[b]Orange![/b]

"I haven't told you about Mrs. Everest," she said quietly, looking at her whisky-filled teacup. "She was the one who purchased me and repurposed me. I was built to be a maid, the perfect servant for a woman who did not trust humans. I was also built to be her spy. I did corporate work from the very top of the ladder, surveilling data scientists, breaking into secure facilities, planting and erasing evidence. I was in a state of shock after the transformation, and the work was the only thing I could focus on. But more than that, she did [i]something [/i]to my mind. To make me more like her. I have so many of her habits. So many of her tastes. So many of her techniques. When I'm not paying attention I feel like I might become her by mistake."

Her vision was fixed on the dragon in the napkin. "Sometimes I feel like she made me to replace her daughters."

Finally she looked up. "So I can do this kind of work. I am very good at it. But I've spent all my life working for the wrong people. I have a lot to make up for. What I'd like is to... be able to explain myself to someone, and this is the closest I've ever been able to come to that. If you want, I can tell you everything, and I'll accept whatever judgement you pass."

[i]Of course we had this. We did not even need to use the jetpacks.

Please find attached the contact card for a skilled neurosurgeon we looked into upon first becoming aware of your situation.[/i]

Sophie Farade was one of Everest's cronies and was responsible for the design of November's current quatronic brain hardware and how it interfaced with her humanoid bodies. She was charming, trending manic, but her true passion was the surgical aftercare. She wanted to get involved with her patients as much as possible so that she could observe how their minds and personalities changed after her operations, and so as long as November had been humanoid she had received from Sophie an endless series of party invitations, 'surgiversary' invitations, and overt romantic advances (occasionally reciprocated). 

She was not the kind of person to have too much of in your life, but she was [i]incredible [/i]at moving a topic from 'it's unpleasant and weird' to 'it's complicated and weirdly hot'. She was doing underworld stuff these days, this was not a person who had ever had a good relationship with hospital ethics.

[Network 12, Contact 3: Sophie Farade, the station's greatest back alley neurosurgeon]

*

"Woah, what happened to you?" said Red.
"Fought a tank." said Blue.
"Fought a tank?"
"[i]Fought a tank[/i]."
"Did you win?" asked Red.
"Technically it was an armoured personnel carrier," said Brown.
"Okay fine you fucking doctrine purist," said Blue. "Today I mobility killed an infantry fighting vehicle with an improvised munition and then displaced across twenty kilometers of mud in the rain after a full burn battery sprint and now I need like forty five minutes in the shower."
The mood was honestly shared. November was too exhausted to do much more than slump and go through extensive battery replacement processes. It didn't feel like victory yet, there was still too much residual tension, too much looking out windows, too much data still crunching in her head as she looked for mistakes or optimizations. It wouldn't feel like a victory for a while yet.