[b]Brown:[/b]

I’m going to be honest there’s like, no easy way home from where you are and a mob outside but legging it is probably the lesser of two evils here, yeet. Just means York’s going to be seeing you took over the channel for a bit without him.

[b]Fiona:[/b]

“That’s harder.” Fiona admits. “I think… Well. Actually. You did ask if people don’t use drugs to help with meditation, and they do.” 

“Okay, so there is one thing I can think of. They first synthesized LSD trying to isolate the chemicals that gave people religious visions, and it’s really well documented. I can’t give you a real dose, but-” She takes her phone and checks Wikipedia. “Not completely understood, shit. Okay but I don’t need to know that I just need to know what it does. Dopamine, serotonin, what the fuck is default mode network activity…? Sorry, one sec, I’m usually better at this stuff, I had to learn a bit to rewire my brain after I fucked with it too much.” She taps the titanium plate at the base of her skull, hidden by her hair. “So I’ve had some practice with this kind of analogous conversion.”

“Oh! It’s the center for daydreaming and mind wandering stuff, okay, that makes complete sense. So this would be… right, okay. Shame you’re not an android-android or I’d just be able to check a forum for something, but we’ve got to go bespoke. Like, you don’t have digital dopamine, so I’ve got to work out how to replicate the outcome of messing with dopamine binding agents rather than replicating the input. Thanks to your friend who figured this out with Red, or I’d have no idea how to start.” 

“[i]Okay[/i].” She repeats more confidently, she seems to have worked something out. “Okay. So there’s two parts to this. The first is just the code, something that rises and falls like a real trip but it’s got an emergency stop button - very jealous of that one, by the way - and the second is just, if you want to get really wild with it we hook you up to a blank server rack, or lease out some cloud computing space, so you’ve really got somewhere to push yourself into with it.” 

“But if you give me about, thirty minutes? I [i]think [/i]I’d be able to make something that matches an LSD trip for you.” She reads off her phone again. “Side effects include; feelings of joy, euphoria, an increased appreciation for life, decreased anxiety,[i] a sense of spiritual enlightenment, and a feeling of interconnectedness with the universe[/i].” She grins. “Worth a try, right?”

[b]Chaka:[/b]

She’s pushes the crate she’s carrying onto the cargo pod and pushes it right to the back, like someone organizing suitcases in a Greyhound bus. She’s about halfway done now, the left half of the pod full, the warehouse half-empty. Her tail whip-cracks as she leans back out, and she looks thoughtful.

“Hadn’t thought that far, yet. Wasn’t a point to it until now.” She admits. She’s still sobering up, but she [i]is[/i] sobering up. She’s kept the rum bottle here, but she needs to jump to a high shelf to reach it. By the time she’s steady enough to make that jump, another swig won’t hurt so much. “Keep doing what I’m doing, I guess. Alice’s ex is a social worker who kept trying to get her thrown into invol to detransition her, last time it was a three night stay. No restraining order because he works with the cops and they just think he was doing his job. If she shot him while he was trying to take her, it’d be a clean case of resisting abduction instead. Habeas corpse his ass.”

She hefts another case and snorts. “I can’t keep watch all the time, we don’t got enough guys to check on her, and if she’s already at the ward then it’s a mandatory watch period. And you know what can happen to a girl like that in a place like that. All i can do is sell ‘em the fucking gun, can’t I? And if I stop selling the guns, then I just got to keep hearing about all the shit I could have done something about, and I can’t live with that.”

“It’s not about the fucking money, so don’t just try and buy me out, Spooky.” This is her nickname for Black, now. Spooky the Spook. “Find a better way to keep these girls safe, and I’d drop this like it’s hot.” 

[b]Crimson Tower:[/b]

The Femur is fucked. Again, Red made the right call staying in Aphrodite.

So, they’re not dealing with the crisis of the riot itself, no. But the tear gas is creating health issues, there are too many fires, the cops are shutting down train lines for emergency vehicles out of random acts of main character syndrome. They are busy.

It takes ten minutes for a haggard Knightly to take your call. “Make it good, Crimson?” He asks. “I’ve got three, pardon, four other calls waiting, I can’t really afford to be thinking about having enemies right now. I don’t care if you ran a forklift over my son, if you’re holding a bucket you’re a friend of mine.”

[b]Meanwhile:[/b]

The Zeus train pulls into the station, packs, and leaves. Ares will be here in just a minute. Then it's just Hermes, Apollo and Aphrodite to go. 

The team retrieves Zhang Ho from the store, and the bald medic immediately starts a saline drip going for her, even in the dark of the store you can see she's severely dehydrated - bad enough with the burns that it could have killed her, if you'd waited longer. The fight's moved on from this spot, steel toed boots and steel-shod hooves crunch broken glass and detritus in the street outside. There are sounds of police lines still moving around, hammering the ground with staves as they walk as a warning to scatter and disperse. It's getting dark, and they don't want to keep fighting if they don't have to. 

Zhang's carried out in a stretcher like a palanquin across the shoulders of the ox bouncer and the bald medic as the satyr flies across the rooftops in front again, valkyries come to carry her home. She'll make it, from here.