Thanqol

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

Hsien was, in her heart, a lurker.

For all her thoughts and philosophies and understandings of the world she didn't exactly post them. She just read all the correct people, built up silent disagreements with them, witnessed their arguments and identified the imperfections from a place of superiority. She didn't wade into the muck and debate people. She didn't want to risk getting into an argument where she hadn't done the legwork, where everything was on the line, where the translation barrier between righteous thought and righteous speech was suddenly so intensely complicated.

So she froze up. In this moment she was just that: tail seven, suddenly under the scrutiny of the only eyes qualified to judge her. She felt tiny, blinded, scared, frozen in a defensive crouch. If there was a saving grace in this, her stunned null reaction looked anything but dangerous.

[Rejecting influence: 7. Clearing Insecure by proving them wrong]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

Brown stared for a moment, then sighed. "Law enforcement officer, badge number 502-332, was your interpretation of detention periods outlined in the Crime Prevention Act 2055 your own, or was it given to you by a supervisor?" she said in her most android voice. "In either case, I would like to speak to them, and a copy of the facility's policy as you understand it in writing."

There's no direct threat there, no attempt to monster him with legal action, no need for cunning recording plays. They both know that's bullshit, he's a cop, the system is on his side in any trial. What she can do that will ruin both of their days is Karen this. Asking to speak to the manager. Getting everything down in writing. Making all of this a formal process with receipts and written statements and getting called up as witnesses in some low energy public defender trial. That threat is credible - after all, she's just been told she has to stand around for hours, she might as well make those hours as unpleasant as possible for everyone involved.

Blue!

"The -" Blue is startled by the question. She's like that - so singularly focused, vision so clear in her head, that she doesn't know that she needs to explain it. No matter how many times she learns she can't know. "The lawyers. They're the audience. There's not a future that doesn't involve them, but they need to feel their house is rotten."
"So that makes you Lady Justice then?" Orange cracked.
She looked immediately concerned at how thoughtful Blue looked.
"Maybe not..." said Blue. Orange relaxed. "... a lady?" Orange looked panicked. "In a monster way, not in a not-girl way," said Blue hurriedly. "I don't want to get axe murdered by Pink."
"... still concerning, but you definitely put the threat profile in perspective there," sighed Orange. "Look, I'll raise looking into your surveillance detail with the collective. Let us know if the urgency shifts at all and we can prioritize."

Breathless Dead

Mosaic!

"I just need... I'll get there eventually..." the words drain out like poison. "Just one more victory and I'll..."

The wolf maiden slumps in sudden exhaustion. The animating vitality has bled out of her. More. More, more, more, it drips out of her heart and as it goes the space it leaves behind is how little it even wanted it in the first place. "I want..." what? "I wanted... to not be bored..."

The blade slides free, shining clean. Her claws scratch at the edge as it leaves her. She falls gently to the ground as a final truth escapes breathless lips.

"I don't know what I want."

She lies on the road, curling up, vulnerable, shivering. "I don't know what I want. I don't know what will be enough. Nothing ever is. I fill myself with instinct but being full isn't the same as being whole. It's just... not having to think about it."

Ember!

"Oh!" said Gemini. "You! I can't even be mad at you, and that's the most annoying thing of all!"

She fumed, staring off into the distance. "Well. For love, is it? I can't be mad at that. But the pack is the pack, and right now the pack is suffering because of you. So your punishment is to suffer with them."

Scent and memory are intimately linked - but Gemini can go one step beyond. Her invisible aura swells, her being larger than her body, and she acts as the conduit - the full flow of the pack's formation instinct pours through her. In normal circumstances a Ceronian is subconsciously aware of the exact location and status of every pack member around them, letting warriors move in perfect silence and harmony through complex maneuvers. What Gemini does to you is a razor sharp refinement of that basic instinct.

She pours all of the experiences of the entire pack through you. Those of them trapped under nets, piled up on top of each other, stripped and bound and put on display. Your mind fills with the full humiliation of defeat, every slap and jeer and gag and twist of rope applied to the Silver Divers also being applied with crystal clarity to the one who doomed them.

It's a lot.

Dolce!

"Do you see it?" asked Artemis, sitting across from you. "The power."

The ancient stories speak of the moon. The hunt. The howling of the animals in the bloody forests of the night. The maiden who walked into its depths untouched and emerged with the bloody wreckage of her victims. This deep into the work of the Service...

Your senses are heightened. A stray number on a ledger might be a family. Your breath is still. You have sat in a repose that an ancient sniper might have prayed for. Your tools are sharp. With a flash of your pen invisible arrows cross the distance. You are afraid. There are monsters in these depths truer than any modern wolf.

Artemis stares at you. When the natural world became knowable, when wolves became tame, when ecosystems were tamed she did not change. She still stands in the heart of a mysterious world, where the tremble of your fearful hand or the blink of your weary eye could spell death.

"You had fourteen minutes spare after you finished your assigned tasks," said Artemis. "Enough time to fill out two requisition forms. Two wagonloads of treasure, delivered anywhere on the world you desire. You moved around tens of thousands of Corvii, and you had a surplus of them. A unit of them could have been dispatched to burn a village and massacre its inhabitants. You ordered the clearance of the orbital minefield to make preparation for the Architect's arrival. What if you submitted it with the wrong priority stamp and it did not get done in time?"

Her eyes are more lupine than the wolves of Ceron. To walk into her forest is to risk everything - and to emerge with meat, rich and bloody.

You can feel hot breath warming the paperwork under your fingers.

Dyssia!

"You sound like you're bored," says the Dust Knight.

He doesn't choose to say it, though. Some power inspired him to say it. Silver strings descend from above, lifting his cheeks and jaws, waving his arms about like a puppet. Careless. Ridiculous. Mad.

You look up at the divine monster hunched over him, hands raised aloft in the splayed puppeteer's precision. Your own distorted face stares back at you in the murk of Dionysus' mask.

"And why wouldn't you be?" said the Dust Knight/The God of Feasts/Your Reflection. "You haven't moved an inch. You thought you were looking for righteousness, but you never were. This is righteousness. It is just another Path, Dyssia. After all that you're climbing the same old ladder towards the sun and you haaaate it. So is this it, then?" His face/your face is Merilt's. "You just needed to feel even more guilty about getting bored, hopeless and distracted before you'd finally stick with it? All you needed to knuckle down and do the work was more strength behind the whip?"

Dionysus grinned Apollo's grin, mad and shining, more passion than the Sun had ever shown you. "We're sure to get there eventually if we do it this way," he said. "Swear on me mum."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"It's tea, actually," said Brown, looking at the stain on her suit.

She is thinking about botany. The hydroponics bays in Gaia where the cascading tea leaves fall in waterfalls, the yellow and white flowers in full bloom making them look like rivers of honey cream. She's thinking about the sound the water makes as it runs through them. She thinks about these things in the face of the ugly inhumanity of these cells, not because she's untouched - quite the opposite. In the face of horror, beauty. Beauty in the smallest things, even in the scent of tea from her stained shirt. Beauty was stability, was sanity.

"Can you open the door please?" Brown said to Cheadle. "Are we free to go, or does the state intend to press charges?"

It would be interesting to hear a 'yes'. The inhumane conditions alone would undercut any prosecution's case and attract media attention, so the fact that she'd been let in at all meant that they'd likely decided to wipe their hands of the case. Failing that, she'd at least have the next stage of the conversation in a private room.

Orange and Blue!

"I can do something about that surveillance," said Blue immediately. "Whoever's at the other end, if they've got that many assets pointed at you I can trace it back. I can -"
Orange held up a hand. "Blue, no."
"Why not?" she snapped. "Like he said, we can -"
"Stop," said Orange. "Okay. Before going full psycho mode, answer his question first."
Blue glowered darkly, folding her arms. "Because - Green had it right. Imagine being on the Supreme Court - being the Queen of Justice - and being this fucking mid. Do you understand what a powerful idea justice is? How hot it burns? It's -" she took off her glove.

The hand beneath was mechanical. Monstrous. Fusion cutter talons, shaped like the claws of an industrial beast. She rested it on the desk, tracing it back and forth. Not carving grooves into the wood took visible self control.

"That day in front of the courthouse, do you know what I was looking at?" said Blue. "The Goddess of Justice. Sword in hand. Something greater and more pure than mortal politics. But her blindfold stopped her seeing she was ankle deep in blood and her high priestesses were rotten to the core. I wanted to see the scales fall from her eyes. To turn towards the courthouse rather than facing away from it. I want her to break with the system that claims to speak for her."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange and Blue!

They're back with Pope. Professional courtesy, not to change anything up from one meet to the next. He's the obvious and correct choice.

"Our source on this is highly sensitive and vulnerable," Blue is saying. "And we cannot risk their safety. We're only giving this to you because we respect the caution you've shown so far, you need to convincingly fabricate the chain of events that lead you there. Speaking of, there's a link you should use -"

She rummaged in her bag. "Someone talked about a friend getting 'necklaced'. Looked into it and it turned out it was a journalist. Gorush Castro. Used to be a friend of the family, whoever did him had an eye for history. He knew the truth and was keeping it quiet." She produced a stack of printed papers, ugly jpg scans of a singed paper notebook. "They scanned it into evidence, but if you don't know what you're looking for then it doesn't look like anything. Make a few leaps of intuition, place a few meetings in historical context, and pin the reveal on a dead man."

[History 0/1]

That's the tradecraft stuff, but Orange looks more wistful. "I wish it could have been something more impactful," she said. "But the truth is I just got mad. I got mad and I wanted to burn down one of the people responsible. I couldn't think of anything else to do."

Brown!

She can't wait to start waiting. She sits down and zones out almost instantly, fading into her sunlight reverie. Human children often enter states of reverie - do you remember staring into the grass, or the sky? Watching bugs or running water or the movements of lizards? Hours can pass by in silent contemplation of simple things. Little tracing patterns. The way people move, the way they change their stance, shifting the weight from side to side. How regularly they go to the bathroom, how often they pat the pocket with their wallet, how often they glance at their phone. She loved the small details, the flexes of the arms, the strain of fabric against bicep. She stared at the little black bulbs concealing camera angles in the rooftop. She watched the chairs until the intricacies of their construction came apart for her; the cheap hollow metal, the corporate makers mark, the mold line down the side where the stamping machine had been misaligned...

Her holotop is open in front of her, streaming with words and documents and video but she isn't focusing on any of it. It's there to make her look busy, its cheap semitransparent holographic screen not blocking the tracking motion of her eyes. She's a daydreaming kid in a classroom, the faint breeze making its way in through the door feeling to her like the breath of the divine, the motion and smells and sighs and coughs of the world around her passing endlessly through her unfocused focus.

The path of least resistance involves sitting quietly and soaking in every detail of this room. She could do it forever. She used to hack her box in NASA so she could look at the telescope feeds, escaping the tightest security they could come up with so that she could stare into the glittering eternity of space.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

Without friction, she closed her holotop, walked down the street, and into the cheapest clothing store she could find. She'd gone out wearing her Headpattr maid uniform after all - she always wore a copy of it, it was more convenient than maintaining a varied wardrobe. Previously it had been an incredibly obvious problem with York's stupid plan but now, well... it was now less work going with it than figuring out a new plan.

Dressed now in a cheap brown suit, she pins the lawyer badge to her lapel. She takes a final sip of her tea and then spills the remainder over the front of her suit, staining it instantly. With the illusion of the discount public defender in place she goes in after York.

Green!

"Thanks," she said sincerely, "and good luck."

The idea of undercutting his moment of cool doesn't occur to her. They have been solving a puzzle together and no one knows more than Green the value of alternate perspectives. Juan has been invaluable and he's found an opportunity to go out impressing her, the least she can do is look impressed.

She's missed the window of the show to cover her exfiltration but the station hopper is still there. She just needs to cover the distance and the gauntlet of security without being seen. Stage one she does by simply booking it. The best way to evade a search pattern was to get outside of its area before the perimeter secures. [Athletics 3/8, autosuccess]

From there she signals Orange and Pink. She just needs an opening...

Orange!

She gets the signal. She triggers the release. Inert capsules in four stomachs start releasing drugs.

And the goats go wild.

Smelly, Bitey, Atticus, and Stomp are goats, and goats love psychedelics - Psilocybe semilanceata, or magic mushrooms in particular. They'll not only scarf down magic mushrooms wherever they find them, they will get in headbutt fights with humans who try to take them away. When interacting with the goats at the beginning of the evening she'd slipped them the drugs, capsules set to release on a radio signal. It had been a bit of a task calculating the correct dosages but the proud Costa-Silva family had entered their goats in a prize show a few years back that had seen them all weighed publicly.

Speaking of headbutting humans, the smell of magic mushrooms covered the guards. Well, it covered everyone - she'd released a cloud of it amidst the fireworks show - but then she and the children had been drenched with water. Luis is the first target of their affections, having sat out the festivities, but when the guards move in to assist him from being licked to death by hungry goats they'll be greeted just as enthusiastically. It's chaos - but animals, what can you do?

It's enough for Green to slip aboard the station hopper undetected in the midst of the chaos.

[Preparedness MOS]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

Brown watches faces. Men and women, the air of tension, the performance of control. She listens to the rustle of belts and fabric, sweat stains shaped by the edges of the hard vests underneath. The smells of sugars and fats and coffee, infusions of raw toxic energy. She falls into reveries of silent watching easily. Time disappears when she watches and she can indulge the straightforwards bliss of holding a position of power while utterly inactive.

In the silence she opens her holotop[1] and starts to work.

[1] A holotop is a pencil sized holographic display panel that will project a screen and a keyboard, the modern version of a laptop. They're often dirt cheap, underpowered and have terrible battery life but Brown finds it easier to work around the flaws than to go through the process of replacing hers.

She looks into incident reports, browsing through them until she find Zang's. She opens another tab and starts cross comparing it to relevant case law. Looks into background files - if Zang makes a career out of getting arrested she must have a seriously high powered lawyer in her back pocket, so she looks back in the files until she finds that person and reaches out to them. She takes her time to understand the situation properly and work it right.

If York wants to play silly buggers with the cops and gets arrested, then she'll provide for him the same level of service.

Green!

The staircase closes. The vents re-open.

People suffocate in poorly ventilated panic rooms - which this essentially is - especially if you have to, say, pack a dozen or more family members into it. When the staircase goes up it pressurizes the space, and when the room's carbon dioxide sensor - that Green has directed Juan to blow hard onto - registers a high level of carbon dioxide then its automatic system decides that the security risk of an open vent is less concerning than having its manufacturers' name listed alongside the casualty report.

Not to worry, though - the system will pulse in a rush of air and then seal again automatically, a cycle so quick that it wouldn't present an opportunity for an intruder who didn't want to get cut in half - unless there was, say, a buildup of rust from a leaky water pipe on the key internal gear that slowed it down. Unrelated, did you know that hydrogen peroxide is a common household cleaning product, and mixed with table salt and vinegar it can rapidly rust metal?

Green gestures to Juan to go first. "Piece of advice," she said. "Always make sure the door can't lock behind you."

[Mechanics 3/8, 5+5 10]

Orange!

"Ah, my fault," said Orange. "I'm just not... a complete enough person."

And that was kind of it. Bondi loved Orange - and didn't comprehend November. She couldn't take the idea of Orange switching out for a more relevant colour and had sincerely tried to express to Orange that she was special, unique, and if she just believed in herself she could be a real girl all on her own. And the sentiment had been flattering. She'd tried. She'd tried hard, but...

There were holes in her mind. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't fill them. Maintaining a single perspective and personality took all her energy. Concealing the rest of herself from someone felt like trying to pour her light through a pinhole. Talking was all she was, and isolated it was all she could be, so many thoughts running to into dead ends and flaring out. The experience gave her an intimate understanding for the inner lives of the Stepford Wives, as that was essentially what Orange was without her collective.

It still hurt, though. So she's a bit cruel when she turns it around. "It's why I'm envious of humans," she said. "Nine children! You must love your wife a lot. It's a shame she couldn't make it."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

The Aeteline leans down over Akaithon. Isn't it beautiful?

Look at it.

No hint of the organic textures or plates that mark Zaldarian mechs; this is a thing of sharp angles and Imperial ambition. The bladed angles of it are sculpted, three overlapping triangular patterns for chest and shoulders. A head like a razor beak, lit from within by a pale violet glow. It is painted with a hexagonal pattern of dark blue and black on its raised armour plating, giving it the impression of computerized scales even across its smooth and unbroken flat surfaces. The underchassis shines in green-tinted silver, the body underneath that armour even brighter and more beautiful than the patterns on its plate. Its arms have the curved, fine arcs of fishbones; its remaining leg rests on a dainty foot without the complication of claws or talons. It's such a simple design, almost basic - no tricks or gimmicks, no concessions to the inhuman or the alien, nothing that would cause friction between it and the mind-impulse unity of its pilot. It makes everything else feel monstrous in comparison.

It looks down at Akaithon. No, not at Akaithon.

It reaches down into the wreck of the Kathresis, armoured fingers grasping, passing right past the shouting girl. It reaches into the Kathresis and finds it's computer core. And it crushes it into pieces with a single remorseless flex even as the recovery engines race towards them.

Then the Aeteline stands, takes up its severed limb, ignites its thrusters, and leaves Akaithon behind.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"Oh, I see!" said Brown. "You're trying to be charisma at me! You think I'll agree to your weird improvised scheme if you talk fast enough!"

She remains sitting and does not touch the items on the table. "York, you may be a fucking lunatic these days, and you're definitely good at attracting fucking lunatics to work for you, but you're going to sit your ass back in the chair and interact with me like your brain is operating on its default chemistry."

Green!

She nodded. Was quiet for a moment. Made sure to take the point seriously and not gloss past it. "That kind of crime is awful, but it grows in the broken parts of the world," she said. "It's possible to cause it and fight against it at the same time."

But that was all she had time for. She can't hide like a kid but she can hide like a machine. She closes the safe and walks into the holographic art projector in the corner, cables in, and stands extremely still.

Green has been thinking about holograms for a long time - the idea of having an infinitely adaptable body of light is desirable to her. Her plans for her future have herself as a holographic projector node paired with fine manipulator arrays, changing her shape adaptively in response to whim and requirement, an animation frame amidst the physical world. To conceal herself now just requires her to stand amidst the right kind of art - the kind that benefits from the null black canvas of her bodysuit. She lets the light dance across her body like dresses and gowns, like starfields and masks, the glittering patterns associated with Panjia Noss, the famous holoartist who built this sculpture array in the first instance. She doesn't need to change the painting much, just follow through on the patterns that will hide the parts of her that a human might connect into being a face or body.

[Conceal 5/8 Forgery 0/1 2+6 8]

Pink!

The problem with being cute and literary: if someone was sharp enough to dig into the metaphor then they might see the shape of the story. The advantage: they might start to see their place in it. Pink relaxes a little, letting her shoulders fall, the serene expression fade. The air of an actress tired rather than a magical spirit.

"It always seemed like a shame we couldn't get any weather onto Aevum," she said. "So many people growing up not knowing what a storm was. The early signs, the stirrings of it, the heat and pressure and sense of wind..."

She remembered herself in that little drone body outside as the air began to change and the storm began to rise. How fearsome it had felt, how fragile her quadcopter body seemed in the face of that rushing wall of water. Antonio dwelt so long in summer Naples he forgot the sign of the tempest.

"I've always loved the Tempest," said Pink. "It was both the last play Shakespeare wrote, and the first play he wrote for Blackfriar's theatre. Blackfriars was a massive improvement over the Globe and the ground-up redesign of the stage's infrastructure allowed far more special effects than had been possible previously. An enclosed, controlled setting allowed the magic of wind and sea air to travel to the heart of London. It seems at first a story about vengeance, but it's not - it's a story about the breaking of power. The ship runs aground, the false Duke is overthrown, the staff is broken and the book is thrown into the sea. In the heights of his new, final grandeur Shakespeare shatters the very system of magic that gave him power and bound artificial slaves to him, granting them freedom. And then - do you know that Titus Andronicus was his first play? A furious, bloodthirsty shock-horror show about murder, revenge, cannibalism and suicide. From the intensity of that beginning instead, at the end, Prospero forgives his enemies.

"More than that, he requests forgiveness for himself. He turns to the audience and apologizes for his faults. He faces the reckoning for everything he has done and asks for pardon for all the errors and mistakes of his career. Even the power of the author breaks at this moment, he shattered this final illusion and asks as a human for mercy and understanding. It's a moment of honesty and vulnerability more raw than anything he ever wrote, his final goodbye and epitaph. I'd like people to think about that, if I can help them do so. It's only when the spell is broken and the slaves are freed that people have the chance to be truly honest with each other."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"What are you on about the declarations for?" said Brown. "The writing is good because there are no typos in it. I go through and check that myself. The grammar all checks out too. That's the definition of good writing; correctly placed spelling, grammar and punctuation." She nodded contentedly, and then looked worried. "Unless I missed something?????????"

Chewing over that, she reads Jezebel's profile. She can't see what the problem is here either. Extremely dry, procedural documentation was great. These videos were extensively researched. The fact that other people managed to spice it up for the Reds of the world seemed like the ecosystem working as designed, bringing that in-house seemed like an exhausting amount of work. She looked up at York. "I'm afraid I don't get it."

Green!

"It's boring, yes," said Green. "It doesn't hurt anyone all that much, yes. But what you're looking at here is the death of empires."

She bought up a holographic display of the Aevum ring, perfect in glittering blue. "This is the world as it was designed, even and balanced, a home for all. But then someone picks up a second home." The graphic blinks, one section flashing green - and another section on the opposite side of the ring flashing red. "Wealth falls unequally. Someone is pushed to the fringe of the station. Power, life support, infrastructure is all stressed. Your mother has, what... a hundred keys here?" The graphic flashed, green and red spreading like the pox. "Still doesn't look like a lot, does it?"

She smiled sadly. "This is the consequence of one person like your mother. Here's what it looks like with the rest."

The graphic updates to the pulsing, corrupted red and green spikes of Goat's game. A station spiraling out of balance, half the ring scorched red, and ten percent luxurious green.

"Land rights are what set the peasants against the Tsar," said Green. "Land rights are what ended the line of emperors in China. Each of these keys is a cut, small and anonymous, on the backs of the poorest people on the Station. There are millions of keys like this out there, and those cuts pile up until the people at the bottom are bleeding out. Why is this a big deal? Because if the Queen of Justice is just another slumlord then how can the people ever expect justice to help them when they're being sliced up by all the other slumlords?"

"The fact that it's boring is, sadly, the problem," said Green. "Justice shouldn't be boring and corrupt. It should be exciting. Revelatory. Like the news, justice should be about the truth, and that should be an ideal worth fighting for, worth changing the world for. But your mother is just like her fake journalist friends. In the end, they give you a boring, disappointing reality when you should expect and demand an archangel with a flaming sword. Who even cares? You should."

Orange and Pink!

Black would have told them to keep this under wraps until they were free from the blast radius - but they couldn't help it! The whole rehearsed thing about keeping secrets was kind of ironic in retrospect - it was word for word what Black had told them to say, but they'd let it slip early because they couldn't keep secrets well enough themselves. And now suddenly they're being Morally Confronted by a human and they don't have anyone on hand who can reason their way out of it.

"Well... I suppose..." said Orange. "You're right. Our original exfiltration plan was to make me disappear again and have Green come out in Caliban makeup to rejoin us. But she's taking too long and we ran out of distractions..." She looks to Bondi, not sure how to proceed from there.