[b]Euna:[/b]

“It’s all on camera, anyone can see what those guys were like. I think you’ll be fine, and I'll still be there Friday if you are!” Mew says after she finishes bowing back, with the reassuring innocence of someone who hasn’t been caught in the gears of the legal system before, and mistakes that experience as anxiety in Euna. “You weren’t just going to keep doing this all night until you got hurt or arrested, were you? You’ll be safe?” 

She holds the glass door to her apartment open instead of going through it at that, tail swishing. Mew doesn’t realize she’s asked two completely unrelated questions, and there are already more map pins on Euna’s phone she could be heading towards instead.

[b]Crimson Tower:[/b]

“You didn’t-” Corday starts, but then there’s a clatter as Ms Becerra’s wireless mouse loudly falls to the floor and she bends out of her chair to pick it up. When Corday looks over, the glare Ms Becerra is giving her is enough to startle her into thinking. “Right, sorry, I’m only used to people taking credit for my good ideas.” 

I would take a beat here, Crimson Towers, to secure your position. You are about to do some things here that are questionably legal and incredibly dodgy on a very visible system.

There’s a few things you can opt to do - move your side team here to a more hidden area so it’s physically harder to stop you, spend a point of human terrain or similar figuring out and neutralizing the people here capable of stopping you, or use your org chart to blackmail someone in Zeus to kick this up the chain of command and get some official sanction, bring other colours in to support Red here. Or some other thing I’m not thinking of.

Either way, you are about to piss off the cops in every district simultaneously, and it'd be to your benefit to hold on to the saddle long enough to organize the second wave of transfer trains, you can't even fake that requisition until this wave has forced the issue. The Crimson Tower identity is not going to survive this, but the longer it holds up the longer two major government organizations are fighting each other instead of just you.

[b]Fiona:[/b]

“I just want to see what happens when you make something for you.” She hugs Pink tight, lets her grip fall slack and pushes away again. 

“Okay, so,” she says in that tone of I Am Bracing For A Hard Talk, “I also said I could debug you, but I was thinking… How do you feel about [i]daemonology[/i]?” 

“I was just thinking, with how Green works, and how Red’s been doing better lately, and worrying about Yellow - I’m not a brain surgeon, I can’t do that kind of subtle tweak. But I could put a partitioned subroutine in there for you.” She fidgets with her oil-stained fingers and looks away. “It’s how people used to do black magic, we can’t access our subconscious very well, but you can train yourself to imagine a little daemon who lives there, and the little daemon can read your subconscious and tell you what’s back there.”

“I was thinking about it before I knew meditation would do anything for you, so maybe it’d be overkill. But it’d give you a way to think thoughts that you wouldn’t be able to think normally, because of how you’re specialized. A second voice in your head. It wouldn’t sound like your own thoughts, so it’s not like it’s deceiving you, it’d be more like… having someone who can read the walkthrough for you while you’re holding the controller.” 

She’s overselling it because she knows she’s prescribing a benevolent schizophrenia, the kind of thing that when it goes wrong in people ends with them blowing themselves up in the Nevada desert with L Ron Hubbard. It’s just that, well, the Zodiac engines are built different. And unlike people, Pink could just [i]delete[/i] it if it goes bad. 

A voice that converts what she’s not noticing about the world into poetry for her. A voice that can do guided meditation when she’s overwhelmed. A voice that can tell her why, when someone hurts her, it’s their fault and not hers. Hell, if she’s practicing willpower and selfishness, Fiona’s daemon could externalize whatever thoughts she’s suppressing so she can have a conversation with them instead of just not thinking about them. Like a White whose only existence was to be bullied and teased.

So, like White. 


[b]Train Gang:[/b]

It’s funny, ‘jumping the shark’ is a trope term that’s mutated from its original meaning to just when a show got too ridiculous, too absurd, referencing the Fonz on Happy Days literally jumping a shark. An important part of it is that it’s a high point, too, it’s the moment a show stops being able to beat itself. There is nowhere left for it to go from here. 

Cyan jumps the cookie shark. 

Everyone loves this, the addition of the character lurching about, the threat of the antagonist. It’s fun. But it’s so much fun that everyone loses the cohesion of the chant, the direction of their district leaders. It now just becomes a game of screaming blame to send the cookie cop elsewhere when they get to close, broken mob cries and random instructions all at once. 

And that’s [i]fun[/i]. Nobody sees the problem in the moment it happens, because it’s just a solid escalation of the bit. But without that cohesion there’s no way to keep it going, and no way to restart the bit when it’s over, and it’s just kind of the end of the game.

The bit peaked, the bit died.

It was probably going to get old soon anyway, and this was a good way to end it.

The first double-decker train arrives for Gaea, the doors open. People start boarding and finding seats even though it’s not going to leave yet, not for a while. Soon the train for Zeus, then Ares, then Apollo, then Hermes will come one by one, based on how far they’ll have to travel. Gaea leaves now, because it has the furthest if it’s going to arrive at the same time as everyone else. 

And like the cookie detective, nobody thinks of it this way when it first happens - most are jealous that Gaea are the first to all get chairs right now, and the people packed in them are waving out the window as the train pulls from the station with all the green faces. But this was the last moment of complete community before the isolation of a lesser home than the one they’re coming from. 

From fear, to triumph, to distraction, the Gaea train leaving is the first time it starts to sink in - Who actually wants to go home right now?

Who’s ready to not feel safe anymore?

It’s well past sunset now, deep into dusk. It will be true night when all these trains are due to arrive at their destinations - the real ones, not the fake ones they're currently aimed at.

Maybe it'd be less melancholy if Black hadn't made the right decision before, if there was tension and threat and a sense of real siege. This was supposed to be the hard part, wasn't it? The setup is still without a punchline. They're realizing they're not going to be together to face it, when it happens. 

[b]York:[/b]

He wakes up in the hospital bed and, in the first moment he realizes where he is, [i]slams[/i] the call nurse button tap-tap-tap-[i]tap-tap[/i]. He doesn’t see Brown yet, or Junta, or much of anything really. 

A blonde comes in pretty quick. Service is good here because it’s overstaffed for Junta’s sake. “Yes, Charlie? Mr York?”

“Mmgmfm.” He starts, stops, points to his mouth. 

“Right, of course, I’ll get that for you.” She closes the antibacterial privacy curtain around his bed and puts on a pair of nylon gloves, so she can remove the cotton wadding from York’s mouth. He chews at nothing for a second and groans.

“They didn’t use opiates for me did you?” He asks, real fear in his voice. “Do you know?” 

“I don’t know, sorry, but I can ask. We mostly use synthetic parblistadones now but,” she looks at him. “I’ll ask.” 

He lets his head fall back to the pillow as she leaves. You can get clean from stuff like heroin or dilaudid, but it really is a lifelong thing. A dose of surgical anesthetic can trigger going through withdrawals from the beginning, all over again. 

She’s back a minute later and slips behind his curtain. “There was a mix of remiparablistadone and hydromorphone, which is an opioid. There wasn’t anything in your record, do we need-” 

“No, it’s, it’s, no.” York interrupts. “Just, uh. Nothing in my record, huh? Good, good to know.” 

“I’ll have to make a note of you asking.” She says, half warning and half apologetic. “Confidential to you being here, but if you start having cardiac symptoms or refusing painkillers, that’s going to need to be passed on.” Or asking for more painkillers than you should, she doesn’t say, but he knows she’s thinking it.

“No it’s just, just,” he’s in too much pain to think of a lie as to why he’s asking, so he leaves it, “Can I have my phone?” 

“It’s locked in the cupboard here with everything else you had on you, I can get it for you.”

“Cheers.” 

He stays logged off the Anthrozine chat when he gets it though, Brown notices. Or anything really, he’s just clutching it like a security blanket - he can’t see through the curtain, but she can.