[b]Persephone:[/b]

Piper does not hide her contempt. She is exhausted by you, exhausted down to her titanium bones. “If you’re going to try to pull strings on me, at least don’t rub my face in it. It makes me feel slimy when I think you’re right.” She glances around the room, starts weighing people up along those lines. “Usually the passion projects just get treated as mise en scene. We can do better.” 

Here’s your problem. Piper starts doing the interviews, and it’s good. She’s relaxed, friendly and interested - at least, to everyone but you. In other hands people like Talbot make for terrible television, but your host shines like a diamond on camera, and she has a way of sharing her sparkle. The problem is you’ve got her hanging around the small players, sticking to safe topics. Talking about the art doesn’t help you here. 

It does help Piper though. She might be less hostile to you, if you play this without ulterior motives for a bit. Maybe. But it’d have to look like an active decision you made, not just failing at investigating. 

You can use an Art History spend here to find a hidden gem in the room, something completely overlooked, but with real [i]charisma[/i] to it. Something with more emotional power than just a science fair project. She might be more tolerant when you move down to the stables that way.

Or you could start talking to Priyah while Piper’s focused on interviews. Aim the camera at a target while pretending to do a gear check, and have her run facial recognition from her tech-den, tell you something. Piper’s just going to notice your heart’s not in it, if you do.

Priyah’s eager for it, though. She jumps at the first chance she gets. 

“Lady’s Maria. S’not Yggdrasil.” Priyah tells you about the lady in the leg armor, while Piper’s letting Talbot shine. Then Priyah starts to click her tongue like a geiger counter in a hotzone. “Oof. BlackSun sec honch. Bad-bad-bad, way bad. Gone legit? Big doubt. Fronting muppet, bet.” 

Oh yeah. BlackSun may be gone, but the people who got rich off it? Lingering like a fart in an elevator. Though in Maria’s case, maybe more like Zyklon in a shower.

“Oof.” You can [i]hear[/i] Priyah wince through the earpiece. “Powerplegic.” Now there’s an obscure bit of slang that you’re intimate with. It means paraplegic but with enough cybernetics that it’s a strict upgrade. Priyah’s extremely comfortable using the word around you, doesn’t see a problem with it - the [i]oof[/i] means she just read the wiki on how it happened. That’s almost always oof worthy, you know. 

[b]November:[/b]

[b]Strawberry:[/b]

[i]I rolled - 5, 6, 1. If you can make two successes, dealer busts. For now-[/i]

Three voices are starting to emerge. 

First is Aaron Knightly, permanent SES liaison at the Cloud - Lord knows it needs one. He doesn’t outrank you in the chain of command, but he is a direct expert and closer to the scene. 

Knightly is young, bored and ambitious. He’s chosen a cherry role for himself that ensures that, when this day came, he had a chance to make a name for himself and end up in a history book. Not because he feels like he [i]deserves[/i] it, not because he’s a vainglorious or arrogant. But because he’s always dreamed of one day being the hero people [i]deserved[/i], in the right place at the right time. He’s a former EMT with his head in the Cloud, and boots on the ground. 

He’s going to be a problem, but you’ve got him on side. For all his pull as someone at the scene, for all his accolades and the respect of his peers, he sees you as useful - his Man in the Van. And that’s critical. The second he sees you as an obstacle between him and the crisis, he’ll cut you out of the loop and make his own. 

It’s like Pratchett said. If he were in it for the vanity, he’d gloat, he’d preen, he’d take you down a peg. But this is a good man. A whiff of double-agent on you, and he’ll cut you without a word. 

Second is the agency executive in command, Alison Mycroft. She’s been quiet through this, because her authority is well-established and ironclad. But she trusts her delegates to do their role. This makes her more dangerous to you - because she’s not spending any of her energy talking, ordering, she’s spending it all [i]listening[/i] and assessing. The humble Alexa app routine doesn’t pass her filters - but your uncanny situational awareness means it doesn’t need to. 

Third is someone out of the chain entirely, unfamiliar but giving incredibly specific updates and details. They identify as an engineer, Bruce Spring, not part of SES but a maintenance local who’s given himself a field promotion. Make a roll. Sense Trouble, hidden difficulty. You can also spend from your Surveillance pool for this one. The guy’s flagging your bullshit detector, but without concentrated effort, you can’t tell if you’re over-or-under reacting. 

All three represent a threat to your social capital in some way: Knightly beats you for being in the right place at the right time, and Spring is your rival for assessment and reportage. Mycroft is the ref. 

This is a situation co-ordinating dozens of people - soon it’s going to be hundreds. Just having made it to the semifinals is to be commended. 

[b]Waffle:[/b]

Dead on. 

You stop when you hit the back of a storage cabinet. The cut starts going too fast, the molten metal vaporizes instead of liquifies. Here’s an analogy: Picture a carpenter running a plank of wood along a band saw, oblivious to his finger being in the path of the sawblade. Imagine the reaction time to hit the emergency stop button when the blade’s only left a papercut. When the cabinet surface solidifies again, you can barely see a few pinpricks of red emergency lighting through the smattering of tiny all-the-way-throughs. Mostly it looks like bubbles on a pigiron pancake. 

You have no idea what’s in the cabinet, bolted to the wall. You don’t know where the bolt points are, but you can probably find and shear them with some improvisation and tools. 

Could be anything in that cabinet. Could even be a server rack, part of a quatronic core on the other side, a risk of a lobotomy. Could just be cleaning supplies. Hard to tell from this side.

Difficulty 2 to break through the cabinet. Difficulty 4 for the cabinet to survive intact - It might be wasted effort, though, when time and energy are finite. 

[b]Flood:[/b]

Eyes up.

News from Strawberry Team. Spring and Knightly are choosing their play. Water in micro-g is horrendous, but its still [i]water[/i]. Their plan is to vapourize it, suck it up using the Marangoni effect. Surface tension goes haywire in microgravity, see, and back in the 2010s they found out that vacuum tube heat pumps on the ISS weren’t working how they were supposed to. Instead of liquids vaporizing at the hot end and condensing at the cool end, they found that the hot end was acting as a [i]magnet[/i], pulling the vapour towards it. The plan is running a big enough vaporizing surface to draw all the water out. 

Bring the entire damaged section above boiling point, and the water will be energetic enough to start funneling towards the hottest point. The heat fatigue is going to be a nightmare to fix, but it’s the lesser of two nightmares. 

Here’s a fun question - what’s November’s safe operational temperature range?