[b]Persephone:[/b]

Half the problem is just in [i]understanding[/i] the tech goblin. I’ll give a rough translation: 

You get a [i]lot [/i]on Yggrasil. They’re a company run in the style of a medieval guild, so their executive suite reads like a Jane Austen novel. This takes time to get through, and you lose track of it every time you need to actually pay attention to the camera work you’re doing, but your erstwhile assistant writes it all down for you on their end. 

Of note? Something November stumbled on, actually. Remember that dinner table conversation with Blue and Orange trying to network through babysitting for a prominent prosecutor? Halfway down page 6, search for Daniel Perez. Yggdrasil poached Orochi’s head geneticist before this event. Orochi tried to sue unsuccessfully, failed on activating an NDA. 

Yggdrasil is a deeply insular company though, look at them. It’s deeply unusual for them to bring an outsider in like that, and Orochi didn’t let it go peacefully. 

You know who’s not in the room right now? Conspicuously absent from anyone I’ve described so far?

Anyone from Orochi Group. (Page 9). 

Even a few people from Crown and Slate showed up, mostly to offer gabs of money to the more inspiring experimental showings. Your tech goblin asks if it’s considered insider trading to buy stocks while she shouts it out for you. You have a feeling she’s going to do it either way. 


[b]November:[/b]

[b]Green:[/b]

This is where Remoil would give a villain speech, except she has nothing interesting to say. Not here, not now, not to you. She represents something interesting, though. She will not speak to [i]things[/i], which is a shame, because her [i]things[/i] say more interesting things about her than Remoil could.

Culinarily and culturally, the cygnus that Remoil drinks is most similar to a mint julep, the drink of choice for the discerning Southern plantation owner. It’s a necessary update - real bourbon can still only come from specific geographic regions of the United States, with strict conditions that are undesirable to match. The kind of malted liquor in a Cygnus wasn’t invented until the 2060s.

Like, take bourbon barrel aging. Two years leaving distilled alcohol to sit and absorb the flavours through osmosis? Take the same charred wood and make it into toothpicks instead of barrels, throw it in the entire bulk-distilled vat, and buzz the thing with ultra-sonic frequencies, and you get the same thing. You can skip barrelling and go straight to bottling. 

By the time you’ve figured that out, you’re already making concessions to how to do the whole thing better. Does it have to be charred wood, or can you just vibrate the flavour out of [i]anything[/i]? Or if you’re still wiggling charred wood, does it have to be absorbed into distilled alcohol? Can you make a whiskey-aged beer instead? Sure - you can even make whiskey-aged [i]milk[/i] like that. At some point ‘real bourbon’ just ends up looking like over-regulated toilet wine. 

Sure, all very culinarily interesting, but what’s the point? 

Everything. All of it. Think about it. 

Remoil orders a drink with a tradition, a legacy. There’s a break in that legacy, the earth itself that it was borne from was razed. But the kind of person that tradition was made for reasserts themself. A return to the old order of things - literal order, drink order - done a new way. The new technology that should have threatened that old way of doing things just lets it re-establish itself, reinvigorates it. 

Remoil thinks she would prefer a mint julep, because she’s never had one. And she’ll never have one, because a cygnus is better in every way. Nobody serves real mint juleps anymore.

She’ll spend the rest of her life looking for one, not knowing just how unhappy she’d be if she ever got it. 

It’s a long trip to Thrones. Remoil takes a quiet comfort in the length of the journey, because she doesn’t want to be where she’s going. This is who wears the boot, who picks the route the boot will march, endless faces caught in the treads. 

Dad’s planning on meeting you on arrival. Do you plan on introducing him to Remoil? It might be funny. 



[b]Yellow:[/b]

The station flickers around you - even in the green spaces, the districts still encircle you as horizon and sky. There’s a crack like a snapping suspension bridge as a piece of substation blows in the distance. 

It’s happening more frequently, since Goat was pulled from the system. The hail-mary dry-clean of the Goddard pump wrapped up, but that didn’t fix it. To everyone’s shock, it seemed to make everything worse - Like putting too much load into a spring until it snaps, when you were relying on it to push [i]back[/i] at the end, reset itself. Instead pulling the load off just gives room for all those broken pieces to rattle loose, show the extent of the damage. 

Spaceships and tugboats fly past the station windows - those big chunks of skylight that run beneath the trans-district rail lines. Ships commandeered into picking up the slack as the station’s orbital defenses lose efficiency, as the station stops being able to maneuver in its orbit to dodge the larger asteroids. 

These are just the first few hours. The nature of Goat’s work is that these things will get worse as they [i]compound[/i]. 

It begs the first question from Fiona. “Okay, so it’s getting pretty obvious how big a conspiracy this must have been. Like, starting to understand how causing as much damage as you did could still be considered keyhole surgery, in context.” She jerks a thumb over her shoulder in the direction of smoke rising from that distant crackling. “Is there a plan on fixing this?” 

Crystal is terrible at bushwalking. A rock in front of her foot, and she looks down at it and jumps it like she’s skipping a rain puddle. A sharp contrast to Yellow’s uncanny grace. “The surgical removal of an organ that the host had no right to carry, of course, there shall be no hand-wringing on that account. But if it turns out the organ is vital…” Crystal walks up a rise in the dirt path and comes down again, to avoid an easily stepped-over pothole. “Let’s drop the metaphor, before it becomes unflattering.” 

Their speech mannerisms have an overlap here, but the intonation is different. Fiona speaks with a scientific grunginess, casual but with precise wording. A huge brain making low effort. Crystal instead speaks with a poet’s affect and a diplomat’s intent. A poet understands that words that are literal synonyms don’t always [i]feel[/i] the same, and a diplomat knows that misunderstandings lie in every ambiguity. Their voicing becomes more similar under pressure - Fiona sounds a bit more like Crystal when she has to make an effort, and Crystal adopts more of Fiona’s vocabulary for its utility. 

“The continuation of the metaphor is that we’d be parasites on the host body that just got operated on.” Fiona finishes for her, and Crystal wrinkles her nose in distaste but doesn’t argue. “I guess that’s part of what I’m asking. Say it turns out there [i]isn’t[/i] a way to fix this. At least, not in time. Would you still have done it, knowing that?” 

Crystal seems very interested in the answer. Neither seem like they’d lash out at confirmation you’d do it again, knowing it would mean the end of Aevum - the fault there would lie on the people who made things that way.