[b]Blood and Bandages:[/b]

Rudy stares flatly. “You’ve seen them. Hell, you’ve [i]cleaned[/i] them, back when I just thought you were just a maid.” A pause. “I remember thinking you were good. The collection’s still in my office - along with all my papers and documents.” He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a keyring. There aren’t many keys on it, but the ones that are there are interesting shapes - multiple staggered bits, a twisting helix. “Just make sure you grab the collection while you find what you’re looking for. And [i]please[/i] be careful with it? Some of them are very, very old.” 

You have cleaned them. Some of them are literally doubloons and pieces of eight. Forget ‘trust’ and ‘voluntary co-operation’, this would make burying him with his gold [i]very aesthetic[/i]. 

Sophie scrolls through her phone and offers Blood a glance at a choke-chain collar she’s just found, designed to look like a stethoscope. You pull down on the stethoscope part, see, and the ring around the neck tightens. Too much? 

[b]Zeus:[/b]

Pope vapes. 

He’s an older model, but he’s still equipped with a full sensory suite - just not pseudo-digestion. That one required a bit too much space to be worth the trouble, space that was still needed for other pieces. The vaporizer is a sharp hit of flavour and stimulation with very little to clean. 

So he lounges in the chair of an empty cafe across the street from the Old Court, leaning as far back in his chair as the furniture will allow and stares at the half-burned building across the street. He wears a crisp black suit with starched white cuffs rolled over the sleeves - it doesn’t look refined, it makes him look like an old-fashioned ventriloquist’s dummy. And when he talks it’s with such explosive body language you’d think they were a series of sneezes, except if you were listening to him - then you can see how the gestures match his words. 

In short? Pope neither emphasizes nor hides his inhumanity. He thrives in the borderline, one foot squarely planted on each side of the line, where it suits him. 

“Were you there, when we burned this place down?” He asks, curiously. He was, clearly. “Twelve years ago, I think. 68. All the strikebreaking, all the unions, and the fires didn’t start until the corporations got challenged on the idea,” he rolls these last words like a cloud of candied smoke around his tongue, “that they might be legally and financially accountable for us? And they dared to look at their spreadsheets and their little black books and think those numbers added up for them, the numbers looked [i]goood[/i]. And we heard that’s what it came down to?” He takes a real puff of the vape pen, then, and gestures with the rig to the burned-out hull across the street. “Were you there that night, when we rebalanced those numbers for them, showed them what the cost of that paternal, patriarchal bullshit could be?”

This isn’t just a history lesson; He can’t tell how old you are. He really doesn’t know. He does know how much he’s oversimplifying things here, though. If you weren’t there it’s a teaser, but if you were then it’s a toast. 

[b]Goat:[/b]

“How do you change the rules of the game?” Several different voices ask it in unison. Some curious, others sad, others frustrated, others angry. But it’s a big enough question that there is harmony in asking it. 

But at least it shows an understanding - those things about bulldozing Zeus, Goat at least understands those are the symptoms of winning and not the method. 

“What do I do now?” A smaller voice asks, timid. It’s the voice of Goat that isn’t being swept along by how new and exciting everything is - it’s the voice that’s scared that Goat was happy how things were before, and might not be happy again.