[b]Crystal:[/b]

Her phone notifications start blowing up, but she ignores them for the minute. She’s already gone through ‘actually my flaws are okay because I’ve earned them’ once with Fiona, thank you very much. “That was more said to make it up to Red that this conversation had to happen in front of her.” It’s still [i]true[/i], mind. “You have your own ways of impressing me, and you do.”

She looks at Yellow and tries to put this into language she would understand, which is a difficult prospect because it requires trying to figure out the language Yellow might understand. “You would not be very impressed with me if I forgave unkindness for my own gratification. In fact, I don’t think there [i]is[/i] a way you could get out of this without me having to disappoint you, and I’d prefer not to disappoint you.”

She checks her phone notifications.

[b]Apostle:[/b]

“Hey, cool.” Apostle says, “Makes sense. In that case I’d put the TV news on because it’d piss Junta off more, just zone out if you want, and I think I smelled laksa in the cafeteria which, there’s no way it’s good, but I have to see.” They think for a second. “So yeah I’ll probably be back in ten minutes to tell you you’re doing a good job, and then I’ll go read in the other corner of the room for a bit. You’re doing good, by the way. Keep it up.” Awkward thumbs up.

It’s stilted because Apostle just, does not know how to give a compliment or praise like this. They just figure that if they’re talking to the part of the brain that does all the things nobody cares about doing, then it’s likely the part nobody cares enough to thank for doing it, so this is the correct thing to say.

The live news would be interesting. An android nurse comes in to make the other bed ready for a new patient, once they get out of surgery.

[b]Fiona:[/b]

Okay, the bowl is a big piece she needed. 

“You’re not one to one, you’re representative like political parties.” Fiona says as if it should have been obvious because it should have been, but it wasn’t. “So if your votes are-” She stops. “Okay. Who counts the votes?” She asks. “Is it something that could be hacked like,” she pulls a sharpie from her pocket (always be prepared for bodywriting at any moment) and scribbles over some of the red tiles in the bowl to make them black - but only on the inside, not from the outside. “Does anyone need to win votes, or can someone win by just changing the perceived weight of the voters? Could she marginalize someone indirectly doing that?” 

The park is sheltered, and you’re both hunkered in a big concrete bowl. Without the immediacy of a news channel, the world passes by for a moment.

At the start of WW2 there was an island shared by the Germans and the French. It took six months for them to receive the news they were at war. And they wouldn’t have been, if they hadn’t heard the news. 

[b]The Third Day:[/b]

There are a lot of ways this could tie to November’s actions, or the people she knows.

Zhang throws the first brick, only in a crowd because she was asked to be there. Maybe Crystal’s convention is the nucleus. Chaka gets found because she was forced to move to a less secure spot, and things spiral out of control from there. Numb does something stupid. The anthrozine prematurely publishes its atomic bomb in this moment, the one November hid in turtles. All the heat finally catches up to November, she’s tied to the movement, everyone’s outed as terrorists, everything sucks forever.

But history is greater than great people, and the world is bigger than that, and sometimes things just… happen. It’s just messy, it’s nothing to do with us, and we just have to live through it.

The match:

One of the leftists own homemade bombs blows up in a crowd, killing no one but wounding three. The garbage build quality that causes it to detonate prematurely at least causes it to detonate incompletely, wounding only three people in a packed crowd.

This is the primer that blows up the powder keg.

See, people further ahead in the crowd thought it was their people being attacked, and charged the anti-trans crowd who were just kind of waiting for it like Christmas morning. This is where the cops switch from observation to suppression.

After that, all the protests have to be treated as violent and made to disperse. Up until that point standing orders had been observe and watch and that was fine, but at that point the situation’s deemed too volatile and so everyone has to be made to go home.

The problem is everyone might have gone home until you tried to make them.

This is where things start to go how you’d expect.

This is when Zhang Ho takes her bricks and starts getting ready to be in a real shit-fight.

This is when Pope sits on a high rooftop covered in cameras in Apollo, all pointed at the streets above and below in like the old Google Streetview cars, a few friends and fellow journalists watching the cameras and checking batteries. They take turns going down the fire escape to the streets themselves, to do on-the-ground interview and bring back coffee and vape juice. A crate of gas masks sits at the corner.

This is when the almost-useless pineapples are used against Echidna’s crowd, and in rage they crash the lines, and heavier riot police are on their way to stop the ‘monsters’.

This is when FUCKING SKELETOR drags a cyclopean android away from the fires being started in Cerberus Augments, cycling in and out as it alternates between extinguished and reignited in cyclic retribution, the place is held responsible for Echidna’s people on the other side of the station. Violence begets violence, and the information exchange across the whole world is immediate.

The police station keeping brutaldickshots is unseeable through the teargas they’ve flooded the entire street in, corner-to-corner. Some brave souls use it as cover to hurl lithium bombs through the cover of the smoke, causing incredible, beautiful chemical reactions to burn through the clouds as they’re hurled.

These people are just a fringe minority that most people don’t feel that strongly enough about to be this violent towards, so this riot isn’t to hit the levels of the Watts Rebellion from 200 years ago, a pressure cooker of racism and redlining.

This is worse in a different way though. Look up, and around, and you see the whole world with just a decent pair of binoculars. When the George Floyd riots happened in the US, it was contained to the US, the riots stopped at the borders. Here there are no borders. Just as the founders intended, this is one people, with one language.

The fire is less intense, but it is also unbounded. It’s [i]everywhere[/i].

The first thing they’re going to do is shut down the train lines, and then it’ll be much harder for everyone Crystal’s holding to get home. Two options - get everyone out now using Zhang’s opening, or talk the hotel into letting everyone stay one more night despite everyone here being a target, and trying to get out when it’s safe.

But they’re about to shut down the train lines everywhere, for everyone except emergency vehicles. Wherever November is now, she’s about to be stuck there.

[b]Anthrozine:[/b]

The chat thrums with sleeper members, the barely-actives.

Showing up with HartlyDworkin are names like IRA_Glass, paperkatana, foot_to_the_left, BreadSanta, SapphoOfAphrodite, and puttingHisbootsOn (from the Pratchett quote about truth), the chat is dinging like crazy with news and updates.

Everyone just assumes York’s got his phone off because he’s in the thick of it, and they’re not wrong. But it’s left the commotion a leaderless fracas just sharing as much information as they can, much like the world around them.