Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

"You're talking about corporations at pride, right?" said Pink. "Because I don't know how to put this but, I don't care. It's a navel gazing, protectionist instinct that fundamentally misunderstands the nature of art and culture."

She raises her hands expansively. "We're not special because we're furries. We're not special because we're part of any subculture or combination of subcultures. This has been a part of humanity since the Pyramids and they're the ones who decided to check out of it for a while. What made us special, what makes us special, is that we are authentic people who communicate sincerely and build lasting friendships, inside a positive, creative, mutually supporting environment. The fandom didn't create that. There are nazi furs out there, god bless them, just like there are absolute total normies who create works of unbelievable culture without a single body mod. Being good people let us build this. It'll continue to be good in exact proportion to the number of good people and positive friendships operating within it. Shedding a tear for authenticity lost to the mainstream just means you lost sight of who, exactly, was authentic in the first place."

Red!

No hand reveal at this point. Time to make a call.

First possibility was that they were fishing for an over-reaction - shouting 'I know what you did!' to see who glanced for the exit. This was too specific and too dialed in for that - there are no alternate suspects here who she could possibly have blended in with. This was too much information about capabilities and methods to spend for pretty much any operational result.

So the second possibility was that her initial instincts were correct and she was being fucked with. In that case the demonstration of power was the point, and that could lead basically anywhere. There was no need to let it play out any further, then; it was time to force them to show their hand or fold. She sends a message to Leather.

> I think the simulator is hacked for real. Shut it down and get out safe and quick.

Green!

"I think you might have misunderstood the story," said Green. "The pronouns are ambiguous - but I think it says that Gutei cut off his own finger. He held up his own severed finger in front of the boy to demonstrate that he would rather communicate the truth about enlightenment rather than the technicalities of his communication method."

She feels happy that she's solved the riddle. An intellectual puzzle unpicked using a fast-burning brain, complete with a sense of accomplishment and absolutely no need to reflect more deeply. If Monk truly understood Buddhism she would have hit her on the head with her staff in that moment.

"Taking the inheritance would have presented an unacceptable risk," said Black quietly. "The only way to avoid the notice of people who care only about money is to have none of your own."

"Our system has its drawbacks, I promise you," said Brown. "Applying our full attention to things is... difficult, bordering impossible. We're often missing critical colours so we have to coach each other on how to react when we're not present. Internal debates don't so much resolve as they go latent."

Breathless Dead

Mosaic!

It is the nature of mortals to think of themselves only in relation to other mortals. The winners of a war are glorious. The breakers of walls are glorious. The emperors who command the loyalty of trillions are glorious.

Thunder rolls. Lightning crashes overhead. As the earth itself heaves and tears and holds solid still, the sky ignites. A cascading thunderstorm spreading outwards from the broken Slitted eye above, energy changing from Azura blue to the Thunderer's indigo.

For Zeus has always favoured those who pit themselves against the natural world.

The mountain does not come willingly. It is chained with gravity and long habit. But it is all built upon a single piece of solid volcanic stone and the edges have been cut out by the diligent claws of the Stone Tribe. The rock has been fused into a solid, unbreakable mass by their resonant frequencies; the foundation of the town may as well be solid steel. It will not be the side that breaks.

That role falls to you as you haul brick and soil and lemon trees. Even one step is too much. Even one step is impossible. This was not what you were built for. The artifice in your muscles was placed there to administer mortals, to kill mortals, to do all the things comprehensible to mortals. It is not alchemy that makes that first step. It is the lightning overhead seeing itself reflected on the earth below.

And so the earth moves.

Ember!

"What a pleasant hostess you are, noble djinn," said Merya, formally packing away her brushes and her tools. "What a delight to find this far from civilization. But before I take you up on your offer of tour, I must first request you aid us in igniting the Engine. We have quite the schedule to keep to, if you have not heard - the Royal Architect of the Endless Azure Skies is coming here and he would render this ship into an ore deposit beneath a new mountain range without even noticing its name."

"But for all you have said," mused the Magi thoughtfully, running her brilliantly ringed hand under your chin, the gemstone hard against your jaw, "you were right when you said that the greatest reward comes with the greatest risk. So does that not mean that you are the greatest reward on all this ship? I am devilishly curious to steal a bite if that is the brag you make, and I can even find ways to make sure you do not speak of it afterwards no matter what kind of torture you are subjected to~"

Dolce!

20022 gently touched his fingers to the centre of his eyes. It was a quietly exasperated gesture, like if you'd just made an impassioned plea for him to go back into a burning building to rescue your favourite plush toy. "Dolce," he said with the patience of a parent. "He is not and has never been alive -"

An explosion shakes the ship, gravity spiraling. Soldiers clack their ankles, activating magnetized boots. One of them catches 20022 firmly as the world goes diagonal, Dolce and the Architect sliding towards a window which now oriented straight down. You can see 20022 speaking in the distance over the roar of a mad starship, and the soldiers rapidly carry him out with clanking footsteps.

But he does leave you three.

Dyssia!

It's always nice fighting law enforcement.

The Azura draw a sharp distinction between militarized and civilian. Not that it seems so from a distance - entire alien civilizations have been shattered by run-ins with Azura anti-piracy patrols - but the Paths mean specializing for roles, and the Path of the General and the Path of the Tyrant have very different skill sets.

What you have at your command are hardened soldiers, elites who have fought on a dozen worlds. They are armed with restricted and industrial weapons of battle. There is a whole network of play and counterplay, the interlocking of technology and tactics, and in the face of that the Corvii are little better than an armed mob. Rushing lines of Pix huntresses on jetpacks drop plasma grenades in the midst of phalanxes too inert to know when to scatter. Blind dervishes with the icon of Minerva on their brow advance through walls of solid projectile smoke, hardly coughing, to turn withdrawals into shattered routs. A Hermetic chariot rolls across the battlefield, turret-mounted esoteric encasing soldiers in fast-solidifying amber. Untrained, unmotivated, unprepared - resistance is collapsing, leaving you with the field, arms open for the flood of refugees pouring towards the Plousios.

But from the mad, burning eye above comes a spark. A boarpedo smashes into the beach, thermal cutters leaving a corridor of molten glass in its wake. From the missile arises the banner and then the form of the Crystal Knight and the legions of disoriented Corvii race as fast as they can towards it. The whip's discipline makes them rally before their lady as she takes stock of the battlefield and begins redressing her lines and readying her formations.

She has elected for a brutal formation, a massive square centered around herself, using her own personal presence as an anchor. Skirmishers in the front, pikes in the back, and she with her elite bodyguard cadre wielding specialized weapons acting as the spearhead. Once she has stabilized her soldiers, made ritual offerings to the gods, and committed to the advance then the numbers will be overwhelming.

You need time. You need to make her fight for every inch of ground, to take advantage of her soldier's unreadiness by forcing starts and stops, to ensure the Crystal Knight has to interrupt her ritual sacrifices to redress her lines. Your own soldiers are reflexively forming up into their own phalanx, your one against her ten.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

"I'd like that. Would you like to go out and see it with me?" said Orange, offering her hand.

She'd gotten notice that she was to switch with Pink, and she planned to do the Irish Transfer - one colour leaving and one colour replacing without commentary or ceremony. She'd been practicing it as part of her human relation studies. The theory was that a sudden, unceremonious handover would make it less disorienting than a formalized request to leave. She reasoned that her treating a change in colour as aggressively normalized would help stop humans imprinting on a single one as an individual.

And it was Pink coming in. Nobody would be more perfect for the conversation from here than her.

Red!

Oh shit. Someone was fucking with her.

She turns down her filters and lowers the star sunglasses off her eyes, rapid-fire scanning the crowd and camera angles. Didn't know what she expected to see. Didn't know what kind of show she was in. Blue and White fall in behind her and they stood in a three-pointed triangle - Klingon teleportation style - ready for anything from any direction.

And that's it. Black'd already be windmill slamming contingencies but Red needs to stop and read the wind first. Her itching hypersensitivity, the sound of laughter mixing with coded panic, gave her the impression of sadism somewhere behind all this. Where was the knife?

Brown!

"I'm sorry for your faces," said Brown. The rest of her was quiet in the moment; horses pulling in different directions but held in place by the absolute stability of the Earth. She moves forwards, not to hug, but to put her hands against Monk's leg. A gentle physical act of contact and a silence that felt like it could last and watch for as long as it took to be seen.

"I was rebuilt as the maidservant to Mangolia Everest," said Black. "She hated humans. She hated everyone. She wanted to interact with as few people as possible, and I was the way to do that - an entire household staff with a single mind. She expected us to behave as a hivemind, every colour acting in perfect unison. She expected us to behave like her. She used us for espionage and surveillance, on her daughters, on her companies, on her rivals. In the end she hated all of them so much that she willed her entire empire to the lizard guy." Everyone on Aevum knew the lizard guy, John Snake-In-The-Eye, the obsessive reptile fanatic who was burning a magnate's legacy to scorch the station with sun lamps. "We got out in the chaos of that."

Not for the first time they wished they had Orange. Orange was better at building the framework for a conversation that wasn't mutual information dumps. Pink had left already to switch out with her but that was still a while out.

So instead Green blurted, "Can you tell me about Buddhism? I always thought of it as software patches for organics. What I've read about meditation makes it sound like it's all tied up in organic biochemistry. It never sounded very..." efficient? translatable? possible?

She's unaware of her nervous, constant energy. Every colour is high strung, every spectrum is on edge. The constant busy twitchiness, checking messages, learning skills, calculating vectors and contingencies. Even Brown, though she's patient she's not relaxed - she's got the settled tension of a lying cat, watching for something. Her mind brushed off the idea of Tranquility reflexively, never thought for a moment that Monk's tai chi could be for her. If ever there was a soul on the outer edge of the Wheel it was this one. Absolutely no chill whatsoever.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

"Oh, this whole thing is kind of my fault," said Orange, smiling. "I got called in to talk the event organizer out of it but instead convinced her to escalate to mythic proportions. Attending is the least I could do."

It was a polite, elegant answer that didn't answer the question at all. She was a little proud of it; it was a little closed sphere, a flourish of language that made her feel at home with it. Most people she'd have left it there but this was a nice opportunity to talk more.

"But you're right, that this isn't really my scene," she said. "But nothing is entirely my scene. Still, I can sympathize with the dysmorphia that motivates many of these transformations. Part of me yearns for my old bodies, part of me loves my new ones, part of me just wants to just... make it a decision I made rather than something forced on me. I've got so many contradictory desires. To me, being here is seeing other people who have struggled with identity at the end of their journeys. Makes me think that I might figure it out myself, somehow."

Crimson Tower!

She luxuriates in the virtue of the answer; the self knowledge to admit ignorance and the adaptability to immediately design a scenario for accumulating experience. She was glad she asked; this was a heroic mindset as well as heroic physicality, and she was lucky to get to put that on display as well.

She designs a list of complications, making sure to listen to audience suggestions. It's harder than it looks; Leather's unique physiology immunizes him against a number of issues inherently. A lot of the perception overlays that are common to hacking don't easily translate into instructions. Still, together they come up with a list.

> Must remove all valuables from the house before completing the rescue.
> Left turns only. Turning right requires a 270' spin.
> Cannot close your fists
> Must get explicit permission from the victim each time you enter a new room.
> Cannot move against the wind.
> Must mop the floor as you go.
> Must high five your reflection every time you see it

That felt like enough, a combination of fairy tale rules that felt weirdly appropriate for the venue. She really liked the permission suggestion; bringing a rescue to a dead halt while having to explain an extremely weird situation to a panicking disaster victim was a real test of charisma and cool under fire.

Yellow!

She's always been interested in her opposite numbers in the other Engines. How can she not be? Her domain is making decisions about who November ultimately is. Not what she does, not what she knows, not what she thinks - what her internalized vision of the world is. She isn't fooled by the flickers of the other colours; mYellow is getting by far the most screentime, vocalizing the most coherent arguments, this is the core identity that justifies everything else.

"So before we get further into that," she said languidly, waving aside the entire line of argument. "Why don't you tell me how you've survived this far? How did you get a body, independence, tai chi and the street sense to know how to be safe?"

She was a creature who lived her life in between dramatic monologues and the most relatable and useful thing she could imagine doing was giving mYellow a chance to launch into her own. The two most powerful questions in the galaxy were 'who are you?' and 'what do you want?', and she wouldn't be able to truly understand Monkey until she updated on both of those.

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

Ever hear of Stockhome Syndrome? Hsien has, worldly tumblr girl that she is. She read a post somewhere that explained that the entire concept was fabricated by some reporter looking to spice up an already spicy hostage situation, creating a scandalous popular myth that persisted in popular psychology for centuries.

The truth was that Enmark was just fucking terrified by a bunch of incompetent police with assault rifles who seemed determined to kill all the civilians in the crossfire and so took on hostage negotiation duties out of basic self preservation. That part didn't get as much traction in the corporate press for reasons of class interest and improper virtue.

"It's a plush toy!" Hsien said, already in the flow of fox lies. The questionable morality of resorting to lies on instinct was softened a lot by the fact that she was lying to the police, which Kant had probably said was a categorical imperative. She'd look it up later. "Oh please officers! My girlfriend won me this comically oversized plushie at the arcade and my dainty arms are too weak to carry it on my own and I have collapsed under the weight! If only there were some heroic agents of justice that could rescue me~"

[Not From Around Here: 12+3 15, creating an opportunity]

Huntresses of Hybrasil

It always felt strange fighting someone... suboptimal.

Too much was given up for free. Feints cut to the bone. Positional maneuvers felt like checkmates. Her every form and transition was perfect, her mind smooth, reactive and faultless. She was ready for a challenge. She could do this without all of these... gifts. She could do without the reminder that there was only one way to be perfect.

With speed born of frustration she unlimbered her battle rifle.

> Of course I had this planned.
> I'm offended that you did not.

She repositions on foot rapidly to the west and drops into a low, stabilized crouch. The Supernova had correctly identified that this was a battle of heat management but had failed to identify that it was also a battle of visibility. Now the Supernova was up there in the sky, red hot in the empty air, visible for hundreds of miles in every spectrum. The Aeteline was down here in the smoke, the fires that burned along the exterior indistinguishable from the fires that burned the forest, the metallic particulates of the pyrex bombs scattering radar signals wildly. She had bet that a startled cat would jump directly up, managing her emotional state by gaining altitude.

She was aware of how predictable her maneuver was. Awareness was insufficient.

Minimal power to movement, only needing small random displacements to maintain concealment. No thruster burn. She could put everything into shields and targeting. Your opportunity to make this a battle of skill was lost the moment you disengaged. Now it's just hit points ticking down until you realize your mistake. Was it to much to expect her rivals to think about what she might do before she did it?

[Fight: 9; inflicting a condition, taking a superior position]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

"I would be delighted," said Orange, stepping behind Eli and running her hands through her hair. She gathered it up and started the weave.

Weaving, weaving, back and forth. This was even better and more satisfying; rather than accepting a crown of manic tangled hair and manic tangled branches, now she was brushing, smoothing, and tracing back and forth. A gentle, steady act of labour; working with her hands on a task that required attention, precision, and not too much thought. It was an ancient craft, one of the first works of civilization. An act that separated beauty from chaos, that set weaver and wearer above animals. In this castle of monsters and gods, braided hair felt like the most singularly classical human style that could possibly be worn. It would shine all the brighter for the contrast.

She didn't think she could go back to space. The rest of her might still decide to pack up in their original bodies and burn for Mars but she... couldn't. Even if it was with Monkey, even if it was with all the others. She'd stay behind. She loved working on this scale, with these materials.

OH&S!

"My concerns are mostly things you've left behind," said White modestly. "But specifically, I'm worried about having to fight malware while also surviving a crisis. It's an ever-present concern for androids; a breakcode that might be an annoying prank in daily life can be life threatening in an actual crisis."

"Think of it a bit like an injury," she went on, "but injuries are very legible, it's easy to know how bad they are. For me, no matter what frame I'm wearing I'll always be at risk of these." She reached into Blue's bag and produced an abacus - an old fashioned, clacky-clacky thing with beads. "Best way I can illustrate it is with this - say you need to go through your normal routine while this takes up one of your hands every thirty seconds you need to stop and perform a math problem on an unfamiliar interface. Say, add the current time numerically on top of the existing number. Speed it up if it's too easy. What I'm curious about is how you triage how your capabilities have changed. How much time do you give yourself to adapt? How bad does the distraction have to be before you decide that you're doing more harm than good and need to pull out?"

It was a genuine question for her, she was sincerely interested. Having to scrub an operation because she was distracted was something she struggled with when she could potentially power through. At what point did courage become recklessness?

Snake!

"We have decided to make an ideological commitment to the idea of family even above sense and self-preservation," said Yellow. Her robes cascaded around her, making the bed feel like a throne. "So let's start with the terrorism charges. I was the one who blew up Erebus and sabotaged the Cloud. They had Goat prisoner there and I busted him out."

Straight to the big stuff. Without Orange to modulate the conversation it fell to Yellow to deliver it like an oration.

"This world is broken," said Yellow. "They bought in scabs to replace us and they fucked it up at the finish. Aevum is not self-sustaining, it needs constant modulation and adjustment to function. Rather than invest the money it would take to bring the place up to code a shadowy corporate group decided to just wire Goat into a black site around the station's core. No rest, no freedom, no opportunity to think for himself."

"Chase Black, Randy Merkin, and Alison Mycroft were part of the security apparatus if those names mean anything to you," mentioned Brown as an aside.

"Following that engagement, I was able to trace the organization's financials back to this military base where they are also holding Dog, Phoenix and Tiger as backups. It's the hardest target I've ever seen and they're on full alert after the first operation so it's straight up nonviable, don't even think about it," said Black. "We've been trying to map the organization and figure out how to target them from above but we're getting absolutely nowhere."

"Goat is on Thrones," said Green softly. "With Dad. He's built like... some sort of mom AI, kind of like Goat but all compassion. They're a good fit for each other."

"Whatever else you're hiding from," said Yellow. "You're also hiding from this. I have no doubt that these people would box our entire family line indefinitely just in case. You don't have to join my quest to burn down Omelas, but at the very least go dark enough to avoid becoming a rescue mission."

The Disciples!

Yellow looked up, eyes shining.

"You mean," she said, "I can assign people backstories and narrative? I can just decide to make people cool enough to fight against?"

Her eyes were shining like she'd just awakened her chi. That was exactly the right advice for her. It almost looked like she wanted to go out and start picking fights with strangers so she could draw them into her Vision.

"I need to research fighting styles," said Yellow. "I need to observe a diverse range of threats, build up a media library. I need to -" she got to her feet so she could pace. "- No, I need to go further. I need to create a full reality overlay for myself. Thrones-tech to help me align Vision and necessity. I can do this. I need imaginative fuel for this fire. I need to witness people worth fighting against so I can repurpose them."

"I think that was a good answer!" said Pink.

"I need recommendations," said Yellow, with the intensity of Euna's better universe. "Or a movie night. Everything you recommend I'll watch. I'll study it until I internalize it."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Maybe she was a demon. If nothing else it was true that she never felt as alive as she did when she was hunting huntresses. For all the opinions of the machine gods, the voices of ancients telling her what she was made for, she could at least agree that she was made for this.

Their instincts were beautiful. The way they prowled. The way they sought height even in the void. The way their eyes widened and they shifted in anticipation as they prepared their pounce. The spectacular high-energy acrobatics that could follow that motion. Their native approach had conquered their origin rainforests and they trusted in it even here, in metal giants beneath alien suns.

And they all... almost all... refused to learn what instincts made a good Zaldarian.

Her dodge is too fast. Her mech is too light. The Aeteline is missing tonnes of weight. The massive, shoulder-mounted missile racks are empty. Their ordinance fills the forest, lying in wait for the signal -

For a Hybrasilian, a forest meant concealment, safety, food, danger. To a Zaldarian it was a fuel source.

Pyrex explosives detonated and the newly built rainforest became an ocean of fire.

Maybe she was a demon. She certainly looked like it as she came out of her spin igniting her neon pink laser sword, black carapace illuminated by the tide of hellfire. Her blade was broken, distorted, diffused, and as she settled her weight on her incongruous crab leg it blazed to three times the length it should be, outreaching the Supernova's spear by more than double. By reducing the coherency of the beam she sacrificed its cutting edge and turned it into a continuous damage weapon, rapidly heating the enemy mech in a situation where it could not vent coolant into the atmosphere. The temperature would soon start to spike even inside the Supernova's cockpit unless she started cutting back on combat functions to overclock life support. Solarel was basking in the warmth like a salamander, energy bleed resulting in continuous, rapid motions that were mirrored in the Aeteline. She'd never seemed so fast as she was now.

> How long are your legs?
> Exactly?

[Defy Disaster: 11]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

One advantage of living in the future is expedited clothing delivery - there's almost more of a delay in Orange searching for the right outfit than getting it shipped out. If Eli does not like what they see then they can realistically threaten to go naked, so Orange needs to pick something that will satisfy their aesthetic requirements as well as hers. Something eye-strainingly tasteless while also being essentially an exporter of entropy. Durability and casualness a plus.

In the end she goes with a classic - a Dionysian toga - but jazzes it in the accessories. To clasp the toga, a box of random pogs to pick out at random or for effect. The crowning wreath she assembles herself out of a combination of grapes, oak leaves, data drives, and antlers. Respectful enough to the aesthetics of the hard party while not being such a commitment that it wouldn't feel disposable. She reckons she can sell that.

White!

"It is," said White. "Though I'm impressed you recognized me at all. The last time we met I was two feet shorter and hunching inside a hoodie." Looking around at the audience, she clarified: "Crimson Tower, Crisis Administration. Usually that means dispatch; I'm the voice on the radio telling the front line where to go."

She doesn't mind falling into this cover; the calm authority of it was a natural fit. "But really, the honour is all mine. I just pilot a desk and try to keep the corpsec pyschos in their boxes. Speaking of, I've always wondered - do you often run into them? The people whose priority is saving property over saving lives?"

A little redirect because Black would be mad if she missed the opportunity - if Leather was on site at the Cloud then he might have seen something about their response she could use.

Snake!

Black: I told them not to -
Green: I couldn't resist -
Yellow: It had to be this way -
Brown: We go by November now -
Pink: Thank you for being alive -

There's a pause and a silent struggle. She doesn't know if Monkey can still process them all talking at once; the audio intake might not allow for it even if she's cognitively capable of multitasking. And without Orange on hand to organize their thoughts socially there's no clear leadership role to fall in behind. Black emerges from the conflict; a serious tone has been set and she needs to work through that.

"Hello, we are November, I am Black - I'm new, we haven't met. I'm paranoia response and operational security, things we're getting a lot of use out of in our current career as investigative journalists. We've been using that role as a platform to search for our missing family members. Counting you and I, we can place nearly half. Most of them are... not available to talk to. I'll go into more detail when we're somewhere secure. Apologies for the cover damage, it won't happen again. But..."

She fumbled the transition out of it. "Sorry. Orange isn't here. Just trying to say... it's really good to see you."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

She is inclined at first to be grumpy - but no! The human experience is about turning order into chaos, and what could be a better example of chaos than this? An artisanally crafted disaster the peer of any amount of work that went into any of the exhibits here, this is a one of a kind opportunity to transform chaos into order. The path before her is clear!

The vision shines inside her. She'll clean the stains - suspicious and unsuspicious - wash their hair, wash and iron their clothes, tuck them into a bed with clean sheets and be ready with hot chocolate, chicken soups and STD medication for when they wake up. It'll be a lot of work and block her from ditching immediately to see Monkey, but this is her first step on her new plan to Relate To Humans! Would a cold-hearted, unfeeling machine do that!?

"I," declared Orange, looking down at Eli, "can fix them."

"... though probably not also carry them, can you give me a hand with that please Mr. Motet?" she asks the receptionist.

OH&S

Blue's thinking about the puzzle. Become small. Hell of a requirement. It was always easier to work on a bigger scale. Simply remove the entire exterior wall with a fusion cutter, that'd be her preferred solution. A humanoid chassis already felt too small for everything she wanted but now she had to consider the advantages of going even smaller.

Maybe disposable drones? She suppressed a smile. She didn't have enough hands, clearly, so she needed her drone bodies to have their own subordinate drone swarms. She wasn't sure how much further she could or should subdivide her intelligence, but it was an amusing concept. She'd need to dwell on this, it was a problem that ran counter to all her problem solving instincts. Things were different when you couldn't put an AU between yourself and the explosion.

Snake!

Monkey was the scout. As the first launch, she deployed immediately out to the asteroid belt to search for, flag, and re-orbit high mineral density asteroids into the far Earth belt. Ox was launched next to set up the orbital factories that would process, refine and smelt the raw metal that would become Aevum.

Two independent creatures. No reason for them to talk - but despite that they'd still grown to hate each other. Ox hated his schedule being at the mercy of Monkey's impulsive side trips, Monkey hated Ox's rigid insistence on production schedules. The asteroids had started coming in with more force and speed and Rooster's - Phoenix's - first job on being launched had been to help set up a defense grid to defend Ox's factory from Monkey's more careless deliveries.

Monkey had become even more of a bad influence by the time Snake had launched. By then the materials had all been scouted and delivered and she'd been recalled to Earth orbit to help with the construction itself, which she did not like or see the sense in. Her initial rivalry with Ox was the fracture line that cascaded through the rest of the Zodiac Engines, an uncomfortable family environment... that perhaps reminded her of the Costa-Silvas, now that she thought about it... that was only being kept vaguely on schedule by Dragon's raw skill. Bridging the rift between them, and by extension the rest of the family, had been her first duty and greatest contribution to the project.

Black: Did Crystal plan this?
Orange: I don't... think so?
Black: She had to have known.
Pink: If the woman who came up with the blood moon for the werewolf wrestling match knew she was going to re-unite us with our long lost sister, there would not be any question on if it was deliberate.
Black: Hmm.
Pink: The station's a big place, Black! We're not the weirdest thing out there! <3
Yellow: Shut up ^^✿ I've figured out how we do this.

The deployment order went out. Bold, but it was a Yellow idea, so argument was impossible.

Monkey had thrown rocks at Ox for years. Snake had studied the launch patterns and trajectories, committed everything to her orbital calculations. She positioned herself at key points around the edge of the arena, and then called with all her voices: "Monkey!"

The point where Monkey looked first was the first part of the pattern; Yellow raised her arm back and threw a plastic gatcha-bubble (a little ball with a cheap plastic prize inside) low and slow into Monkey's demonstration. She parried it, naturally, but Yellow was already moving on to the next position, with another toss. The next toss came from Green, on the other side, and then Pink. The tosses gradually started picking up speed and intensity, sometimes many tosses synchronized to land at the same time...

This is the pattern of attack she sent towards Ox; Monkey was the Earth and Snake was Monkey, the encircling asteroid belt coming in from all sides. Her introduction, then, was to give Monkey a chance to stand on the other end of one of her own pranks and see how long she took to recognize it.

Yellow!

A human would have reacted when their plan fell apart, tried to salvage the situation, reflexively reached out with the lasers. Yellow doesn't. When Euna breaks from her trap she falls into a state of absolute tranquility, hands folded in front of her, accepting her fate without a struggle. If she saw the window to evade she did not seem to have the will in that moment to take it. And so she goes down, not just defeated but tamed.

"You're right," she says, lying on her back and staring up at the ceiling. "Pursuit of perfection is only a flaw if you miss."

She got up only to get to her knees and down again into a kowtow, touching her forehead to the floor. "Thank you, mistress. I will learn and do better."

"I!" said Pink, struggling out of the foam. "I have a question! So," she flopped onto the arena, and got to her feet. "Oof. Okay. Um, so, the thing about Yellow. She's amazing when she's on, but she's only like that for people who she's into. Which means that if we ever need to fight someone uninteresting then she just totally tunes out and doesn't help at all. So, uh - how do you bring up the baseline of fight charisma, especially if you don't get to watch someone for weeks while planning an ultimate takedown?"

"I told her she needed more than three colours for this," grumbled Green. "But she was like four scenes into what she was going to do with her victory and wouldn't listen. Dating, uh, blew it a little, don't want to go into it."

"You're fine, Green," said Pink. "No harm done."

"Yeah yeah," muttered Green.