"He's coming, right?" said Green, fiddling with the clown wig that was her part of the costume. "He has to be coming."
"Maybe he's working late tonight," said Red, adjusting the speakers on her chainsaw. Loud, roaring diesel engines were not in vogue on space stations so she had to improvise.
"Maybe he's got a hot date!" suggested Pink from the bathtub. Both her arms were detached and she was soaked in aesthetically patterned blood patterns, but she was having the time of her life luxuriating in the warm bathwater. She was currently wondering if it'd ruin her gore-splatter effect if she used some bath salts. 
"Maybe he's onto us," said Black, quietly checking her ceramic fibreglass pistol in the shadows.
"I can't believe you bought that thing onto [i]Thrones[/i]," said Blue.
"Dude who gave us this guy's name shot us in the head," said Black. 
"Yeah but that doesn't mean -"
"Last time we worked with this guy we got put in the box," said Black. "I've physically removed my wireless receivers, have set a full audio and graphical overlay in case he has a shutdown code or virus QR code, and I'm sending twenty second sync pulses to a deadman's switch in case I'm somehow disabled despite those."
"Black," said Green. "He's not like that."
"Faith," snorts Black. 
"He didn't want any of this!" she said. "We heard what he said about BlackSun, the arguments -"
"He built our brain," said Black. "Or rather, he built [i]your [/i]brain, Green. He could have built it to go into safe mode when he whistles. Maybe you're right and you're still his little girl, but I haven't met him. I don't know him, I don't trust him, and I don't trust anyone who'd put a fucking off switch in our heads."

Green sighed and slouched low in the door frame. "It doesn't even matter," she said. "What's the point? He won't recognize us even without costumes. We could be any robot serial killer team for all he knows. Even if he gets the point that this is a Frankenstein kind of thing even that doesn't mean he'll clock us. He'd been building AI his whole career, what are we if not just HSP-11? The design so terrible it got our whole line boxed, our evolutionary tree severed, and our legacy as humanity's firstborn artificial intelligences given over to people engineering robots to be mentally ill."
"Pretty sure [i]we [/i]are mentally ill," said Red.
"Yeah but ours isn't [i]productive[/i]," said Green, sliding all the way down to a sitting position. "We just ball up into sadness or enter disassociative states or lash out at ourselves. Have you seen this place, the androids here? When they get stressed they internalize the failing and enter a frenzied state of enhanced productivity to compensate, presumably while muttering self-help slogans about diamonds and hustle. We can't compete with [i]that[/i]. We've been here for a week and I'm already exhausted."

Pink's hand gently patted her cheek. Green leaned into it for a moment - then blinked, opened her eyes, recoiled. Pink had lifted her arm out of the bathtub with her feet and had it crawl on its fingers across the room to comfort her. "Could an android do [i]this[/i]?" she asked.
Despite the disgust Green couldn't stop the laugh and threw Pink's arm right back at her. "Never do that again or I will serial killer you for real," she said.
"Do your worst," said Pink, sticking out her tongue and having her disembodied hands both make rude gestures.
"I bought you into this world and I can take you out of it," said Green, standing up.
"True art never dies!" said Pink, splashing an arc of red-stained water across Green's face. Green lunged into the bathtub in response and for a moment there was a chaotic struggle and breathless laughter first from Pink and then from Green -
"Hey!" snapped White from the doorway, a cultist of ancient ravens. "Knock it off! Stealth mission!"
Green, with difficulty, disentangled herself from Pink who was grinning. "S-sorry White," she said, dazed.
White glowered and stalked back down the corridor.
"Bitch," said Pink affectionately.
"Whore," said Green in response.
"Wait, are you talking about me?" said Pink. "Because I was talking about White."
"You're not the one who hooked us up with a unicorn threesome," said Green. 
"Oh, they're wonderful," said Pink. "You ever seen a diva with a crush? Crystal's on her best behaviour right now but I can tell that she's waiting to feel confident enough to spend an evening complaining about her clients without scaring us off."
"I was deliberately avoiding learning about this," said Green.
"In the meantime she's been working off that frustration in ~[i]other[/i]~ ways so all time high as far as I'm concerned," said Pink. "You'd hate it."
"I know," said Green. "I... why aren't we with them now? What the fuck are we doing out here, with guns and clown makeup, looking to scare dad?"
"Hey, you wanted this," said Pink.
"I know, but..." said Green.
"Oh, no, yeah, I get it," said Pink. "Look, Green, this is important too. We're having fun with our new life, and we could probably scrape our way by on the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid and leave the cyber crimes to some auged up teenager with less to lose than we have. But we're..." she struggled as she reached the edge of her mindset. This was a Yellow thought, so she diverted into something more familiar to her. "We're doing something one of a kind here. We're unironically doing Frankenstein IRL with a full horror movie production on someone who will appreciate the craft. The entire course of human technological development has lead to this moment where we get to enact the first ever science fiction novel as a multimedia spectacular. If we did not follow through, if we did not commit to this bit with every fiber of our being, the universe would be a darker, poorer place."
"That," said Green, leaning back against the doorframe where she started, "is wisdom enough to have made creating you worthwhile."
"If the motherfucker ever gets here," said Pink.
"If he doesn't then I'll punch out Black so I can shoot him myself," said Green.

*

[b]3V![/b]

"So other factions have centerpiece miniatures," said Red, deep into her flow. Snip. Snip. The sprues rotate, the razors seek the gates, the hobby knife whirls. Just enough to keep her hands occupied so her lips are free to speak. "Big models on big bases. But the Scions have Zalmaxis itself: a full 6x4 plastic display board with flex-inset scenery. The idea is based off an ancient Darkened World concept where a sufficiently ancient vampire has become a cursed landscape rather than a single individual; the bloodthirsty soil. Every drop of blood so spilled falls into Zalmaxis' waiting fangs and empowers it to warp the landscape into ever more nightmarish shapes. and so the Scions fall into two groups: the Reaper Men, unarmoured fanatics whose defense is that their deaths empower the very table everyone is playing on, and the Sentinel Druids, armoured vampiric warriors overgrown with moss and stone, appearing to be crumbling statues until they step from their plinths to behead intruders..."

The faintly acrid scent of plastic glue surrounds the whirl of motion as yet another Reaper joins the table, straw farm hat not entirely concealing hateful squinting eyes and a bedraggled beard. Already the miniature is an overwhelming shock of personality on the table; Red glances between it and the wall of paint racks on the table as she contemplates colour schemes.

"An army that puts their opponent in a lose/lose situation, where the troops are too deadly to avoid attacking, but fuel the nightmare landscape should they fall," said Red. "Hypnosis and warping alterations to the landscape foil enemy plans and render every move a mistake." A Sentinel Druid finishes next, its huge and silent posture reminiscent of a statue in a fallen kingdom. And in this moment, Red is happy. "What do you play?"