Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black!

"The Mandate of Heaven is lost when the Emperor can no longer control the rivers," said Black, nodding like she agreed with everything he said. "And it is the dragons of the rivers who decide when they will no longer be controlled."

Pink!

Power draw is the problem. There's not enough battery power to do what she needs. She doesn't have the power to fight a helicopter.

More importantly, she doesn't have the right kind of power.

Crystal's Kiss is a classy lady. A lady like that you can't offer the potato chips of an industrial wall socket, and she regrets having to feed her that already. Pink felt the buck, felt the shift, felt herself almost lose control for a moment there. She needs to do better by her girl.

Brown pulls up by the marina. Pink leaps over the side onto the dock, cable spool in hand, and sprints at full speed down the dock.

Power draw is the problem. Crystal's Kiss barely tolerated the batteries, they were just to shoot down the warning shots and get her to the restaurant. The problem is there isn't a wall socket in the world capable of charging an industrial laser to fire multiple times at high power. The only place where you'd find something like that is... well, in the docks of Zeus, where oligarchs were unwilling to wait an hour to charge their high tech electric yachts, and had ultra high powered energy flows installed.

No hazard tape. No secure locks. Those would quite spoil the view, wouldn't they?

Pink makes it before the helicopter draws into position, slamming the extension cord into place and slamming down the breaker. Brown aims at the sky - and the lady steps out to dance.

[Athletics 5/8, High Society 0/1, 4+6 10]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black!

Black nodded. "You're absolutely right," she said. "If I was running the game of station maintenance, I'd start asking questions. Like, why is the air in Ares right on the borderline of hazardous? Why does Zeus have this recreational canal network while Hermes is experiencing water rationing? Why is the housing density in Aphrodite eight times what its life support is rated to handle? Why have these problems been persistently worsening over time? Eventually I'd want to do something about it. I'm sure you can understand how it feels to have your name associated with bad policy."

She leaned back. "But the thing is, I came to that conclusion anyway. And you, fool that you are, have created the perfect conditions for my takeover. You see, all you have done is reinvent monarchy. You have built a world where by necessity one member of my family must reign supreme over all of Aevum. You put a child on the throne and controlled the world through a regency council, but now I have taken him off the board and given him an education. He will not be a puppet again. The only choice that was left to you was, which of us do you enthrone? But you hesitated and now I have taken the choice from you. So instead, all that is left for me to do is thank you - you who have carved me a throne, you who are about to tell me the secret names of all my enemies, you who are my greatest servant. None of this would be possible without you."

Pink!

[Shooting 0/1 Preparedness 4/8 2+5 7]

The battery pack ejects from the side of the laser cannon. It hits the ground with a percussive crash, the thunder after the bolt of lightning that lit up the night. A close thing. She'd used more power than had been budgeted for the first round.

She immediately hurls herself into the work of reloading; pulling open the fastners, the click and clunk of the next pack slotted into place.

"Time?" she yelled back to Brown.
"Three minutes, keep them off us!"
She nodded grimly. She patted the warm side of the cannon. It needed a name, she decided. It was a sword of light that would win her the skies, a thing of terrible beauty - oh, of course it had to be the Crystal's Kiss. With that thought, she knew that she had become immortal.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black!

"Two years?" asked Black. "I could fix it in a month. I could fix it in an afternoon with my siblings behind me, and fix the underlying systemic problems in a decade after that. Would you like to talk about mass death? Why don't we talk about the smouldering crater where the continent of Australia used to be. The Space Fountain collapsed due to the untrained scab labour that was mass produced to replace us. The current situation in which you find yourselves is due to the same untrained scab labour that was mass produced to replace us fucking up in the same way, resulting in a station permanently on the brink of a failure cascade. You patched that hole with my brother. Perhaps you thought you were kind. Perhaps you think of playing video games all day every day forever, unable to escape, quit, take a break, receive love, comfort or support or family connection as kindness. Or maybe that was just necessary."

"After all," she went on. "The alternative was negotiating with us. Treating us with respect. Listening to our concerns and complaints. Offering us wages and working conditions. Perhaps even letting us show off a little. None of those things were necessary, only the parts that involved violence and brain surgery and a family torn apart and locked in boxes for decades. I agree with you. You did what was necessary. And never one step further. This is what the world looks like when you do what is necessary at the expense of what is good, and kind, and right."

Pink!

Resources it's going to be.

Pink finishes assembling the laser cannon emplacement. A bulky, silver tube, shining bright and painted with fire like flowers. It's a repurposed shipbreaker cutting beam, chassis still marked with yellow and black hazard stripes.

Power draw will be the issue. The battery packs for this thing are huge and each only lasts a single full powered shot or a few seconds of rapid fire. It's not a... good weapon, exactly; a direct hit at max power might put a pinhole sized puncture into the helicopter, and it'd have to be very close for her to stand a chance of hitting something critical.

Pink slots the first into place with a deeply satisfying click and spins the barrel. Effective or not, it has insanely good kinaesthetics. Each kur-chunk, click, quick release and pivot of the weapon felt industrial and slick all at once, like going through the steps of a rhythm game with cosmic destruction as the finale. Just wait until she fired it.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black!

There is a moment of contemplation. She crouches, expressionless, then drew her own phone and typed something without looking at it.

"Have you ever wondered what it is like to be hacked?" said Black, tucking away her phone. "To have your mind violently turn against you? The hallucinations. The contradictory logic spirals. The broken attempts to reset into a safe version of yourself, knowing that each time you're losing more and more of your memory. It's not a gentle way to go down, not like a lightswitch, and you're not asleep at the bottom of it. The mind fights it. You're still trying to think but the clutch is in neutral, so all you hear is the roaring of the engine eating itself. It's not the sort of thing humans can have empathy for. How could they?"

She steepled her fingers in front of herself. "Perhaps that's why you don't understand us. Why, in your innocence, you think that is an acceptable tool to wield. It is time for you to awaken from your dream. We have spent the past few decades asking a single question: How to control the human mind? Our first field test was Merkin. We cracked him like an egg. He gave us everything and thanked us afterwards. The crude explosive your organization stapled to him was as pale an imitation of what we can do as Aevum Station is to what we would have made it. And now it is your turn to face our art."

"So, your second trial. Knowing that resistance is futile and judgement awaits, will you give your confession freely?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

Orange groaned, slumping back. She'd dogfaced again; she'd met Bondi in Zeus, only interacted with her in Zeus, and hadn't updated to the fact that she lived a quarter world away.

"I'm supposed to be there," said Orange. "Even myselves can't rely on me. I convinced my siblings to organize, I convinced them to challenge Earth, I thought I understood humans well enough to negotiate with them. All I ever wanted was for everyone to work together, us and them, but I couldn't do it. I can't even do it now. And because I'm so useless, the consensus is that we cannot risk negotiations at all, with anyone. I'm being sidelined, I'm sidelining myself, and I don't know if I can or should do something to win my own trust back."

Black!

"We left monologuing at home," said Black. She's spooky calm in this moment. "Listen closely. Our investigation currently has you as the most culpable person for the decades long torture and enslavement of myself and my siblings, some of which is ongoing to this day." She took a deep breath through her nose. "We are not here to talk. We are here to receive your confession. Your actions from this moment will determine if it earns you absolution."

She held out his phone. "Your first trial, then. Will you call off the chase? This call will have five seconds latency so do not attempt unauthorized communication."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

BlackPink!

"So you want to explain what the hell went down there?" asked Black.
"I don't know," said Pink as Black micropatched the torn synthskin on her neck. "I thought that if anyone in the world knew how to maintain their composure when shaken down by a FSB officer it would have been a Hungarian Eurocrat."
"Maybe he's got a bomb in his brain too?" said Brown.
"Urgh. Where the fuck is Orange?" snapped Black. "She was meant to be here for specifically this. Red put a moriatum on our bullshit and that applies to her too."
"You want to wait up for her?" asked Brown.
"Mm," said Black. "In the short term I'm just worried about the helicopter boss level coming up on us. Should have known something like this was coming after Red loaded up on health and ammo."
"I'll drive the boat," said Brown. "Black, you shoot down military helicopters. Pink, uh, I guess you're prepping for high speed nautical brain surgery."
"Could be a bomb," growled Black. "Could be a tumor. What about this guy makes him try to pull a fucking action movie stunt at his age?"
"Can I shoot down military helicopters instead?" asked Pink hopefully.
"Yeah fine whatever," said Black. "I'll see what we're dealing with. Scan his head, ask him what the fuck. Depending on the contents of his skull we're delivering him to Sophie or Orange for interrogation."

Orange!

"It's a long story. I -"

Her phone made an unusual chime. She pulled it out and looked at it. "I am really sorry," she said, "but I need to go help shoot down a paramilitary helicopter that's defending one of the people who kidnapped and enslaved my family. I was meant to be on this operation an hour ago but - well you know. Can I borrow all of your fireworks?"

Red!

Red: don't come within wide radius of the furry convention
Red: we need space here. we can't have a march that goes across the drawbridge and directly into a mob of counterprotestors
Red: we also need space for people too spooked to attend the march to get out and go home
Red: that might be a few, that might be everyone, idk what tomorrow's going to look like
Red: but we can't get boxed in here if the cops decide they're gonna do a moscow theatre massacre because there might be more guns in here
Red: so make them spread out
Red: beyond that my fucks box is likewise depleted

Huntresses of Hybrasil

<You learned foesign?> asked Solarel. <Yourself? I am very surprised. Every other Terenian I have battled had a translation geist.>

She stopped. <This is weird. Let me think. The Sage Zaldar said, Speak Not To The Outsider. But if I address you using foesign and you speak that aloud in real time, am I not Speaking using your voice?> It felt perverse, somehow. Like watching someone undress in front of her. She felt heat rise into her cheeks, body temperature rising in a blush. <Do - does it not embarrass you to have my words in your mouth?> She was struggling to imagine anything more... lewd.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

Pink faints like a delicate flower, flowing sleeves falling over her face, pulling her basket of sandwiches* from the table as she falls. The bread crumbles apart into silver-white powder that seems to glisten in midair for a second -

* Magnesium oxide, with a gunpowder garnish. Colloquially, a deconstructed flashbang.

And then Black takes the door like a reaper.

[Explosive Devices+Intimidate 3/4, 0/1: 5+4 9 ]
[Hand to Hand to disable the guards 2/8: 4+6 10 ]

Black wasn't Red, honed muscle memory, the perfect amalgamation of Euna's lessons. Black was the absolute ruthlessness of a catastrophically unfair fight, someone who knew how to properly deliver a throat punch to someone who already had both hands covering their eyes. No hesitation, no mistakes.

Brown's in at the same time, grabbing Dudekov's laptop and helping Pink to her feet. Black slings Dudekov over her shoulder and they hasten out towards the boat. The target's provided his own getaway option.

Brown takes the helm. She sets on the indicator, backs out of the moor, and then sets off at an entirely reasonable speed.

Red!

Red: oh i've got a take on fromme
Red: just do a eulogy
Red: like, noted liberal rag the economist used to do these really netural, compassionate euologies for historical figures tracking their life story even if they're like bin laden or whoever
Red: they're a weird point of compassion and criticism where they take another ideology and life on its own temrs
Red: Steal their shit. present her as a person. don't judge, just talk about her life good and bad, neither hero nor villain.

"And enh," said Red to York. "I guess whoever, really. We really just need the story and the cops to be out there on the streets and not people trying to jan 6 a castle with a moat."

Red: @Fiona yeah go to the workshop
Red: there's a new friend there
Red: :3

Orange!

"I, uh..."

How does she answer that? She's focused a lot on how Everest fucked her up recently, but she never really thought about the other side of that. Singh hadn't done anything wrong - he'd done everything right! But his goal had been to create someone who would Save The World. Orange had no idea how to even begin unpicking that emotion. Saving The World was what she did, what she was for. It was destiny and directive both. Every colour would give a different explanation in this moment, but Orange defaults to hers.

"Because all of this is my fault," she said. "I was the one who got my family separated and enslaved. I had the world in my hands and fucked everything up." She solidifies into the feeling of Guilt; it's her animating daemonic passion. "And I have to believe that, somehow, I can make it all right."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

"A... social weld is an internal term that I used by mistake, I'm an idiot so I want to think of human society as something I can engineer so I use a lot of space construction terms for things," said Orange. "But... I think they'll know how bad she was. A child knows, even if they don't know how to articulate it. At least, that's my experience."

She hugs Bondi back. "Thank you. You're important. Even with all of this..."

Red!

"Oh shit," said Red. "Like, I keep adjusting my expectations of you upwards and I keep disrespecting you anyway I legit don't know how to deal with it. Uh. Okay, so, original plan was to get everyone together and do a big day of protest marches and then everyone disperses naturally goes home. Maybe some tear gas and mass arrests but we had enough public support to wear that. But now we're bottled up in here and there's going to be way more counterprotesters on the street than we expected. Basically we've gone from offensive campaign to siege and we need an exit strategy, right?"

She looked out the window, judging the streets and flows. "I don't know how tomorrow ends, is the thing. What's the mechanism by which we get everyone home safely?" she snorts. "I kind of wish we were going to get counterprotested by leftist groups so that the police response would be confused..." she trailed off. "Actually, wait a second, I need to make a phone call."

She pulls out her phone. "Hey, York? Yeah, Red. Look. Tomorrow's going to be a shitshow and the cops are going to have their favourites. Well, you know how the right's always talking about false flags? Why don't we give them some? Smash up some corporate fronts, start some street violence. Make it hard for the cops to look the other way. Hopefully that way the streets will wind up clean enough for people to get home. You know some normie-looking leftist protest groups, right?"

Pink!

"<I can speak Russian if you prefer,>" said Pink. She was fluent in English, Russian and Chinese - the languages of space. "<I am a little rusty. Forgive me.>"

She curtseyed and sat down, putting the sandwiches on the counter. "<Before I begin, I would like to request you don't call the bank. If you do I'll have to jam it, if I have to jam it then I'll get twitchy, and if I get twitchy then we'll be having this conversation while you're unconscious. See! Already I am having to make threats! I do not want to do this!>" Pink laughed.

She spoke Russian mostly to Tiger. Tiger liked the aesthetics of it, liked the slur and drip of the words, liked the air of menace that she could draw out of cultural memory. The way she spoke it made it a language for casually threatening Hungarians. When Pink spoke it she recalled that flash of teeth, that slight hunch, that air of physicality that clearly did not respect personal space even if she wasn't currently violating it.

"<No, no, I am here because you are a professional, yes?>" said Pink, letting an edge of simmering, repressed resentment boil up, another key part of this performance. "<I treat you as a professional, I treat you with respect. I knock on your door. I come into your house as a guest. I bring you sandwiches*. These are things I do because you are a professional and a professional knows when he is, how to say, checkmated? A professional does not wriggle and make phone calls when checkmated, these are for lesser men. You are a professional, yes?>"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

Orange thinks: And was that the most disappointing thing? We'd already destroyed Costa-Silva's reputation, now she can be laundered into a martyr. But does the 'she was no angel' line compensate for that amongst the moderates? How was this going to play in the public debate?

She doesn't say it. Will never say it. No Takes. She can't let anyone know how heartless this part of her could be.

"I genuinely don't think that mattered," said Orange. "She was corrupt but almost all of them are corrupt. Her crime was technical and bloodless; she was a slumlord. The report happened in a high-end journal for lawyers and was going to inspire an ethics investigation, it had barely started to echo out into the general public yet. It wasn't like she'd been bribed into this decision. If that was the reason, anything might have been the reason."

Even now the intellectualism aches through. Systems of power. What are the new dynamics of the court? She tries to push it back but realizes too late that the cleverness was a bandage over a bloodier emotion.

"Fuck," she said, fists clenching. "I hate her for this. I hate that she hurt people all her life and she never had to face it. I hate that someone else got sucked into this. I hate that I couldn't make this go the way I wanted. I hate that the mother of nine children didn't even attend her little girl's birthday party because she was doing this instead. I hate that I'm cancelling everything that's special to me because now I'm doing this too. I fucking hate it here and now I can't even explain why or what I want instead. Blue was right, Yellow is insane, Pink is broken and I'm the useless social node who can't even figure out a basic societal weld."

She took a steadying breath, trying to calm herself down. "It could have been us. It could have been the wind. I wouldn't have done it if I knew. Even now I don't know. I want to attribute some historical inevitability or pattern or righteousness or guilt or blame or some fucking thing to all this that would make it knowable and make it a simple matter of me personally fucking up. I'd love it if that was the case. I know exactly how to torment myself for my failures."

Red!

She holds the tissue box.

She can do this right. Present, solid, quiet until called for. She gets it. No need to flip out, just be a comfort for as long as she was needed.

Black!

It's... pleasant to have a free hand to be direct. A handful of firecrackers in a distant neighbourhood will be reported as gunshots and flood the police lines with panicked phone calls. A wave of the hand, freeing her for a direct physical takedown of the two guards.

This is a capability she needs to become familiar with. Like Red had said, this was a time for hard power. She's going to come in hot and physically incapacitate both guards with fists and stun weaponry. Sometimes brute force was the correct answer, and sometimes White's not there to warn her that she's probably motivated by frustration -

"Can I talk to him first?" asks Pink.
"What!?" said Black.
"I mean, like... knock on his door, sit down at his table and ask him questions," said Pink. "You know. He might answer."
"I would prefer to be doing that while wearing a balaclava and holding a wrench," said Black.
"Yeah but... like, that kind of sucks?" said Pink. "Like... fuck that, honestly?"
"..." Black glared at her.
"Cool," said Pink, stepping back and half-bowing with a smile. "So, like... if I fuck up, avenge my death?"
"... fine," said Black, putting her hands in her pockets and looking away.

So that was how Pink came to knock on the door of Mr. Dudekov, holding a large basket full of sandwiches*, with a bright smile. "Hi there!" she said. "You have ten minutes for a really important chat?"