking her wrist, more focused on the conversation. Whatever they’re talking about, it’s engaging enough that nearby dancers lose their rhythm stopping to listen to them. 

Finally there’s the bartender himself, a hulking water buffalo with curled horns, wiping glasses with rolled-up white sleeves. He might have a more objective eye on the run of the place than the guests. 

[b]3V:[/b]

Black has her moment to dance, but there's an ambush here for you, too.

You wouldn't be the Anthropozine's first culture reporter, and you won't be its last. We stand upon the shoulders of giants. 

Here's one from the archives, something you read on the site before you joined. Maybe it's one of the reasons you wanted to. I would understand why. 

[hider= Errant; Close to the Sun]
Once upon a time, in the middle of a localized economic boom, three men came perilously close to bringing music to its knees. They stumbled into a recording booth with all the seeming of vague shadows filled only with the dreams of an insular peninsula and its strange warbly, crooning ballads drinking the waters of rebellion and tasting the first sweet, sour, bitter, salty (and umami) flavors of global culture. It was a beautiful moment, the kind that’s mostly impossible anymore. Not that people had become less creative since they’d driven themselves into space, but because corporate reach stretches so much farther now that the kind of isolation that gave birth to this kind of moment has basically been made extinct. You’re born with a list of the latest megahits beamed into your brain, and it’s on you to forget them if you can. Oppression wears a different boot these days. That’s all. 

But at the time it was pure indulgence. They sang about love, loss, schoolyard bullying, and the need for the government to do more to support the people, often in the same song. And they did it wearing absurd poofy coats in the kinds of colors nobody around them would be caught dead in. With silly, feathered hairstyles and flashy makeup and shoes that cost more than everything in their recording studio. They put together music videos hinting at an elaborate story in a cosmology deep enough to bury all of your sins. They sang. They spit peppy and peppery bars in equal measure. They put it all to flashy street-inspired dance moves, culminating in a flashy showstopper historians dubbed “the Tornado Spin.” In short, they threw together the aesthetics of the tiny bubble they’d been trapped inside of all their lives with all of the excesses of the wider world without caring how any of it fit together, and without bothering to chase after any kind of consistent sound. Until one day they got bored and quite literally disappeared off the face of the earth, leaving the message “We have shown you everything we can try” and then being spirited away to who knows where, never to be seen or heard from again.

All of this is ancient history. For all that the children of that little country cried when these mysterious heroes left them, and for all that they made bridges collapse in their wake, shut down schools for almost a week, and sent several companies into stock freefall, all that’s left of them now is a single ancient video file in ugly, grainy 240p on a decaying hard drive owned by a very fidgety archivist. It doesn’t even matter, I don’t know why I bothered telling you any of this, except that I wanted you to understand that the imitators that eventually gave rise to the banal monster called (of all things) Bulletcore were actually chasing something that was beautiful and real, once. 

Popularity’s not a death sentence, necessarily. But, and you can ask a celebrity gamer owner of a theme cafe about this if you happen to know one, the more of it you’ve got the harder it is to hold onto what got you started on the path in the first place. The music scene in that little peninsula-shaped bubble flourished for a while. 

And… when I say it ‘flourished’, I don’t mean that it was some renaissance moment that lifted the whole of human culture up or anything like that. Some of it was good, a lot of it was very awful to listen to, and right from the start it had to wriggle through the fingers of a lot of corporate meddling just to survive. It thrived in the sense that chasing an indie kaleidoscope of ideas gave a lot of opportunities for a lot of different people who’d been living under the same slowly collapsing bubble to express themselves and their home in a lot of very different ways. But the more you do something, the better you get at it, generally speaking. And the more refined it becomes, the prettier it gets, the more you start to see eyes that’d normally slide right on past this weird mess turn and stop to watch, instead. And you loop. You focus on improving, which means getting more refined, which pushes you closer and closer toward mass appeal, and finally down the pitfall where your niche is now the size of the Pacific Ocean and suddenly it’s not niche at all, now is it?

‘Bulletcore’ refers to the so-called genre of music you hear softly piped through all of Aevum’s trendiest hangout spots (and the streets. And from random ad spaces while you’re trying to watch a cooking tutorial. And interspersed through your music streaming if you’re using the major platforms without paying for the Premium Plus Plus [clap clap clap] package. Listen to what you like, whenever you like. But also, this!), but more specifically it’s a callback to Bulletproof Boys, the first group of absurdly pretty boys to wind up going crazy stupid viral enough that they rocketed all the way up to mainstream. 

Their original concept was a chaotic mess that can be most easily described as ‘hardcore, spiritual hip hop’. They presented as hard and edgy while rapping about the soft beauties of the soul, or when that got boring, about how pretty girls were and the degree to which they wanted to take them home and fuck them. And in the original tradition of the genre, this did not always happen in separate songs. Some of their more popular early work ditched the concept completely for a series of cyphers that amounted to nothing but juicy diss tracks of all of their contemporaries who’d looked down on them for their lack of polish. They were themselves, nothing more or less, until a lucky remix put them full-blast in the public eye.

On Aevum, but really anywhere a megacorporation is allowed to exist, diversity is a checkmark to be ticked off and then aggressively rubbed back off the ledger again once it had served its purpose. The Bulletproof Boys were given funding, equipment, new wardrobes, and practice spaces. They worked, they got better, they refined. And as they got more popular, by way of a lot of deep pocketed “encouragement” their hip hop turned gushier, gummier, and all in all poppier until half of their members had been reduced to backup dancers for want of quality singing voices. They were the first, but they weren’t the last. 

Every time a big name group washes corporate, the lost souls that found a little solace listening to their weirdo music bounced to the next name they could find. People can’t really help themselves, honestly. The talk, the hype, the lifting up, it’s almost like they called the clawed fingers out of the sky to pluck their heroes off the ground and carry them up into heaven, where the only noise coming back down from the clouds sounded like Tuesday night at the Clarinet Jamboree. 

It’s been happening for over a hundred years. You might have heard about the most recent, and possibly most tragic version of the story yet. FAEWYL-D, an all-girl ensemble known partly for their death-metal-by-way-of-trap sound and extreme love of tight faux-leather dominatrix costumes but much more prominently for their extremely detailed storytelling, were the talk of the entire underground music scene for almost three entire months. Every time they released a song, it came with a recorded stage play that slowly told the story of a traveling group of faeries on a journey to find the kind of magic that would give them all wings to fly with. Sometimes their adventures were fun, sometimes they were hard and scary, and pretty much every time two or more of them would wind up kissing. Sometimes they would chase a rumor only to find out it was a trick, and other times they’d have to save a cafe full of high school girls from a succubus who devoured happiness from everyone she touched. Sometimes instead of a song there would just be a fifty three minute lore dump about the world they lived in and the dangers that inhabited it, or hints about the corners of the magic seal that could be put together to grant a fairy her wish.

FAEWYL-D had just started telling their most tantalizing story yet, about a night under a blood red moon where most of the faeries had fallen asleep but for their leader, silently watching over them. She was approached by a witch, who praised the leader and offered her wings in exchange for the hearts of all her friends. And, to the shock of everyone, she agreed! The story turned to a tale of blood and betrayal, as the fairy princess Dami broke into crocodile tears and accused her best friend SuA of the exact betrayal she herself was guilty of, holding out her blood soaked hand as proof of the covenant. 

Two weeks later, Dami appeared by herself having ditched her entire aesthetic for a colorful magical girl outfit. It almost felt like part of the story, and the bubbly music she sang and danced to had people wondering if this was some sort of commentary about the corporate power washing that happened to every good group once they got too close to the sun. But then the next song was much the same, and the next one after that. The lore dumps stopped, the stage plays got shorter and easier to predict, and then they stopped too. 

The other members came back, minus two. FAEWYL-D was rebranding to Mynx, they said. They were so excited! But Dami was going by “Emma” now. And SuA by “Alice”. JiU by “Lily”. Rachel and Della and Monica couldn’t contain their giggles. There were no kisses. And thousands of people grumbled and punched the closest thing to them all at once as they realized, together, that they were listening to Bulletcore. Again. Fucking again!

There’s not much point to this story either, I guess. “Megas steal your soul if they get inside your front door” isn’t exactly a hot take these days. But, for those of us who can’t help but bend our ears for the sound of the next song strange enough for our wicked hearts to dance to, just remember to be wary. When you do something, you can’t help getting better at it. When you improve, you refine. And then you get popular. And… Well, up here, none of us are very far away from flying too close to the sun. 

–Errant
[/hider]

The DJ is making a statement. How many times have you heard the witch's offer to Dami, and how many times have you heard Dami's answer? Someone's isolated the vocals, killed the original instrumentals, and replaced it with a building, throbbing beat. The musical equivalent of how it feels between the "We need to talk", and the words that come next. 

But then the beat drops as Dami declares her dedication to her friends. It's a great beat. FAEWYL-D's trap influences make it malleable to this kind of mix. Everyone else is dancing like that's all it is. Does anyone else realize the statement the DJ is making, when the succubus that SuA is fighting is replaced by Emma's bulletcore lyrics? It's a seamless sampling job. 

Up above the crowd, a black catgirl raises her green eyes from her laptop to scan the audience, looking for understanding.