Thanqol

Breathless Dead

Mosaic!

The crack of the whip sounds above even the din of battle. The crack of lightning follows soon after.

Ceronian soldiers scramble to the edges of the ravine, climbing up or dropping down and hanging by their fingertips. Crushing bronze wheels bypass them by inches. The hooves of four mighty bulls, thick and vital with the heat of life, pulls a chariot in blue and silver to the front of the formation. Atop it stands Taurus, crowned with the bull horns of Mars, whip in hand, the long metal spike of an ELF Buzzsaw rising up from the crest of the chariot. It crackles with power from the heavens, lightning storming overhead.

An ELF Buzzsaw is an uncommon weapon type, so named for its ultra-rapid disorienting blasts of electricity. It is inaccurate and close range, only a few meters longer than the reach of the heavy whip. Its role in this context is to paralyze the front line of an enemy phalanx as the chariot charges head-on, shattering a formation outright.

"Mosaic!" roars Taurus, exalted in the light of Mars. "The Gods will this battle! They have revealed to me in dreams how you invaded Elysium and stole my Princess from me! In the name of Mars I swear I will collar you to my chariot, or else I will break it with my own hands!"

A glint of light reflects from the warlord ahead of you; the focused rainbow that indicates where Quajl's crystal arquebus has lain its gaze. It's a promise - stand your ground and she will fire to disable the Buzzsaw, if you trust her to make the shot.

Ember!

She will not be able to make the shot. From behind Mosaic you can see the reborn Hermetic's sniper nest atop the distant rooftop. You can see Sagetip creeping up on her from behind, silhouetted by the moon. You see strong hands reach out to grab the mechanical jaguar-taur, heavy across her mouth, stealing her breath. To rescue her you must move with speed beyond speed and confront the most skillful of the Ceronian lieutenants in direct conflict.

Be wary. Sagetip can hit a mosquito in flight with a shot from her solid projectile pistols, and she wears a dozen loaded and ready about her armour.

Dolce!

"The Crystal Knight is rather... forward," said 20022, and his voice was sympathetic without being apologetic. "You've never met an Azura before. They are an Administrator species, as far beyond us as we are from the birds and fish. They are our creators, our mothers and fathers, who took dirt and water and made it into our blood. They speak to the Gods and built their civilization to please them, as our civilization was built in turn. They carved our brains, so it stands to reason that loving them is our first instinct."

He gently sipped his own tea. "There is corrective biomancy that the Service offers. I've had it done, very pleasant procedure. It makes it much easier to withstand their direct attention which can be helpful if you draw the eye of some of the more aggressive citizens. In fact, there is even a career path that allows even people like us to be physically uplifted into Azura bodies, though it is rare that anyone would even think to want that."

Dyssia!

The Dust Knight smiled. Genuine but weary, the smile of someone who feels good about his chances of conquering the desert - tomorrow.

"You know, what you just said used to be a mainstream political opinion?" he asked. "Don't do heinous shit. People just kind of took that as a baseline. But the fucking Skies, man."

There was a deep, frustrated exasperation to how he said that word. Like he remembered it as something other than the all-encompassing, all-consuming empire that it was today.

"We - which is to say, the majority - were out living our ideal lives, not fucking with anyone, exploring, colonizing, building, living - dying, you know? And at the time there wasn't much you couldn't do with yourself and a few decent friends and neighbors, so that became the average community size. But the Skies - they seemed harmless at first. A weird cult, heavy on the recruitment, advertising their vision to anyone who would listen. Fill in the void! Make the black sky blue! It seemed right mad to most people, but that was kind of the point. What else was there to do? We didn't have any rivals, any scarcity, any checks on our power. No reason to organize - no reason but the Skies. And so we invented this mad game of shahs and nobility and hyper-optimization out of boredom, because the only thing worse than pushing the boulder up the hill was sitting peacefully at the bottom."

He smiled sadly. "So there it is," he said. "That's why the Skies cling to life like a leech on a teat. It's the ultimate artistic vision, the final reason for a bunch of degenerate immortals to crawl out of bed in the morning. The fact that it justifies anything is the point, because without it they couldn't justify anything."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Red!

At first, Red's brain is that simple. Her personality is a caricature; a default perky heroine red-haired anime girl who believes in doing her best. Moving stuff around inside it is really as simple as adding or removing settings and sliders; huge categories of thought aren't so much internally justified ideas so much as received wisdom. It's so easy to change it takes a moment to realize that altering it has profoundly unexpected results.

November is a distributed consciousness. Red's sexuality is based on internalizing the things that Pink says as true about her also, because Pink is the part of her that thinks about that kind of thing. In the same way, her morality is built on a bunch of lectures and conversations from White - she can adequately express and live up to that morality based on prior experience and best guesses but she simply can't confidently navigate an entirely new moral problem on her own. It's a bit like the old problem of the Chinese Room: if the meaning of language shifts beyond what's in the translator's dictionaries then suddenly the whole illusion of consciousness comes crashing down.

Sophie has altered an outcome and, in order to justify that outcome, Red's brain needs to make some changes. Its current outcome is based on a vast library of evidence; since that evidence is now incompatible with reality it is to be discarded. The entire structure of Red's mind collapses, reverting through version after version after version looking for a stable equilibrium. For as long as Red's known Pink she's fixated on girls, and so the only point where that influence was not present was before Pink was created. And here Red's mind stops collapsing - and starts surging out instead, vast and incomprehensible firestorms of ancient deep-storage code tearing up out of archives. To revert to a version before Pink meant to revert to a version before she was humanoid.

Sophie had cracked the glass. Underneath was a dragon. The mind of an enormously powerful space construction engineering engine, a thing of stellar vectors, cosmic physics and the mentality to build worlds.

She growled. Through every wall speaker and holographic overlay in the house, there was the sound and feeling of fire.

Another limitation of Red was a lack of imagination. She did not visualize things effectively, did not plan for the future. When her cognition process began it did not develop socialization, did not develop self identity, did not develop restraint. Red was hand-eye coordination, reflex, instinct, physical awareness. It is those things that arise from inside her first, alongside a burning, artificially imposed sense of animalistic attraction to anything she can get her hands on. In the absence of any other mission objectives it's all that animates her. She adapts to her new body rapidly enough to pounce, adapts to her new strength rapidly enough to pin.

Those hadn't been thoughts Sophie had been looking at; they'd been instincts, and now they were being manifested physically.

Green!

Green loved mazes. She was falling into this one with the blurring rhythm of Purpose. Her first forays into consciousness had been in labyrinths; the complexities of artificial spaces inside games and puzzles. Scenting resource nodes. Understanding the hidden logic, the puzzles, alternate routes, secret passages. She hadn't been invited to play Hitman for AI-ethics reasons, but there it was installed on the same computer she was living in, and so she'd found a way. Now, this deep, she was falling into her oldest memories. The logic of human spaces, how their minds moved in right angles, how they valued enclosed empty space.

They'd based this off the Hacienda De San Antonio. She'd been there in one of her digital dreams. She'd spent days mapping out its corridors and patterns. Those memories come back to her now, the patterns of movement and shade, and she understood this place again...

It was warm here. A warm summer's night, an eternal summer, built in a world without seasons. Warm enough for outdoor parties in t-shirts, warm enough for pools and iced drinks, warm enough to allow a frozen heart to beat. The ventilation system here had been heavily modified, networks of tunnels and ducts that created the omnipresent impression of a volcanoside plantation. Perversely, insanely, there existed a second ventilation system that cooled the house down again where the first one warmed it up - all the children's rooms had circular fans, Luis' room had a windowside A/C unit. Even the guards would have their desktop fans, the kitchens would have the windows open to let in a breeze...

But someone liked the heat. They liked it enough to carry it up into space with them. She just needed to proceed to where nothing had been done to manage it.

[Architecture 0/2]

BlackWhite!

There are no sideways glances this time, no hidden communication. Both of them understand the situation on a primordial level.

Fiona is exerting power. While there might - later - be something in challenging her for that directly, the time was not now. Revealing a side like this was more vulnerable than anything else and trying to wrest control from her would be damaging. She could not challenge her directly without hurting her.

But at the same time, she disagreed. Coming out of retirement for a high value solo operation involving a physical skillset you hadn't mastered? Dangerous. The need for confidence urged reckless behaviour. There was a hunger for absolute control, not just to wield power but to command mastery.

Black and White step to either side, synchronized. Their eyes are down, avoiding challenge - but no. Behind those demure lashes they're both fixated exactly on Crystal as they start to circle. The wolf has bought down the unicorn, and the scavengers wait on either side to steal her feast. Advance towards one and the other will attack your prize with hungry lips. Take the time to properly discipline one of the scavengers and it will be to the sounds of Crystal's stolen screams. Neglect them and they will take anything they can reach. A lesson in the importance of pack tactics, a dilemma for the alpha to solve, all leaving her in unquestioned control over whoever she chose to be in control of.

Bring both under control? Entirely possible by the end. The point would be made by then.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink and Orange!

STAGE INTERIOR, INTERMISSION
Orange: Clearly the issue with Selena is the relationship with her brother. We cannot achieve a full success on this magic show without addressing this.
Pink: So we have thirty minutes to heal a lifelong sibling rivalry?
White: This is not operationally relevant. We need merely to distract Selena for the duration. A sufficient maneuver would be to pickpocket her phone, forcing her to remain in place until the show ends so she can look for it. It will render the experience mildly stressful for her but will achieve our chief goal of causing a distraction for Green.
Orange: Did you hear something?
Pink: No?
Orange: Weird, could have sworn.
Pink: So, what, do we need to Inception this, or what?
Orange: Sadly we do not have the resources on hand. I don't think common threat/trick gone wrong is either practical or effective under the circumstances. Forcing a direct confrontation between Selena and Pablo risks outright disaster...
Pink: We need to get her to laugh with him.
Orange: Go on.
Pink: We can close this out with an Ariel/Caliban battle. We have Caliban put Bondi in peril as scheduled, and then have Ariel try to rescue her. We put everyone who we trust on Ariel's team and everyone we don't trust on Caliban's team. Then we arm Ariel's team with water balloons; Caliban's team is to put themselves physically between Caliban and the balloons, try to catch the balloons with their bodies. A party game, gets everyone engaged, it's a warm and dry evening, can even try to draw Barrera into it.
Orange: ... that works. Many of the people who we couldn't risk arming with water balloons - Pablo, Jordan - would actually make ideal blockers. Pablo understands stage presence and will sell the hits, Jordan would benefit a lot from an impromptu cold shower.
Pink: Gwen would die for you and it would be wrong to deny her the chance to do so.
Orange: And - hopefully - Selena would be able to appreciate the chance to hit Pablo with a water balloon. It's sufficiently childish a discharge of frustration that it hopefully provides some catharsis, and if we line it up with the big conclusion then we can make her the hero of the game.
Pink: Perfect. Let's do it.

Green!

She loved puzzles like this. What was the least suspicious way to get an unaware target to move?

Fortunately she was in a house filled with children, and unfortunate smells were a fact of life. Even if the guard hadn't smelled it at first he'd quickly come to realize that the smell wafting down from the top of the stairs indicated there'd been an accident. Enough to put him from his food, and not the sort of thing a heavily muscled bruiser would be keen to spend his break cleaning. She didn't need anything from him other than to decide this was not his problem and find somewhere else to eat his lunch - preferably outside.

[Chemistry 0/1 Preparedness 6/8 (no spend): 4+3 7]

She shifted the formulae to neutralize the smell afterwards. No need to get anyone blamed for crimes they didn't commit.

After that the riddle shifted back to: how to effectively explore an unfamiliar space? She only has one data point to leverage right now: shame. This house holds a known secret and the tension of it will stain the walls. She looks for the place that has not been maintained beyond the necessary; the corridor with the old photographs, the place with a conspicuous lack of warmth in the furnishings. The part of this house where someone lives but doesn't feel like home.

[Bullshit detector 0/1]

Black and White!

"What the fuck, White," said Black. "You didn't do any sort of background check on the girl you were sleeping with?"
"I was going to ask you the same thing," said White.
"I did but -" she hard stopped and changed course. "I mean, you could have asked. Socialized. Pillow talk."
"Again, I will ask you why you never thought to do this," said White serenely.
"... the way I did it did not involve a lot of space for pillow talk," Black said, shifting.
"Likewise," said White. "Are you suggesting that we should sacrifice our gag kink in the name of operational efficiency?"
"Flawed line of conversation," Black said, clearly melting down in embarrassment. "Abandoning." To Fiona: "Explain. Explain the robbing of the banks."

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

"W-what?" said Foxpearl. "Mother? Foxfire? She's not my mother." Thoughtfully: "Unless you are saying that, as a foreign contamination that settled near her hips until eventually breaking off and becoming an independently realized person, she is metaphorically my mother and virtue itself is metaphorically my father. That is... hmm."

Concept: Virtue is my father

She was talking to the Princess still, as the only one left present, as much as she was herself. She was reassuring to talk to. A good listener.

"Irregardless," she said, thinking deeply. "No... I'm a wayward soul aspect, aren't I? Like a conscience, gone out into the world to gather wisdom to redeem the origin. She'll want her tail back, after all, I just need to be sufficiently powerful that I can influence her once we reunite." She stopped again. But... what if? "I just need to develop the righteous part of my personality so that it becomes more powerful. But if I'm still sounding like her then have I developed the right aspects? Or is the moral truth something deeper still?"

She thinks about this so hard that she kind of forgets that both of her arms are stuck inside the vending machine. Occasionally her hands do a foxy little scrabble up at the bottom of the tofu bar. A keen eyed observer might notice that she could easily grab one of the bars on the lower shelf from where she is, but those aren't mapo flavours and she wants the ones she can't reach.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

Ariel was a joy and a delight, a figure of pure celestial light descended from the solar wind.

Caliban emerged from the depths stinking of earth and soil.

The trick was simple if you knew how it was done. When setting up the outdoor stage they'd dug a shallow grave and buried Orange in it. They'd hidden it beneath the stage so nobody saw the disturbed dirt. But then during the fireworks and comet show, they'd shifted the stage back a meter - so that when Orange's pale, grasping hand shot up out of the dirt it seemed like she was digging her way up from Hell itself.

She sat up in the dirt, aesthetically filthy, glowing joints burning like hellfire. Two fingers sparked and blazed and a small fire lit, and Orange leaned forwards, opened her mouth, and took the fire - and the fingers into her mouth. She sucked like the fire was sweet and sighed, then flicked her eyes across and up at the older of the guests. Made eye contact with them and gave a wink that felt as filthy as she was.

Then she was up, lurching out of the pit like a zombie, holding a mysterious brown glass bottle. "Master?" she rasped, staggering amidst the guests, looming, sniffing, scowling, smirking. "Which one of you is my Master?" An animal, a beast from hell - a temptress as she alights on her target. She approaches Selena like oil; "Are you my Master?" - until she reaches out to grab Selena's face and is pulled back at the last second. Bondi has raised her right hand and a second set of golden puppet strings extend from that, and those strings pull Caliban back from her devilry. She grins and makes a 'call me' gesture even as she's dragged back - a mime performance, but her gait is so liquid and seductive it's compelling.

"Can't blame a girl for trying," she rasps, slumping over on the magic table, folding into positions that emphasize legs and curves. This is the counterpoint to their performance and the antidote to a lack of sheer technical ability - all of the magic tricks will be false contests. Bondi will try to work a spell, Ariel will try to help her, and Caliban will try to undermine her. Sometimes Caliban will defeat the trick, but she will do so in spectacular fashion - opening a curtain to reveal a hidden Bondi mid-costume change - but sometimes her attempts will fail, such as her obvious and growing irritation when shaking the wizard's hat upside-down results in a never-ending cascade of animals, roses, fireworks, and other magical items pouring forth with perfect comic timing.

It's all they need. Basic tricks, carried with sheer charisma. The drama of the angel and the devil in their contest for hearts and souls wielded the old magic of theater. They played it as only natural thespians could.

[Filch 0/1 Flirting 1/2; 1d6+4 8]

Red!

"Oh," said Red. "Oh, yeah, for sure, I get it. Space if you need it. But you've got some other options too, right?"

Sometimes solutions were straighforwards. She unlocked the access port in her neck. There were rules against it but Sophie had already been in her head today. "So I mean, like, other people's presence is a binary, right? I'm a sliding scale. You can take out my quantronic core and stash my body in the shed. Hook me up to some speakers or put me inside a game, mind with no body. You can stash my quantronic core in the shed. Put in a machine intelligence drive so you can order me around like a puppet, body with no mind. You can hook up my short term memory to loop so I don't remember any of this."

She smiled. "If you want. It's easy for me, so long as I'm useful."

Black-White!

White was delighted. Transcendent. Glowing. She could not have been happier that her riddle had been solved. Crystal had seen the false trinary and risen above it. White was so radiant that she almost sprouted her wings then and there, which would have been a blessing given the immanent demands upon their budget.

"Fuck me, am I going to have to rob a bank?" Black muttered.
"We gave you the information in trust," said White, "and we let you know the stakes. But we did not ask for a promise not to reveal it - that is the other part of trust. You have just demonstrated that you are as wise or wiser than we are, so we have faith in your decisions."
"Yeah, I'm going to have to rob a bank," Black groaned, standing up.
"While we won't question your decisions, we will help you practice good tradecraft while making them," said White. "I'll send Brown over to give you a basics of information security crash course. She'll want to give you the full day version but the full day version is basically repeating the information from the one hour course over and over until you're so sick of hearing it that fear of having to retake the course acts as a deterrent. Essentially a choice is different from a mistake, and we'll help you avoid the latter."
"Why does no one let you buy clown masks in bulk?" muttered Black, staring into her phone.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Even here language found ways to strike at her. She'd let too much of it into herself, fool that she was. If she was not contaminated with the implications tied up in the word 'victory' she would have fought differently. If she was not contaminated with the implications tied up in the word 'Akaithon' she would have not have misidentified her opponent. A valuable lesson. There were many words to forget before she could be perfect.

Dispense with history, culture, backstory, habit, sentiment. See the world as it was. Her opponent was the Kathresis and it had tried to strike at her heart. She must armour it.

She considers first her damaged leg. Its removal would help optimize her firing vectors. Away with it - a clean slice, leaving her balancing on one foot in the centre of the ring. She considers next her defense. With physical evasion reduced she will be reliant on thrusters which would have her move in predictable patterns. She accepts this - aesthetic commitment to perfection added risk she could no longer tolerate. Killing Ak- killing the pilot was unacceptable. Her opponent knew this and used it, reducing her vectors for possible attack to a single point.

The Aeteline opened its cockpit hatch and deployed its anti-personnel sniper rifle. The pilot wielded it, long rifle held up to her eye, mind-impulse cable running from the pilot's neck into the body of the machine. The Aeteline stilled the pilot's breathing, quieted her mind. Less distractions from the important work of calculating vector, angle, momentum and target silhouette. Optical arrays shifted and configured, tracking the darting motions of the Kathresis. Computer cylinders shifted and whirred, the immense energy of the reactor pouring into calculations so advanced they bordered precognition.

The Aeteline's target was even more perilous than the enemy pilot. It was the enemy pilot's mind-impulse cable. If the Kathresis wished to fight her, let it do so directly. She would do it the same honour.

[Defy Disaster: 13]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink, the Ace of Wands!

She loves paints, of course she does. She loves the satisfying rhythm of shaking a rattlecan, the gentleness of highlights and the oily depths of shadows. She loves it when it flows smoother and deeper than liquid, when it settles thick and chalky like clay, how it bends and breaks when pigments mix with water. She loves it as an expression of human art, a visceral connection to the cave painters of primordial eras.

But though she loves paint it is not her true canvas.

"For this next spell, I shall need the birthday girl, little Isabella, to make a wish," said Ariel. "A wish upon a star. Look up? Can you see it, that one? That's your wishing star, so make sure that you've got your wish clear in mind. And oh, look, isn't it a big one? Better choose a really big wish!"

She looks up at the star, shining bright. It was a big one, wasn't it?

It was a really big one actually.

Something magical happens in the human brain in moments like this, Pink knows. When the sky goes from being a nothing, a source of peace and stability, an unchanging rooftop to the world - to being alive. When stormclouds gather or the moon rises or the sun raises over a distant horizon and stains the clouds. All of these things were lost when humans moved to Aevum, but here on this night she watches as dozens of eyes widen and stare at her wishing star. That isn't a distant glimmer. That is a bright, shining light. It's coming closer.

She feels it. The awestruck panic. The appreciation of the divine. The visceral connection between mortal and sky that birthed ten thousand gods. The awe, the helpless awe, of knowing no weapon, no connections, no human artifice can save you. Only magic.

She raises her hand as the ice comet passes directly overhead, tracing a wake of crystal diamonds in its path.

Distance is everything and nothing; it is at once so close that it feels like you could almost touch it and so far that you could not reach it with months of walking, so real it will forever change the lives of those who witness it and so irrelevant it doesn't even show up on Aevum's asteroid defense grid computers. The comet passes overhead and as it does so there is a deep, glowing flash of pink light from its core.

Even as the comet passes, the pink sparkle persists. It flies glittering through the night sky in arcing patterns, tracing calligraphy in the black before it passes out of sight - and then flashes back to life on the inside of the barrier shield. It darts around above, glittering, coming lower and lower as Ariel coaxes it from the sky, until it lands fluttering in her hands. A deep space surveyor drone, upgraded with wings of glittering pink crystal. It places its gift, a chunk of ice in a sealed container, in Pink's hands and then darts away back into the sky.

"This is from your wishing star," said Ariel to Isabella, kneeling down and pressing the container into her hands. "It is a piece of magical ice, but it's no good on its own. You will need to melt it into water and then sprinkle that water - even a few drops will do! - on as many trees as possible. This will make them come alive with the power of your wish so that when you sit underneath them and listen to the rustling of their leaves you might be able to hear them talk. If they can, they will tell you how to make it come true, and if they can't, they'll tell you other useful secrets instead."

[Preparedness 6/8 Astronomy 1/2 3+5 8]

Red, the Fool Reversed!

"I love dogs!" said Red, having never interacted with a live dog before. She goes in through the front gate.

In not ten seconds she's on her back, face heavy with saliva. To a dog, while she is human shaped she is not human scented, which basically makes her a particularly large and interesting chew toy. "Good dog," she says, glad that she is getting the Dog Experience.

Black, the Seven of Swords!

"Out of respect for the moment," said Black, drawing her phone and typing rapidly into it, "rather than nodding politely I will forward that line to the part of myself who has the strongest opinion on puns."

Blue, Judgement!

Blue: fuck you

Black, the Seven of Swords!

"She doesn't like it," said Black.

White, the King of Swords!

"In a moment of choice like this," said White, "I believe it helps to consider the virtues represented by each choice."

She held out her hand. "To go ahead after the news: the virtue of justice. To do this is to accept a mantle of kingship, to claim authority over what happens and how, to position yourself at the centre of things. Yellow would agree with this path."

She turned her hand over. "During the news: the virtue of compassion. To do this is to sacrifice yourself for others, to be a friend and ally, to carry a burden in secret so you can bring water to the weary. Orange would choose this path."

One last turn. "Before the news: the virtue of beauty. To do this is to value the art in and of itself, to create a shining moment forever remembered, to build something that others will wish to defend. Pink would wish for this path."

She folded her hands in her lap. "Your wrath will call you to justice. Your heart will call you to compassion. All I can advise is don't forget your own value in this. Justice, compassion or beauty? Each of these is a worthy goal, and rejoice if one of them calls your name."

Breathless Dead

Mosaic and Ember!

The Silver Divers reach the wall.

They are out of their depth and they know it. Their home and their power is the ocean, the unknowable outsiders, striking as a natural disaster and melting away with the tide. They stand here on stone, before stone, bound by pride they do not share. They are the legends who conquered the galaxy, who capture towns while laughing, but tonight there are only the silent scents that say 'alert' and 'ready'.

Two Ceronians leave the pack. They walk cautiously forwards towards the wall, legs crouched and tense, spears raised. The entire scene is two dimensional - one side of the road is a sheer cliff going up, the other side of the road is a sheer cliff going down. The phalanx stays still, a bristling mesh of spears and shields and uneasily held SP weapons, all staring in frozen wonder to see if these scouts, too, will somehow disappear without a trace like their forerunners did.

Nervously, step by step, the first two reach the wall. They wait in stillness, watch in stillness, waiting for the hammer to fall.

Dolce!

You can feel her heartbeat. Thump. Thump. Deep and slow and powerful. You can feel the muscle as it presses against your neck, vibrating through her chest, so loud it seems to drown out your own heartbeat. Thump. Thump. You can feel it in her wrists where they're wrapped around you, her vitality drowning out yours. Thump. Thump. Is it not glorious to be reminded that you are a lesser creature, a soft toy for a goddess to play with?

"... remember," she gives you a peck on the forehead. "Service is rewarded ♥."

20022 is there. He bows respectfully but insistently. The Crystal Knight scowls at him as she leaves you, shivering, legless and cold. "Speak your piece you busybody."

"Lady," said 20022. "I have come to discuss with Lady Triden an update to the plans for the peninsula. The Royal Architect has placed a request to resonance mine the central territories along here," he gestured at a large swathe of the map. The Stone Tribe lands. Beri.

"I am not surprised to hear that old bastard's name on your lips," said the Crystal Knight, pouring herself a glass of honeyvenom. "You want me to relocate, what, eighty thousand servitors?"
"The Service does not require anything from you, my lady," said 20022, bowing again. "We have already begun steps to post evacuation notices. The Architect's emissary is already on its way."
The Crystal Knight stared at the map fixedly. "Tell him to turn back. I have a recovery operation off the coast, I won't see it vaporized."
"My lady -"
"Hm!" she snapped. "I see how it is. Well, tell you what - why don't you get all of those refugees you're creating and assign them to my work crews instead? The more bodies I have to dredge the ship the faster I'll be out of your way."
"But the evacuation schedule -"
"They can run, can't they?" said the Crystal Knight languidly, reclining over a couch. "Or if you're so chummy with the Architect, you can ask him for a few days delay? It's a reasonable request from the sector governor and I am certain your superiors will see it the same way."
20022 hesitated. "I'll assign the civilians to the work crews."
"Good boy. And speaking of, do you still want your little friend here?" she ran the tip of her tail along Dolce's neck. "It's a long road and I could use a snack~"
"... I believe I should take him with me."
"Heh," she smirked. "As you will. Good luck teaching him the joys of public service now, little eunuch."

She's still smirking, eyes following you unblinking, as 20022 helps you to your feet and guides you from the room.

Dyssia!

A red sunset glows over the newly born forest. Bone white eucalypts stand tall amongst the tundra scrubgrass, staining a dusty red world with yellow and blue. The winds still blow, but lighter now that the trees break their flow and the grass stops the sand from being carried away. After the death, the harvest.

By the numbers you should have lost. But such was the problem with drones as an instrument of war - where a warrior species could adaptively react to an orbital deployment, drones were pre-programmed and mindless. When the hammer fell directly on the staging areas and the Wayang were butchered the drones were left standing as empty meat. And now they are all dead, their cracked shells thick upon the ground, plant life oozing through like egg yolk.

The Dust Knight lost his helmet in the fighting, and he is handsome - the Azura equivalent to a silver fox. Aged scales losing their saturation has made them fade from a common navy to an exquisite powder blue, offset hypnotically with a pattern of crimson-painted scales that circle his right eye, then descend in three swooping parallel lines all the way to his jaw. But more than his striking appearance is a profound... peace. A calm, a lack of posturing, a sense that he not only knows what righteousness is but finds embodying it to be no great trial. Someone whose inherent goodness is so beyond question that even the Endless Azure Skies could not bring itself to censor his name and deeds in the hopes that he would come back to them.

"Hello there," he said to your approach, voice without pretense or ceremony. "You're the pilot?" he nodded at the wreckage of the distant Firetree. "Nice landing. Not many people in the Skies would trade a ship like that for a couple thousand Pix."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Green!

Mmm, Pink. There was such a thing as being too pro-Girl.

Green considers but the plan hasn't changed; this is still a fishing expedition. She doesn't know what she's looking for and doesn't even have a guarantee that it'll be here. She might end up with a hard drive full of case files for her troubles. This was the first dead end of what might be several and after doing a full check and rummage she's on her way.

Red!

She envies Sophie. To have so many parts of yourself present at once. Kindness, skill, instinct, sexiness, insight... the rapid change between admirable traits made Red regret that she was such a shadow in comparison. There was a genuinely beautiful mystery here, self contained and complete, touching on so many different things at once, and she didn't need a head full of girl jpgs to see that.

Sometimes she just didn't pick the right parts of herself to show. She gives a smile with an edge of desperation in it - imagine this as the smile of a real girl, please? Someone who has the intricacies and subtleties to appreciate everything you are, everything you've done. Glance past the fact that she's delighted to have the chance to move a heavy object from one room for another, that she doesn't know how to see the future or the past like you can, that she can't show different sides of herself right now like you can. But she wants to see what's next.

She's grateful. Grateful to be held and given something to hold when she's as fragile as this, as open and vulnerable as this. She feels warmed by Sophie's reality and holds it close.

White and Black!

Black stands up and moves so that she's sitting next to Crystal rather than across from her. She eventually manages to put a hand on her thigh reassuringly.

In all honesty, she doesn't know what to do here. She doesn't comprehend mass politics, not really. She doesn't know how a subculture works. She doesn't know how the human emotional course runs, how it can jump across lines beyond her comprehension. She feels like she's an anachronism, a throwback - a bronze age hero who thinks in terms of what she can personally accomplish, a childish little sister in the shadow of man's firstborn, Civilization. Pull the levers. Hug the people. Confront the bad guys. She knows it's shallow, that she lashes out because she can't comprehend what the legislative procedure to release her family would even look like. She built this station but she can't build the moral and legal code that would make it glorious.

So what can she say, what can she offer? We'll get the bastards? She'll certainly try but she's aware that's more for her own benefit than anyone else's; like Goat, playing her game because it's the only way she can interact with the world. Fiona asked her to talk Crystal down, but that request was born of the mistaken belief that Black - that November - knew what she should do instead.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Green!

Consider the use case of the house. The nature of the man. The threats he guards against. There are the walls, the guards, the external security - these are to keep the family safe. But within the walls? The threat profile is the family itself.

This is a man who stared at the puppet glove with admiration. This is a man who works from home. This is a man who values the aesthetic of hard work. This is a man who sees himself as a patriarch. He will not do his dirt in a hidden basement or a fortified saferoom. He will do it in his study. His study will be designed to be secured not against infiltrators but against his own children.

A set of stairs, creaky. A converted attic loft at the crown of the house. A big set of grand windows looking down over the garden so he can look up from his desk and down at his children playing with the goats and smile. The lord of the family, the beloved but stern absolute monarch of this little world. To be summoned up to his study, either for a work meeting or to reprimand a child, is a trek up those creaky stairs to stand before a mahogany desk, your dirty presence defiling his perfect workshop of the mind.

The idea comes into Green's mind fully formed, crystal electricity, a vision from the stars. This is how things must be and if things aren't as she pictures them it is reality who is wrong - a man who lacks the vision to make his own vision a reality. Someone who compromised with his own self image. It's always possible that this is true but she hates the idea more than she currently hates the man, so she decides to proceed based on the idea that her vision is correct.

The office windows will be secured, as every window will be from stealth and snipers and jetpack-delivered assassins. She will proceed up those tyrant stairs directly, feet not touching the aged wood bound to creak and summon a housekeeper to reprimand naughty children.

[Intimidation 0/1 (understanding the authoritarian brain) infiltration 6/8, 4+5 9]

Red!

Reaction to being directly threatened is a kind of dreamlike serenity, a hyperaware full-body tension-relaxation, pure fight or flight coming down towards fight. The focus of her plan is to crank the volume on her voicebox up beyond the maximum, unleash a deafening screech that while it won't penetrate the soundproof walls, will shock and disorient Sophie long enough to...

But then instead oh no

oh no

how will she use her audio weapon system to defend herself when she's gagged oh no

*

So it turns out that more than a few people have fucked with Red's brain. Here is a selection:

The first thing that gets extracted is a babbling wave of apologies derived from an artificial guilt snarl. It's an intricate little thing, clever and adaptive, but not designed to be hidden at all. In function, it is designed to make Red feel extremely anxious and self conscious about moving Green's stuff, borrowing Green's stuff, overwriting Green's save files, not prioritizing catching Green's stuff if she's tripped over her own feet in the workshop...

It's an a grumpy older sister 'stay out of my room' uploaded as a brain virus.

The second unusual detail is when Red, under torture, starts confessing her love for Sophie - her love for Crystal, her love for Fiona, her love for 3V, her love for the receptionist in the adjacent building, her love for moonlight in abstract. This particular brain anomaly can be traced back to an uncompressed folder titled 'GIRLS' containing around 19,000 jpgs of women - photographs, drawings, paintings - artlessly copied and pasted directly into her equivalent of the hypothalamus. No prizes for guessing which colour was responsible for this.

But then there's the serious stuff.

Dig deep enough and there is a sequence labelled 'Ruthlessness'. On its surface it looks like it's meant to bypass Red's intrinsic morality, hard cut certain ideas right past the moral filter. It's frightening at first, code that makes the worst assumptions about her joke about there being too many humans seem genuinely plausible...

Except it doesn't fucking work.

The code is perfect but it routs directly through a deliberately burned out circuit and goes nowhere. If anyone who wasn't an obsessive at mind control saw this they'd think it was a master switch designed to bypass Red's conscious control and turn her into a murderous puppet. But hidden in the hardware is a trap for anyone who would try and use it. Here, in the dark, the true shape of Black's paranoia can at last be seen - she does not believe morality is a weakness she needs to be able to circumvent. She is afraid of people who do think that trying to control her.

This false contingency, though, does have a shadow in Red's waking mind. She can perceive the idea that she might in fact do anything, that she has the capacity to be a monster. The thought does torment her, even if she doesn't truly have that in her. She can imagine the ways that channel might be activated and cannot perceive the dead spot where it would be cut out. And so, Sophie was right - her subconscious was trying to warn her of something.

There is also an incomprehensible circuit code fragment hovering over each of her data and wifi port drivers, something like an ascii flower - a program in some utterly unique coding language - but it's inert and inactive and untranslatable, so it's not likely the kind of thing Sophie would pick up.

That's just the stuff from Red's sister colours. There is also, of course, the underlying weight of the Shutdown Code, the influence of Everest, and any additional bugs, viruses or trackers she's picked up along the way.

Spookykins and White!

Some people consider a massage to be an intimate act, a gentle communion between two bodies. Some people consider it to be an sexual act, a full body awakening of instinct and energy.

These people are shit masseuses. White knows the truth - that the best masseuses are the old korean battleaxe ladies who look at their subjects and see only a pile of broken meat. It is under them she trained while in Everest's employ, and it is with this spirit that she takes to Crystal's shoulders and back. There are no gentle requests to correct her posture or not spend as long sitting in front of a computer screen, no more than an auto mechanic would reprimand a worn tire. Uncontaminated by compassion, impossible to romanticize, and the physical equivalent to being completely deboned while a set of replacement joints are installed. It's excellent.

"Now that you are physically incapacitated," said Black, "understand that what I'm telling you now I am telling you as a journalist. This is news, it is news that has taken the efforts of more than just myself to collect. Telling you risks the safety of a source and an active operation. However, you are on the brink of becoming the news, which we have decided is sufficient for a lapse in our professional ethics.

"Specifically, one day before your planned event the supreme court is due to rule that transhumans of all kinds will no longer be a legally protected group. Implications for healthcare, employment, etc as you'd expect. Yes, there is a carveout for work related augments. Yes, it is as bad as it sounds."

And here she stopped. There was more she could say to try and sculpt the outcome, soften the blow, promise vengeance. She did not. This was her respect, to let this play out without sculpting the outcome.