[b]Euna:[/b] The six gauge her up. This isn’t the fight they wanted, but they obviously came out wanting to fight. They puff their chests out and keep their distance with swagger, every one of the six think they could solo you, which means that this just isn’t fun. “Look, lady, you’re not who we want trouble with tonight.” A large one shaped like an angry pumpkin says, a solid half-foot taller than Euna and salami fingers. The back of his neck looks like a roll of cheap hotdogs. “So go home, stay out of this.” “There’s a lot of bad people out tonight, taking advantage of all this.” A stringier one in a tanktop says, a kerchief wrapped around his neck and dripping milk from the end. “You need someone to walk you home?” Oh shit. Oh shit that’s not sarcastic, he actually means it, and the rest just swell their chests out more when he offers. Oh shit [i]they think they’re doing what you’re doing[/i]. [b]Chaka Zulu:[/b] Something clicks. “You’re like a [i]teenager[/i].” She says it with the exact opposite inflection that Dudekov did. “That’s what’s messing me up. You’re an overwrite and a half, you ever heard that before, Spooky?” It’s questionable if Spooky has, it’s a street word more than an online one, even if street people post too. It’s hotly debated which of its three popular meanings it started with; “Overwrite”, when you delete the old files on the system by putting your new ones in. Over Right, someone with a terminal case of being too smart for their own good. Also as in ‘It’s over, right?’, seeing the end of the old ways as inevitable - if not by their hand, then someone else’s. Lost to time is that it was the first two simultaneously, and the third was a post-hoc observation of the people it applied to. Lenin and Stringer Bell were both overwrites - it’s a compliment applied with both sides of the hand. “Now that, that I can fuck with. It was just, throwing me you thought you were stopping me jumping off a ledge. And I’m like, sister has to know that standing to take a bullet for someone isn’t the same as wanting to get shot, right? Now I’m like, maybe you just don’t.” She pulls out a case, stops, and laughs. She flicks it open. “Present for you. Remember how Spearmint fucking told me off about how I was selling shit that could take out a helicopter, and then you took out that fucking helicopter in Zeus right after, because you are the most messed-up hypocrites on the station? That isn’t the kind of thing you should be worried about.” Okay how the fuck did she know that was you? The weapon is like a blunderbuss that ends in a toaster, a nixie tube barrel filled with green circuits and batteries. Despite all the electronics, it still has a bolt-action magazine feed which eats slugs of rare metals. “If they’re trying to kill you they’ll swarm you with faraday drones. This angry little shit, aka a vape-stick, aka an e-dragoon, fires charged particles with enough force to slice through that kind of protection and ionize everything underneath. Close quarters it’s a trench gun against security androids. Cone of fire, scatter.” She puts it back in its instrument case and leaves it at the door for Black. “The red shoelace on the case means it’s not for sale. That one’s from my personal collection.” These aren’t made on Aevum anymore. It’s a twenty year old civil war era military grade piece of hardware, brought up from Earth, heirloom and antique. Irreplaceable. It’s not the kind of gift she offers because she likes you. It’s tribute, fealty. Because if you’re not Mum, if you’re a kid just starting out, and this is what starting out looks like? This might as well be buying Apple stock in 1980, for her place in that revolution. [b]Fiona:[/b] She sets Pink on the edge of the bed and wraps her from behind, arms around the top of her ribs and legs around her hips. Careful to squeeze her as much as she can without making Pink feel trapped, legs aching from the lack of her prosthetics. “I think I still have your Dad’s email from that Black Sun book. He seemed nice. Imagine if I told him; Are you sure that’s a not too much for a starting dose? You’ll stay with her the whole time? You’ll keep an eye on her internal temperature? You won’t overstimulate her, will you?” Fiona’s chin rests on Pink’s shoulder. One hand moves low across her belly, thumb brushing gentle strokes just over where her belly button might be. It’s so much more intense than it should be, there’s no 20 minutes of waiting for something to happen with the LSD - there doesn’t need to be a digestion period. It’s incredible. Everything is starting to be more as Pink’s brain winds up. So much of this can be explained like a human mania, where the brain starts operating past its safe limits and the changes struggle to fit in the conventional language it has for itself. I will use ‘brain’ as an analogous term for Pink, a useful inaccuracy. Think how big your teeth feel against your tongue, and how small they feel in your hand. Because you have so many more nerves on your tongue than your hand they have to express in different analogous spaces to hold the same amount of information in your head. It’s taking the romance out of this to describe it like that, but it’s useful to understand a common thread behind a lot of the experiences. When you feel like things get [i]bigger[/i] when they’re closer, it’s because your visual brain is overclocked and having to make things larger to tell you how much more it’s learning than usual. It’s a fingertip learning what it feels like to be a tongue. Colours are brighter, colours have their own music because there is no more language left in light that can express how they make you feel. Fingertips brushed along your stomach reach deep into your entire body again, as the feeling part of the brain has to borrow the unused empty spaces to fit it all, and they sing from the spillover of use. But that’s just your external senses. The thing this amps up the most, the thing this really plays up, is the imagination. That rich inner sense expands, too, until the inside of your head is also a fingertip trying to become a tongue. This might be why Fiona suggested more hardware. For now you are too big to fit into you. You expand past your own borders and move past them, out into the universe around you, pressing at the edges like oil spilling into water. The feeling of floating away is like having swum to the bottom of a very deep pool and, while still feeling the pressure all around you, kicking off as hard as you can from the bottom and soaring towards a distant surface you’ll never reach. This is what people inadequately describe as the feeling of ‘floating’. This energy can become hallucinations, machine elves, angels, burning bushes. Dream logic telling your brain absolute facts, so that if you spill yoghurt on yourself you might become absolutely convinced you are the yoghurt you spilled on yourself, and pleasantly melt away into the floorboards. What is Pink’s imagination when it is unfettered, unshackled, untethered, and projects outwards far beyond her boundaries? Current DC for avoiding a bad trip: 0 [b]Crisis Management:[/b] [b]Orange [/b]- DC 5 check to be able to process the information enough to take advantage of an opportunity when it reveals itself. Don’t worry about what that opportunity is yet - this is just to sort the wheat from the chaff in realtime on an information-saturated network. As to the rest? It’s just Aphrodite at the station, now. The other trains are about to switch to their real destinations from the fake ones, and everyone’s going to know what you did. Nobody needs to do anything special to get into position for this, any more than they already have. But one thing I am interested in asking is; What is November’s [i]prediction[/i] for what’s about to happen, here at the last before the plan meets its true enemy?