[b]Persephone:[/b]

Talbot lights right up at the prospect of the interview. “Sure, sure-sure-sure. Do I need to sign anything or?” She doesn’t. Everybody’s signed a waiver just by being here, which is why the media card you’re carrying is such a privilege. General rule of thumb; Everyone in this room is fair game to point a camera at, but it’s like knowing you have right of way as a pedestrian. “Who’s Mrs Piper?” 

Already a bad start. The android’s found you in the crowd, is standing behind Talbot when she asks. But there’s no crack in the facade by the time Talbot turns to see her. 

“Hi! That would be me. Dr Talbot, with BioTan?” 

“Uh, hi! Yes, that’s- that’s me.” Her voice shoots up an octave. 

BioTan’s a smaller company, and it’s clear that they’ve made a rookie error. That understanding something necessarily translates to being good at explaining it. Talbot’s already getting stage-fright, but it’s nothing she can’t handle. Just means she’s not going to be the best at guile. 

Piper gives a warm handshake, and her relaxed aura is contagious. Absolutely nothing like the treatment you got back in the production office, she radiates good vibes. She holds up a ‘one second’ finger to Talbot, and goes to whisper to you. “What are we doing here?”

You’re drilling for oil blind here, and Piper’s your pump. Don’t worry if you don’t strike on your first try - just being seen doing your job might lead to something.

[b]November:

Orange:[/b]

Fiona shudders at the tea, but Crystal is thinking too hard to even notice. “I think you’d have to ‘proceed’, before I know if there was anything else I should have asked.” She says. 

“Showmanship.” Fiona murmurs. “I used to think, if the information’s good enough - if it’s true - then that’s enough. But it isn’t, is it?” She stirs her own drink, a caramelized garlic coffee.[i] Did you know that caramelized garlic produces a molecule thirty two times sweeter than sugar?[/i] “Moses brings the clay tablets, but it’s the wrath of God that makes people listen. I’m guessing when you’re saying you’re doing A Journalism, you’re not just Moses. You’re talking wrath, here.” 

Crystal nods at that, eyes closed in thought, then freezes. “What have you done…?” 

She’s a little scared. It just means she respects your capabilities. 

[b]What have you done?[/b]

The pipe’s not solid. It’s a carbon-fibre weave, connected to apertures every ten meters, like camera shutters. No gravity to make sense of the mass here, so pipes get cleared during a loss-of-pressure event like bowels do, clenching mechanical sphincters. Red, Black and Yellow are in place to watch it when it happens, and far away, Pink and White can see it through the panopticon. 

The blast of the Robert Goddard Cloud Pump is muffled under its own liquid mass. A critical piece of station infrastructure makes a sound like the world’s biggest soap bubble just popped. Liquid mass has inertia too, and more water floods its chambers, the shattered siphon screaming through the roaring wet mass like someone feeding an aluminum baseball bat into a kitchen disposal. The Cloud has other pumps, but the whole system has to be shut down to prevent a chain catastrophe. 

The mass of the Cloud begins to dissipate. The dreamlike storm riding the rail down the heart of Aevum, revealed to be nothing more than sacs and sprinkler heads. All of Aevum can see it, but they won’t know what it means for a little while. Already guesses are becoming rumours. 

That’s the moment Pink and White get emergency powers, in a distant office in Zeus. A brutalist basement filled with computer terminals and alligator clip wiring connecting shortwave, a place that still runs Windows XP as its core operating system and uses bluray drives for data storage, a place that cannot fail when everything else has. Soon, this cramped and airless place will be filled with people. But it’ll take maybe ten, fifteen minutes before anyone gets here. You’ve calculated forty before anyone with more seniority than Crimson Tower, but that number is impossible. The real number could be anything from forty seconds to never. 

Team Strawberry glows in hellish light, just point-eight of a second after Team Flood’s virus pulls its muffling hand away and lets the Goddard pump scream its electric death cry out. Any earlier, and the catastrophe might have been prevented. An unacceptable risk. 

And Red, Black and Yellow are in place to see it happen. The moment the carbon-fibre weave stops rippling like blood running through capillaries under the skin, and hiccoughs and gurgles as the entire sac lurches and clenches like a large intestine clears chyme. 

Then it hangs like whale sausage casing, stapled to rigid anchor points so the fluid casing doesn’t rub and graze neighbouring surfaces over the years. One rigid section covers the entirety of Goat’s vault below, no way down but through. 

The power cuts. The lines go dead. There is nobody around for miles. Now, in this moment, in this place without even gravity, this is the quietest, stillest point on Aevum. 

A moment later, a hum from below, as Goat’s local backup generator kicks in. No rest for the damned, for Erebus means Hell. 

Get to work. The clock’s started.