Thanqol

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Practice is necessary.

Practicing how to fight while injured is reinforcing failure rather than seeking perfection.

Additional tactical options become available when structural trades are viable.

I know, that was... either a joke, or a sincere philosophy.

Who are you telling the joke to? We are the only one here.

Did you know there are two paths to perfection?

If you know it, I know it. We are one.

One path to perfection is... numeric. To be stronger through raw power. To turn up your numbers and turn down everyone else's numbers. A scientific, mathematical sort of perfection where you become a granite mountain, invincible and eternal.

Correct. Perfection is about gaining an advantage and preserving it.

The other path to perfection is to become the ocean, and grind down the mountain with ten trillion waves.

The timeframe renders it nonviable. The mountain just needs to outlast, wait for the ocean to make a mistake -

But the ocean never makes a mistake. The mountain has no counterattack. Though it might take ten trillion waves the mountain diminishes but the ocean never does. Numeric verses infinite.

The Kathresis fought like that. To try and use stealth and subtlety, we saturated its defenses -

I'm not talking about the Kathresis. The Kathresis was a thing of Tactics, and Tactics are no path to perfection. Tactics are about... stealing wins, finding the gaps that make the strong weak and the weak strong. Perfection is a mountain; the greatest there is. Perfection is an ocean; on the correct end of the only binary that matters.

And which are you?

Heh. You chose poorly, Aeteline. I've only ever been Tactics. And I'll never be perfect.

The perfection described is theoretical. United we have surpassed every opponent. Together or alone, all the Huntresses of Hybrasil have fallen before us - and they will again. We will accomplish that through fundamentals. We will practice.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

If she has one talent it's that nothing stops her from being functional.

She can make it home, go shopping, vacuum the floor, and spray down the shadow of mold out of the shower without missing a beat. The train pass scans, there's a spare box of batteries on the shelf, and all of her video games suck but she dutifully manages to waste three hours in one without complaining. And that's the easiest way for everyone involved. Any fracture of her shell would draw in other people, would incite a whole new conversation to fuck up in. Admission of weakness was an expenditure of energy. Emoting anything less than total normality was tantamount to an admission of weakness.

Even any private display of frustration was wasteful. Who would it serve? What would it accomplish? Lashing out wouldn't make her feel better. Torturing herself wouldn't make her be better. Before fucking up, pulling water, cutting wood. After fucking up, pulling water, cutting wood. She could live by that. She could strategically avoid making anything worse, in word or deed. The inside of her brain might be a single massive scorch mark but, fuck, if she was going to let that stop her then she'd never get anything done.

Blue!

To some degree, Blue just doesn't get it. November as a whole has always had a hard time treating anyone as lesser or greater; it means she'll treat the destitute and the damaged the same as those enthroned. Sometimes it results in her addressing a twelve year old child with heartfelt sincerity, at other times she has spent forty five minutes explaining zero-g metallurgy to a komodo dragon because she genuinely thought that the lizard was getting there. That part isn't anything special to her.

But what is... Blue understands the physical world, yes, but she's also interested in physical history. She used to look at Mr. Merkin's coins with an alienated kind of fascination. There had been something there beyond the metal she hadn't quite been able to place. But she saw it now, when Serino had talked about his hometown. She saw... pride. The kind of pride that translated into tradition; the kind of tradition that was a celebration of excellence. An artistic history and community. She had no stone cliffs or smuggler's speedboats in her heart, but the idea of a... a corporate logo as an act of love and self-respect and artistry, rather than a cold-hearted attempt at mind controlling positive feelings out of the general public. That was new to her.

"I'd like that," she said. "I want to learn to make things I can be proud of."

Green!

Everything is made ready. Muscles are coiled ready to pounce. The tension is absolute, the plan is in motion, and -

The world, sea and sky collapses into a small green sphere.

"Can't," said the orb, muffled. "Could but can't. Not even here. Inexpressible, despite being trivial. I thought it would be mine, but it's deeper than that. I need to be lesser/greater. Control with less/more friction. More powerful, more limited. Digital divinity insufficient. Insufficient lack of control. Need to incubate a new thought." There is a crackle of frustrated electricity across the surface of the orb and it condenses tighter. "Translation issue."

Yellow!

Yellow makes a show of the battery change. She stands tall and graceful, raising one foot up to place on a chair, bare knee emerging from her robe as Pink and Green kneel before her and open the storage connector with gentle and attentive fingers. The way they do it feels like it has something in common with a dance routine, not least how they occasionally turn their heads in unison to look at the camera (Cinders).

"These are appreciated," said Yellow, producing a fan with the calligraphic character for SUNRISE from a hidden pocket in her sleeve. "These are going extinct, you know? There's an old line of lava lamps that use the same technology. I've been buying them up but sooner or later they might stop existing on the station entirely. At that point I'll need to make a decision."

She rolled back her sleeve and flexed so that her attendants could replace the batteries in her elbow. She smirked and fanned herself as the mechanical aspects of her body were opened up and put on display in quick, elegant movements.

"Speaking of," she flicked her fan shut and pointed it at Euna. "Music. Fight music. What do you have for us?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"Okay," she said. Remember - she straightened her shoulders a little. Professional. "I wasn't thinking. I'll leave."

She feels like she missed a beat. Why did looking at footage entail an interrogation? A different colour, a correct colour, would have made the connection. Even Pink would have had the courage to detonate the concealed smoke bomb in her heel that she'd installed to get out of situations like this one. All she could do was take it on the chin and be on her way without flinching.

Blue!

She takes extensive notes on this even as it solves the mystery of how her digestive system works. A primitive version of this let her taste test everything that was destined for Mrs. Everest for poison, disease or foreign contaminants. She hadn't realized it could be used for inorganic materials too.

She thinks about what she's learned. Silicon-diamond glassblowing stands out the most to her. Carbon fiber weaving is more practical on a mass scale, but the difficulty and resistance of glassblowing as a skill appeals to her. The nature of it as impractical and hard to industrialize makes it feel comforting, the physicality of the work made it feel powerful, the heat of it made it feel nostalgic. The results would be deeply individual, artifacts more than gear, and that felt right. Earlier members of her family had been all aboard the Factory Must Grow mindset, most especially Ox, but joining the Aevum project as late as she had gave her an opportunity to indulge in craftsmanship.

"On the topic of diamond glassblowing, I can see the compromises I'd have to make to afford a version of it," she said, bringing it back around. "But I'd like to hear, just for comparison/aspirational purposes, who has the best version of it on the station? What do they make? What does the out of touch aspirational manifestation of this craft look like?"

Green!

[Mechanics 0/3 3+3, 6 success but lower, Fiona's lead goes to 6]

Fiona stands tall. The ocean fades until it is the rapid-rushing water of a jungle stream, not even knee high despite its efforts. The tangling kelp pushes into the distance until it's the walls of a rainforest, twisted and tangled in every direction, vines hanging low and tangled but not close enough to catch. Heat comes into place; intense but languid, the stirring of a tiger at noontime.

In the forest there is a growl.

It's a small but meaningful shift; Green has gone from a concealing landscape to something physical concealed within the landscape. Not thinking through the cold, wet cable-hard entanglement of the kelp but through a hunter's patient, steady motions. She has made some part of herself manifest even if she won't yet show what that is; her consciousness has changed from oceanic blue to transparent white; the omnipresent glow of an Indian sun and a determination not to be baited or goaded. Her muscles are gathering beneath her. She won't attack on anything but her own terms.

[Conceal 2/8 4+3 7]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"Ah, well," Brown said, sinking back into her fog. "Yeah let's do that."

Not only did that register as another failure, it was another revealed failure, and if she wasn't very careful it was a failure in herself that would make other people feel bad about themselves. Even as her energy dissolved back into an ambient, sharp-edged fog she needed to maintain a certain tired, easy posture so that her disappointment didn't bring down the room. The effort to do that cost any further attempt at contributing.

Blue!

Blue: Remind me, is bulletproof armour made out of diamonds something we want?
Pink: aahshfjjajahaajajajh
Blue: I could also do diamond swords
Pink: I am already going to the gym I don't need more incentive

Another key fabrication technology, though if anything even more of a commitment than the carbon loom. Building something with this would involve enormous amounts of practice and wasted materials. It would require an approach of building specialized pieces, there wouldn't be the option for uniform equipment. But the aesthetic of it. She could make scales out of diamond-silicon glass.

"Last question," she asked. "What's new with plumbing? Broken water pipes, working through the rainy season, vent-ice? I see the ice mining freighters and they're so much smaller than my envelope math says they should be, and the Cloud got stuck over Hermes for like three months without flooding or limiting flow."

Green!

She could angst over being dangerous all she wanted, but what that meant in practice is that she had no way to de-escalate when Challenged.

There's nothing but the tension in the air now, the micro-shifts of vision and posture. It's a state of utter, serene calm for Green. A clear contest with clear rules lets her dispense with all the infrastructure that keeps her from this state. She needs to make a move but as soon as she commits to an idea she's condensing infinite possibility into something knowable. How to communicate perfectly while giving nothing away?

She opens her wings and becomes the ocean.

Crashing waves upon a storm-tossed sea. Slate-grey and sand green, blue skies and steel clouds. Air that invigorates, sensationalizes, makes the mouth water. A riptide that snatches from below and drags Fiona along by the legs. A sargassum forest that whips and tangles, fast water and tangling kelp vines and the muscular threat of leviathans moving beneath the surface. The inherent eroticism of the ocean is often commented on but rarely manifested, and with wind and wave and the crackle of ball lightning across the surface, Green grips.

Nova!

Their favourite is "Nova".

The reaction to Euna using that name is - well, there's the sense that's the name they really wanted for themselves, but didn't want just anyone to figure it out and use it. November was reverse-engineered from Nova as something to put on paperwork and to stop themselves from vibrating with delight/embarrassment whenever it came up in casual conversation. The only way that name would work for her is if someone organically came up with it independently and there was genuine delight when Euna did. The response to it is almost the most co-ordinated she's ever been.

Beyond that, nicknames that involve alternate colours - Gold for Yellow, for example - don't work, they don't realize that they're being spoken to at all. Questioned, they'd mention uncertainty if Green had already blocked out concept space for those colours or was working on them in the background. They're happy with things evocative of the colours - Daisy for Yellow - but nothing registers quite like Nova for addressing a group of them.

"You can't even compete with us?" said Yellow, smiling, surrounded by her posse - Green and Pink. "How cute~"

There's something about the way that the three of them can move in unison that is extremely unbalancing. They've learned a trick where they maneuver so that one of them is right on the periphery of vision both left and right. Turn your head and they move their position so they're still there on the edge. It's worse than them being completely out of vision, it feels like being stalked by velociraptors.

"Perhaps we can take you on as our project!" said Yellow. Her aesthetic today was knots - intricate hair braids, knotted red neck kerchief, a crimson sash around her waist tied up in a bow, all over a silky white gi. Half shrine maiden, half sailor sentai, all smiles. "Take you under my trench coat, shape you with our eighteen hands, bring you up to speed~"

Yellow was easily the weirdest of November's colours to teach. She refused to touch anything directly, and often refused exercises if they didn't meet her weird hidden criteria, and her showing up at all was uncommon. But when she did appear, she could somehow coax the best possible performance out of every other colour.

Breathless Dead

Mosaic!

Turn your eyes down. Zeus is there down in the dirt with you.

"Therefore, through a constant shifting of rhetorical focus -" she chuckled at an old, grim joke. "Weak people. Strong people. Don't you see that's the thinking that all this is built on? Now you're strong, built for labour, outperforming Heracles as you haul a starship from Poseidon's maw. Now you're weak, disarmed and observed, a mortal before an oppressive Sky. Was Heracles strong or weak when madness made him devour his children? Was he strong or weak when he carried the golden apples to his hated enemy?"

The Thunderer looked into your eyes; deepest indigo and flecked with purple. "Your strengths are your weaknesses, Mosaic. Your weaknesses are your strengths. The ancient playwrights knew it when they penned their tragedies. Modern tyrants forget it when they pen their screeds. You too have the opportunity to walk the same path of tragedy that's haunted you all your days."

"Or," she said, and looked up into her sky, "you could do the one thing you have never been able to do. You could look power in the eye without blinking. See past the radiance of the throne to the woman atop it. Imagine yourself in her place."

Ember!

You see the Plousios emerge from the waves.

The chains of sweating labourers pull it onto a long carpet of null-friction neomaterial, the brutal and arcane manifestation of technology at its height. The massive armoured beak of the ship, the chipped gold and red and black paint as proud as the House of Hades, the riots of colour as corals and crabs drop from its rising surface. Seawater pours from rusted macrocannons. Treasure spills from open cargo bays like dripping blood. It is mighty. It is as familiar as the grave. You remember your claws breaking that coffin open from the inside.

Nothing dies in the deathless domain of Demeter. Does that extend to the spirit of this undead ship? Does the heartbeat you felt beneath your fingertips still stir? Does the voice of the ancient craftsman still resonate in your ears, telling you the secrets of bringing metal and stars to life?

You can feel it in your heart. The space in this ship's heart where you belong.

Dolce!

There is a sound like nothing you've ever heard before. There's a sight like nothing you've ever seen. A crackling blue magical fire ignites in the corner of the room, and where it spreads you can see through into a different place like looking into a cinema screen. You look into a place filled with armoured soldiers.

Immediately they're piling through the gap, shoulder to shoulder, shouting things like "GO GO GO" and "PERIMETER SECURED" and "MARS VICTORIA". They're all over you and past you in that wild, fast paced way that warrior servitors on a mission are like. 20022 does not even let a ripple show in his tea.

And then, when the room is lined in every particular with snake-masked soldiers, the Royal Architect steps out.

He was old. Even if his primitive design of glittering lights, plastic-alloy and holograms didn't make him feel as exquisitely dated as a blackpowder rifle, he moved with a hunch and a walking stick. Despite the obvious signs of age, he moved with a similar quickness to the soldiers - their nervous, paranoid energy mirroring his. Rapidly he moved into the room closing the portal behind him, floating camera drones surrounding him on buzzing little wings, and stopped with one arm folded behind him to look down at Bitemark. Then he turned and moved over to the table where the two Synnefo sat, moving an arm twitchily to snatch at the cup of tea that 20022 had already poured for him. His robotic mouth did not open - it just glowed in time with his words - but he seemed to appreciate the smell of it.

"You -" he snapped his fingers at Dolce, the jerking motion almost making him spill the tea. "- you. You're an atypical design. Different phenotypes, wool is tinted yellow rather than violet, horn structure, excessive posterior design. All traits of human-variant Synnefo strains." The orblike lenses of the camera drones closed in. "Are you a spy? An Assassin? Give me your hand, I need to take a blood sample."

Dyssia!

The Sellarfane is retro.

A RVX-05 Assault Dropship barely seats a thousand in one cramped hangar bay. Chemical-fueled plasma afterburners with eight demi-reactors on a cycling rig - enough to recover from seven direct ELF storms. An externally mounted rack of plasma torpedoes held in grav-spheres and four projector arrays to guide them in. In its prime this would have been a mass assault landing craft, a ship that could endure the storm of a blockade. It could slip onto a planet or space station's surface and deploy a thousand highly armed supersoldiers into the heart of enemy territory, clearing a path and landing zone with precision guided torpedoes. It was a ship designed in the fires of a total galactic war, a ship designed to be expended in the tens of thousands, a ship that was an intimate part of an organized Doctrine that had plans from its manufacturing to its death.

Cool. Stylish. Uncomfortable. And even retrofitted with modern materials, it was a shadow before the Slitted, the flagship of the Crystal Knight. Without the fires of war to pressure the design, warships bloat beyond all reason; armed space stations, weaponized resort moons, temple-complexes designed to be implements of tyranny more than weapons of war. There's no chance this relic will survive an engagement with the Slitted. Ships like the Slitted killed almost every single RVX-05 Dropship ever made and absorbed their mass to repair their hulls. Mars has made it clear who his favourites are.

But with a drunken, manic enough strategy going in, Dionysus can offer you and your legion the element of surprise.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

She faded into the recollection. The tension was still there but it shifted into the background as she went from observed to observer. "The Themis guys. Did you get their badge numbers?" If anyone's used to snap-checking badge numbers of cops, it's Zhang. "Or failing that, the logo of the coffee shop they went to? Was it hot or cold?"

Identify the agents - their route, their base, their pattern. It was some Light Yagami shit, she knew, to take an interest in the investigation into you, but this wasn't the state she was up against. It hadn't been anyone with a government contract guarding Hades, it had been Chase Black. Her siblings were sitting in a military base, not deployed to the field. She could see in her mind's eye that there was a chink between the state and the people responsible for Erebus. A parallel response system with its own interests and assets. If there was an investigation then the parallel system would be taking an intimate interest, just as they had with the disaster response incident. If she could see who was watching she might be able to see what else they were watching...

Blue!

She notes it too. Paper. Multiple missions so far had been stalled by the physical inconvenience of moving large reams of paper out through a secure compound. After approximately a jillion high profile hacks companies and individuals seemed to have wised up and returned the typewriter to active service. She had briefly patted herself on the back for learning handwriting, but it seemed that skill had proliferated dangerously and there wasn't a way around that...

Or was there? She stood up and put her hands around Serino's bicep - they didn't fit but it gives her a good sense of the dimensions. Looked appropriately impressed and thoughtful as she sat back down. Those were big and they did not need to be filled with muscles. She could make some sort of... robot musclesuit, hollowed out and filled with either valuable kit or loot to be smuggled out of buildings.

"What tools are there for depth scanning?" she asked. "In my day, there wasn't anything to tell if a room was pressurized other than cutting a hole and getting clear of the blast radius. There's got to be better ways to scan what's on the other side now, but cybereye firms are extremely light on the details of what they can see and how."

Green!

Where the finger touched the pale green distorted and disappeared, revealing the glittering void of space - though it felt eerily solid. Like skin turning pale when pressed with a finger in reverse. Green leaned into it and purred - but within three seconds she'd turned her head to present the jawline, ear and neck.

"Trust can be broken," she said. "I might seize control of the scene; run it too hard, too fast, too aggressive. I could disable safety controls, force something uncomfortable, or hard cut at the wrong moment. My mind's always searching for the next idea or transition and I flick between concepts like a strobe light, these changes happen before I'm even aware of them. I was talking to Sophie about neurohacking and I was so interested that I didn't realize that was knowledge it was not remotely safe for me to possess - I didn't realize it until after I'd finished learning how to do it. Here I can do anything and I want to be able to do anything and that's an insanely dangerous combination."

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

Hsien did the only thing she could think to do in that moment.

She bit Lady Foxfire's hand.

They looked at each other for a moment. Made eye contact with an exactly mirrored expression of 'are we really doing this?' and 'I guess we are really doing this' and 'we really hope that nobody is watching this because this is about to be extremely undignified'.

And then Hsien is being beaten over the head with a purse and she's holding her grip on that hand but she's too panicked to let go and Foxfire is too panicked to stop and of course in the middle of this whole thing Hsien has finally thought of the correct thing to say so she's trying to mmmmrph gmhr mhhrph out her rebuttal through a mouthful of her greater half's hand and through the yips she makes when Foxfire pulls her delicate little triangles ow ow ow ow ow -

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

When observation turned inwards it focused on those graceless moments. The large scale revisiting of every imperfect moment had begun, and with it Brown's limited imagination stretched itself to the idea of excusing herself so she could beat her head against a wall. The fantasy ran right up to the point where her scream of frustration attracted concerned passers by and then it recursed on itself as a new moment of imperfection joined the others. It was difficult to function at all through this autocondemnatory trial. It made her feel overexposed; she was aware of so much evidence of her own failure that it surely wouldn't take too much more for even disinterested parties to start piecing it together. Withdraw, hide, disappear...

But she could handle it. She took a breath. She missed her wordless reverie and direct lines and would very much like to fall back into them, but she had to keep fighting no matter how much she wanted to check out. "Thank you, but what I was actually intending to ask was about the first group of people who interrogated you. I'm speaking accurately about my welding knowledge; I know how to do it but my skill is extremely out of date."

Blue!

Blue notes it down. There were a lot of advantages to getting a single, large fabrication purchase - not least the practical effects of outfitting a dozen people in matching outfits. One top of the line item also offered an 'impossibility hinge' - that was, being able to do one impossible thing could bypass security as a concept rather than fighting a number of smaller, riskier battles within the spectrum of the possible.

"What about lifting and hauling?" she asked, changing topics. "The station is so hostile to motor transportation but all of the physical shit of construction still needs to make its way around. How do you get a vanload of tools through an overbuilt Hermes alley at night without waking the neighbourhood?"

Green!

"Oh - that's -"

She laughs. November has not laughed like this in - even subjectively it's been a decade. Delight.

"You know, sometimes I forget that I'm actually kind of basic?" she said, spreading the image around her head so she could move around while viewing it. The shifting resumes but slowly, more deliberately. "I mean - not in absolute terms, but..." She turns it over. "This is about a mental framework. The physical structure exists purely as a vehicle to enable the mental framework. No interest in communication or aesthetic. Tyrannical control over input, both in what is and isn't included. Disinterest in features of a body that does not suit the mental framework."

That stops her, commands her attention. The faster her thoughts run the more electric green seeps into her design. "Oh. The framework. The framework for the mind - that's what's important!" She laughed again, folding Fiona's body back into itself. "It's not that I miss my previous body. I lived for a decade before that without any body at all. It's not even that I'm unique in the inexpressibility of my desires - ah, stupid, can't believe I wasted all that time! I need to work backwards from how my thoughts are into how my body looks, and I've already done that. I'm -" any pretense of photorealism was abandoned entirely; now she's a cel-shaded animation, now an impressionistic painting, now a pencil sketch. "- doing that right now."

She settles into a shape like a bird landing on a branch; momentarily stable but ready to take off again at any moment. It's the glitchwork dragon she first appeared as in the sky, scaled down; green-tinted white, scattered with pixel-effect stars and brilliant eyes, jagged in poor resolution artifacts. "In my ideal state I have no barrier between what I think and what I do, between what I think and who I am. That's what makes me dangerous - each check and filter I add to myself feels like a checklist I have to go through before I can be myself, but those checks are there for a reason. But that's," the dragon's snout crinkled, "only a problem here, where I have control over the environment as well as myself. In the physical world I have a containable level of agency but not enough adaptive expression -" A check triggers, her tone of voice changes. "I am talking about myself too much and not acknowledging what you just trusted me with. Thank you for that."

It obviously derails her entire flow to stop examining this fascinating idea and acknowledge another person, rather than forward-predicting their half of the conversation from information she already has. It's as good an illustration as anything of what she's afraid of in herself.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

An abject lesson. This creature was weak because of its distance from perfection. It only took a glance to see where it was going; it took only a little pattern recognition to see where its path would end. The logic of each choice inevitably pushed it into the next one. The chain of decisions lead inevitably back towards the crab. Every hour it spent as its own creature was an hour wasted and when it fought its competitor crabs they would kill it with experience. That is -

- Tragic?

Inevitable.

There was no progress on Roevg, in Zaldar. All of science had existed in the palm of some great hand, and then it had been turned loose upon itself. The Consortium looked forwards to next year's designs, next year's products, but on Roevg the gods would arise when lightning struck the mountains and civilization cowered in their shadows. It had been a world stuck in time forever, a broken mechanical species as doomed as the protocrab to never escape its evolutionary niche. It had triumphed over the dynamism of Hybrasil because while they formed their contradictory, exploratory clans, their clash of different visions, the Zaldarians had fought using tactics honed for centuries -

- And the Aeteline.

...

Which was new. Manufactured in the Imperial Forge, a crowning glory of the Evercity. A brand new creation that -

- An ancient curse. When the creators of the Zaldarians went to war they did not do so with a circus of half-tamed godbeasts, they made reflections of themselves on macro scale. They were their own gods. It was a return to ancient tradition that granted true strength, the warfare of the creators -

- Did they win their war?

...

- Did they predate the sage Zaldar?

Request tactical assessment of situation.

The Aeteline would be best served by a medium chassis replacement matching the functions for which it is optimized. Such a limb is not guaranteed to exist in this environment; matching weight classes are likely to be digitgrade or other incompatable structural arrangements. Advise harvesting the protocrab due to convenience, using excess time to allow automated systems to partially integrate the limb, then leverage that into harvesting a more appropriate limb from our next round opponent.

Commencing takedown.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"Oh, welding..."

The rest of November feared Brown. Everything was just a bit off with her. Green was the manic paragon of brilliance and ambition, but with Brown everything just landed slightly wrong, went a little too slowly, couldn't quite come to the point. There was a fundamental drag with her, everything just a little bit uncool, exhausted and internally twisted. The focus on other people was in part a reflection of that; after dedicating so little energy to her own self concept she could absorb the emotions of others so much more easily. Under the spotlight there wasn't anything she could do but agree, passivity tumbling into bland acceptance.

"... sure, I know the basics," she said. She stirred herself, she didn't like having nothing of herself to assert, so she made an effort to refocus. "But welding's hardly a celebration and you still haven't answered my question."

Blue!

"The main thing I don't understand is how power transmission works these days," said Blue. "Some of it's wireless, some of it's cabled, and there always seems to be construction work happening to switch one type to the other type?"

She appreciates the calculated precision of her new grip. It had killed her to leave her hand strength up to vibes and impulses; she could be so much faster and so much more precise when she could visualize her movements in advance. There was a deep, deep satisfaction that came when physicality felt like the execution of a plan. A perfect movement made her feel like she was in sync with her body at last, and there was a comforting blankness to her mind in those moments where she could almost observe the beauty of her movements without commentary.

Green!

"That's because what I want is to win at Fiona, which is both a normal thing to want and possible goal to accomplish," said Green. There was a strange... frustration to her now? Her form seemed to solidify around the shape of her physical body. "And you're right that I don't know what you can take. That's the whole problem! Not least because I need to push past what your expectations are in order to accomplish my goal. I'd have to map you in real time and that's dangerous."

Her shifting stops almost entirely now; though it doesn't feel like she's stopped changing. This is a self-imposed prison of willpower.

"What I want is to be everything to everybody while also compromising nothing about my core identity. The closest I can come to that is eating the undernet and setting myself up as some sort of glitchcore AI goddess, which is also a normal thing to want and possible goal to accomplish," said Green. "But I'm not there yet, so, dangerous."