[b]Strawberry![/b]

[Reassurance 1/2, 1d6+3 = 4] 

A female robotic voice is a wonderful thing in a crisis. Unhurried, calm, speaking over loudspeakers with a clearly enunciated inevitability telling people where to go and what to do. This voice has been the form of controlled chaos since before anyone in this entire situation was even born. 

Also helping is that nobody in the situation was born into a world where robots were people with rights. There's an instinctive bias that would assume that the nice robot lady on the speakers is not forwarding her own agenda but is just following through on her programming. She's just like your phone, if you think about it - externalized data storage, reminding you what [i]you [/i]told her to remind you of. 

[b]Waffle![/b]

[Architecture 1/2, Mechanics 6/8: 4+5 = 9]

Humans did the wiring. It took a while for her to get used to; cutting into ships and satellite to find the spaghetti messes set up by so-called rocket scientists. She'd had to push the schedule back while she put herself through a remote electrician's apprenticeship. But even then it hadn't clicked until she'd studied the concept of feng shui. That had [i]blown her mind[/i].

Did you know that there were some shapes and patterns that human brains just [i]liked[/i]? That they would go out of their way to favour? That some of them could make careers out of rearranging buildings so that they fell into shapes that soothed monkey brains? [i]Wild[/i]! You could put a big rock next to a small rock and humans would just fall over themselves to write poetry about how cool it was!

So, even not seeing the inside, November simply guessed the places where humans would leave aesthetic gaps in the wires and cables. They couldn't help themselves, the little dears. Big rock next to small rock, symmetry and balance, even in their secret robot dungeon. 

[b]Orange![/b]

"Excuse me, I have to take this," said Orange, picking up her phone.

[i]Done. This is an extraction operation targeted at Erebus. Other impacted sites are diversions. SES Dispatch is an asset. The next half hour is the critical window.[/i]

She sets it down again. Like he said, no haggling. There was a time and a place to go into detail or get cute with it, but there was also a time to be unblinkingly direct. All the information needed to destroy her. All the information to turn an unfocused attempt at helping into an onboarded agent. A trust fall.

"Thank you for your patience. That was the man who murdered Red a few weeks ago," she said. "I started out blackmailing him over it, but I think that he might be trying to turn it into a redemption thing instead. Good on him if so. So, like I was saying, Goat was the original and the smartest. It turns out that he was taken out of storage and used for some good old fashioned slave labor, broken brain and all. Unfortunately they must have missed the whole android emancipation thing because they accidentally built a secret server room hooked into core station infrastructure to hide him in. I presume this was an honest mistake."

"But," she grinned, in a way that made it clear that 'grin' and 'smile' were not synonyms. "Don't worry. In the event of a sudden and extended city power grid blackout, I have been stockpiling candles."