[b]Fiona:[/b]

“It’s only like that at first, and if you get out of practice.” She laughs. “I’m way out of practice right now, so it’d be like that for me too. But it’s just like this.” She starts to unfold Pink’s face from her head. “Maintenance. The longer you leave it, the more builds up, the harder it gets.” 

The mechanical face isn’t the old nightmare animatronics they used to be, they’re not puppetry as Hazel would put it. Printed electronics, like the charcoal loom suggested to Blue, run through piezoelectrics give a sturdy latex-laminar mask the kind of organic, responsive omnidirectional pull and tug of real muscles. Think of it like a television screen made of RGB diodes creating incredibly complex and responsive light patterns but using contraction forces, instead, to create the incredibly complex and subtle varieties of expression. 

It’s like carefully peeling off a mud mask at a spa. Underneath is smooth contact points, but the seal isn’t airtight. The brushed nickel-alloy beneath is meant to be completely smooth and frictionless besides the joints - jaw, eyelids, eyes - a polished mannequin. But tears have rusted lines along her cheeks, food and drink around the contacts of her lips, under her hair splotches rust like spilled dye. Rust resistance can only do so much in a charged material, over time. 

“See, like this, you smile with your eyes.” Fiona whispers, wrapping two fingers of her right hand in the fine-grit sandpaper and dabbing it in the oil, working underneath the eyes first to wipe away the tear-marks. “It’s not even a metaphor, if you don’t put work into fixing yourself up after you cry, then it’s going to feel harder to smile, because there’s resistance to it. We can fix it, but it just takes a bit of work to fix it.” 

“For most people the hard part’s choosing to do it though. Now…” Fiona looks at the phone and checks some settings. It feels weird, like how it must feel to be a ghost touching the planchette through someone’s hand on a ouija board. “Yeah, here we go. If you want to practice it, you can just reboot the phone, and you’ll be locked out for about five seconds. Good enough to start?”

[b]Crystal:[/b]

There is something about the way she asks [i]‘But that is your wish, right?[/i]’ that reminds Crystal of a monkey’s paw. Those old stories of people who get exactly what they want, but at an ironic price. A cursed thing. 

She doesn’t ignore this, or dismiss this. There is no brain convincing the gut that it is throwing up false warnings, she knows she should listen to this feeling and so she does. It’s just that Crystal always came away from those stories with a different takeaway than was likely intended;

When one wishes on a monkey’s paw, always make sure your wish is worth any possible cost.

Crystal: It is.


[b]The Train Station:[/b]

From walking the street:

2 at the front entrance, the only ones visible. Street cops in basic uniform. 

From throwing a brick through the window of a building down the road (that has already had windows broken):

4 on immediate scouting duty. Heavily armored, carrying mattocks. 

From a drone to the high windows: 

Dead. 

Dead? Yes, this killed the drone. They’ve got a microwave gun setup like battleships used to have CIWS, but it going off doesn’t twig anyone new. Seems like their bugzapper’s going off a lot. 

Okay, try again with a faraday cage and the pre-programmed flight path. You don’t want to do that first try because it makes it way bulkier, more visible, and it won’t be able to connect to it until it’s landed again, but it’ll work. Especially if you’re not the only one trying this, as some geeks from the Apollo group get over-enthusiastic to play the objective themselves. 

4 playing poker inside, 4 more rotating turns of a fighting game with their console hooked up to the platform train-time screen. They’re all wearing heavier armor than the remote scouts, with a line of weapons established on the platform in pop-up cabinets. Proper riot shields, mattocks, guns, grenades and grenade launchers for varying degrees of escalation, and a heavily locked crate full of live ammunition that nobody believes they’ll have to open - it’s covered in thick lines of dust. 

16 from a cursory glance. There’s more but it’ll take a spend to reveal where they are. Spending a second point would let you declare something useful that would give you an edge, or simply take the extras out of the fight immediately. 

It looks like they’re treating the station as the point of safe evacuation for the other cops in the area, this is their escape route too. 

This is a problem for more than just the increased police presence it represents to you, it means that they’re going to [i]freak the fuck out[/i] if an army takes out their line of egress - an army that’s already on the march. This has the potential to go from Les Mis to Black Hawk Down very quickly. 

[b]Zhang Ho:[/b]

LetsGoHo!: 117 pierre brissot st help

She’s managed to wedge herself somewhere no-one would find her unless they’re looking for her when she messages November, because that’s the only person she knows who’s close enough right now. She owes her life to whoever dropped a paper receipt on their way out, their dedication to not giving an email address just saved Zhang having to turn on tracking services to find this place’s address. 

She smells smoke but the adrenaline quit on her and she can’t move anymore. 

117 Pierre Brissot is about 2km from the Castle in the opposite direction of the march, which was the point of her agitating there. Valkyries are perfect for this, but they’re going to ask questions about what they’re doing.


[hider=PerfidiouslyFickle plays the objective]

Binh Van Ut wakes up in a hospital bed, but she has to guess that because the room is pitch black, but her bed doesn’t normally have so many buttons on it. Her stomach hurts like crazy, and she’s been crying in her sleep, and her throats’ raw from throwing up so much, but mostly she just feels incredibly embarrassed. 

Guiltily, she wished she’d died so she didn’t have to deal with the shame of having tried to kill herself and failed. Even in a pitch-black room she throws the blankets over her head and hides from that, bringing her head down to her knees and her knees up to her forehead. It is a [i]guilty[/i] thought though, because she doesn’t want that anymore. She just had to try to know that.

She realizes she can’t get a glass of water for her throat without asking for one.

Crap. 

Binh grabs out for the remote in the darkness before she can think about it and presses the button, then drops it like it’s burned her and quickly scrabbles to find it in her bedsheets again, trying to find an undo button. She can’t feel one, just a second button on the remote that should turn the bed light on and off, but it’s been disabled. 

There’s a crack of corridor light as a nurse opens the door a little. A rattle of curtains on the other side of the door, and the spillover from the corridor becomes shadow. “You need anything, sweetheart?” 

The nurses aren’t supposed to call you things like that anymore, but Binh always liked it when they did. It meant more because she knew they weren’t supposed to. “Just some water, please. Thank you. And I’m not that sensitive anymore, some light’s okay.”

There’s a slight pause as the nurse behind the door thinks carefully. “There’s a journalist here who’s been asking if there’s anyone who was affected by yesterday who’d like to talk about it. Is that someone you’d like to talk to?” 

“Journalist?” Binh pulls the blankets all the way down and perks up on the bed. “Uh. That sounds important. Do you think I should?” 

“She seems nice.” The nurse said, and Binh recognized the voice - ‘It's illegal to say what I want’, you heard it whenever they had test results for you and you asked them an obvious question. She just didn’t understand why she was using it now. 

“Uh, okay. You can tell her she can talk to me.” 

“I’ll see if she’s still here.” The nurse said. “When I get your water. Hold on.” 

The door shut, and the room was dark, and Binh fell back into bed and thought different thoughts instead. Her heart raced. Journalists were… Well they weren’t real. They were TV people. They had [i]life experience[/i]. They actually saw the world and had opinions on it. To a total shut-in, a journalist wasn’t a job so much as a fantasy class like ‘wizard’ or ‘paladin’. 

Rehearsing what she could say was like meeting Gandalf for lunch because he had some important questions for you. You couldn’t refuse Gandalf! But her world was even smaller than the Shire. 

There was a knock at the door. “Yes?” 

Someone slipped through into the darkness, a new voice this time. “Hi, would you be Binh Van Ut?” She pronounced Binh’s name right on the first try, which meant she had to be the journalist. 

“Uh, yeah.” 

“Cool beans!” The young woman paused at the door. “Do you mind if I open the door a bit more to let some light in?”

“I’ll tell you if it gets too much.” Binh said nervously, and the journalist opened the door crack by crack until the room was about as bright as a clearing in a full moon. To Binh’s eyes it might as well be midday, but it was clear the woman was still struggling with it as she brought a pitcher of water and some paper cups in with her. 

She was a bit short, and soft, and not that much older than Binh which was even more intimidating. And she wasn’t wearing a suit or anything, her green tube top barely covered her chest, and her op-shop brown pleat skirt was just as short and flowed with her movements. She had tattoos, too, bunny rabbits and a chemical chain and other stuff Binh couldn’t make out. 

She reminded Binh of a sunflower. 

She put the water down on the folding table beside Binh’s bed, and gave a two fingered wave by bending her fingers like flopping bunny rabbit ears. “It’s lovely to meet you. I write under PerfidiouslyFickle for the Anthrozine, you can call me P.F, it’s okay if you haven’t heard of us.” She said before Binh could feel bad that she hadn’t. “Now, do you want me to ask you questions, or do you just want to tell me what you think’s important to say, and I just listen?”

“I… What do you want me to say?” 

P.F held her phone underneath the blanket at Binh’s feet while she dimmed the brightness as low as it’d go. “A lot of people are angry and fighting right now because they don’t understand you.” The journalist says, and she smiled at Binh but her eyes were sad. “I’m not asking you to help me make those people less angry. I’m just worried how much it has to hurt you. We, me and the website, we thought it might help if you felt like someone was listening.” 

And it was so [i]nice[/i] that it hurt, and Binh pulled the blanket back over her head and bit her forearm to cope with it. She poked her head back out again when she was ready to keep her composure. “I still don’t know what to say, though.” 

P.F blinked, and her smile finally reached her eyes. “I guess I didn’t answer the question very well, did I?” No, she did, Binh felt like an idiot. “Nobody’s told me anything about you except your name, and that you might like to talk to me. I don’t know anything more than that, okay? And I think I can guess why you’re here, and I’m okay with talking about that if you are if you think that’s important,” she shows her phone’s recording and puts it down next to the water, in Binh’s reach so she can hit the stop button on it herself any time she wanted to. “It’s not where I want to start, though. I think the best way to start might be… Tell me about your ideal body, and what a day in it would feel like?” 

Binh held the blanket in her hands. “I…” Binh blushed. It wasn’t the [i]way [/i]people normally asked. Her way of thinking about her ideal body suddenly felt vain and narcissistic and horny and weird, because it was so tied up in how she wanted people to [i]treat [/i]her. And that was why everyone was angry, right? Maybe she would have lied about it, if the journalist wasn’t so much exposed skin and tattoos herself. “I’d be beautiful.” She starts, stops, gauges the reaction like testing a landmine for the click. 

Normally when she says that it’s to her Dad, and he rushes to tell her that she’s [i]already [/i]beautiful, even though her skin’s so pale and sick it looks like she’s made of jellyfish, and it’s fucked all her hormones up and she’s grown wrong because of it. Her doctors told her she’s two inches shorter than she should be.

P.F doesn’t. “Tell me about it.” She says, instead. 

At the end, Binh feels bad about how much of the journalist’s time she takes up, how much of the phone’s harddrive she fills up with the recording, because she can’t stop herself from saying [i]everything[/i]. She’s never had anyone she could tell [i]everything[/i] to before, and she can’t help herself no matter how hard she tries. 

She doesn’t understand why P.F is so polite about it, acts like Binh’s the one doing [i]her[/i] a huge favour for saying it. 

[/hider]