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Eclipse Phase (Private)

"KnifeDåd wasn't a joke?!?! I raised a whole person its the only good thing I ever did!"
 
'Vidar shut up and smoke a bowl', was the rallying cry of all his post fall friends so he dutifully waited for Devin to roll him a joint stewing in his disbelief and shivering. "Eppie close the damn door. Come have some weed!"
 
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Chopsticks in hand and a hymn in the part of his mind that sings by default to navigate waters he is not currently in, Rushing Jaws looks out eastward toward the pale Martian dawn, watching a white sunrise creep up over the tablelands. Sunrises weren’t something he frequently got to experience like this, given his usual climbs - either beneath the crust of Ceres or on an asteroid in the main belt - and he had to admit that it was a pretty sight to accompany breakfast. Veronica seems to think so too; she is sat crosslegged on a patch of flat ground facing the sunrise with him, as if meditating. He hears movement from behind him, and looks back to see a bedraggled Eppie.

“Mach should be over n’ the car-” Rushing Jaws starts to say, just as he remembers that in fact Mach passed him by in the dome’s small airlock as he was taking his breakfast outside. “Em, he was in the car. ‘oughta be inside, now. As for Tali, well - ain’t seen nor ping’d her since we got in. Her bike ain’t here, either - I’m led to believe she was reassigned to somethin’ but there wasn’t anythin from Starglass.”

Without prompting, Rushing Jaws scoots over on the rock he is sat on, as Eppie really looks like she could use a place to sit. He takes another bite from the bowl of cheap-print chow mein and chews, the meal already cold from the brisk Martian morning but otherwise still serviceable; looking back at Eppie, he holds his bowl and chopsticks out to her as an invitation.

"Here, it's chow mein - want some?"
 
Mach Infinity
Feat. Vidar and Devin
A Cherufe shave.
​
Mach needed some cool in his nerves. Especially given what he was about to do. So he grabbed a plastic hubcap from the junk boxes, took his joint of hash from Devin, and lit it. Then. He tried to Chief the damn thing. It was a pretty damn fat blunt, and this wouldn’t be easy, but he needed to chill and get this joint done QUICKLY. So he inhaled. And kept going. And kept it up. This pod had some serious lungs. Made for some serious athletics, he guessed. Then he felt heat on his fingers, and let all the ashes fall into the hubcap-turned-ashtray. He held on for a few fleeting moments. Then he exhaled. Fuck, the PIPES on this Pod. What, did they expect it to hold its breath in the vacuum? Well, he was feeling much better now. His forced calm slowly turned to the real thing. Then he decided to fix his next problem. He pointed to one of the knives on Vidar’s person and said


“Can I borrow that for a sec? I'll clean and sharpen it or whatever when I'm done.”


“Uh,, sure they sharpen themselves, knock yourself out,” He said passing it to him. He blew a smoke ring. Mach had really just smoked a whole Motherfuck-style-joint in four long drags. He was not going to argue with him.


“Chugging the joint is antithetical to the purpose of the joint, but you do you, man,” Devin said.


Mach took the knife, gave it a quick examination, then grabbed a shard of broken mirror from the boxes of junk. Then, real slow and careful, he took the knife to his throat, pressed it to the skin, and slowly moved it across, mowing down a great deal of stubbly hairs. Yes, he was using the knife to shave. A knife that looked like a vibroblade or something. He didn’t know, but he wouldn’t hit those buttons. He just needed a very sharp, very straight edge.


Vidar gave Mach a long concerned look and then looked at devin in despair. That was his cherufe knife and he’d thought he’d needed it for like- anything but his face. He took a very long very long drag and could almost forget that Vera was alive and dating devins fork becuase Mach fucking infiniting was shaving with a cherufe knife as he not-lived and breathed.


Devin met Vidar’s look of despair with one of his own.


hara [pm to heliotrope]: glad we’ve figured out who’s got the biggest balls. it’s mach. what the fuck.

Heliotrope: CHRIST.

Heliotrope: Why wont sempai notice me.

hara: idk man i thought cute anime girls were his type

Heliotrope: For fucks sake. How can he have THAT MUCH SWAGGER.

hara: californians are just. like that.

Heliotrope: God. Why am i weak for Åmericans.

hara: god blessed us with untenable amounts of confidence and no sense. grade a beef. pure of heart, dumb of ass

Heliotrope: I’m half american and feel this in my soul.


“Mach- Uh,,,,” He said just wanting his attention in this moment, “How uh,,,, is the car?”


“Hours away from ready… Really I should be working on it now, but if I didn’t knock off the stubble I’d lose my cool. Hard to be cool when you’re constantly-FUCK!” he said, nicking himself just a little bit, right on the chin. At least he could play it up as not shaving related, but… Damn it. Now he stayed quiet as he began on the barest shadow of the beginning of a mustache, deciding that talking and shaving only mixed when one had regular razors.


“Oh, wow you- worked all night on that,” He said sounding impressed. He was mostly useless most of the time. And nicking his neck just seemed sort of cute and intimate and really didn’t detract from the experience of watching Cute-Fast-Boi power move shave while he contemplated none of his existence making any sense.


One or two last slow drags vanquished the last facial hairs, and Mach pulled off a glove to check his face. Smooth as could be. He wiped the knife with a clean rag, double-checked it, and handed it back to the resident knife dad.

“Never woulda thought a Vibroblade would give a shave this smooth. Thanks, Vid. I… Guess I’m gonna get back on that car.”

He said, hoping to get out of here before he had to explain the whole ‘not into knife dads’ thing.


“Cool cool,” Vidar siad taking the knife back, “Let us know if you need,,,,help.”


“Nope. I’m good. I know cars.” Mach said, leaving awkward-town as swiftly as he could, slipping on his glove and helmet, running into the airlock, and stopping. Then he doubled back, grabbed all his fabbed parts, and ran back out there to get on that CAR. He still had a looooong morning ahead of him.

Vidar logged on to the tacnet and silently tagged all his knives in the group AR.
 
“So that happened,” Vidar said taking another long drag.

“Sure fucking did,” Devin agreed.

“You roll the stupidest biggly joints,” He said taking a final drag and making a familiar motion to tuck it behind his ear, except his fingers sort of went though his hair and kept going through his hair until he said in stoned confusion, “Where are my ears”

“They’re...they’re on top of your head,” Devin said, motioning with his hands.

Vidar half tried to mirror him but did a paw motion before he got all the way to his head, “Like,,, nyah?”

“Like nyah,” Devin said, wiggling his hands insistently.

“Nu?” he said reflexively because that would be awful.

“Just. Just touch them. You have ears. I thought you knew??”

“Thought I knew what?” Den.viPlease-” He said. They were not THIS high, they couldn’t be they’d woken up like five minute and smoked a quarter of a fat blunt. like.

Devin reached over and grabbed one of Vidar’s ears, holding it softly like a baby bird. “Ear,” he said.

Vidar Bristled like a miyazaki protagonist.

“W-ww-wat?”

Devin seemed to have no suspension of disbelief that vidar could possibly high enough to forget where his ears were. Vidar how ever had failed to realize on a level quite subconscious that he was in fact; like nyah.

“Oh my god. You’re a cat girl. You’re the dumbest cat girl on Mars.” Devin let go of Vidar’s ear.

“AND NO ONE TOLD ME!?”

“I THOUGHT YOU KNEW!! It seemed like a deliberate aesthetic choice!!”

“NO ONE TOLD ME!”

“You are one hundred years old and you’re old enough to be responsible for your own ears!”

“I DON’T WANT CAT EARS” He shouted holding on to both of them like he could hide them.

“If you have more weed, will you forget about them?” Devin asked.

Vidar’s mouth just worked in distress his brain had done the savant calculation that realizing he had cat ears would upset him enough to decide to just, block that out. But now. Ear. So much Ear. They had been a fad. A fad for a subculture he hadn’t liked, nor belonged to and the idea of signalling with cat ears to people who had eyes made him want to turn inside out. Having cat ears in 2050 was like having an anime icon in 2019.

“I am going to take the look of horror as a no,” Devin said.

VIdar laid down and didn’t move. Devin patted his back.

“I’m sorry, my dude.”

“Oh, today is cursed,” he said.

[Boss. It was in the package with the claws, you looked right at the consent agreement for them.]

I DID NOT

“Sure fuckin’ is. At least we have weed?”

“I’m not high enough for any of this. Devin. Your fork is dating my daughter,” He bemoaned.

“I’m sorry you and your daughter both love stupid Americans. It must be genetic. You are half-American.”

“She’s 3/4ths american. God what have I done. She’s half Brooklyneese. I created a monster.”

“I dunno how an anarchist can raise a hypercorp fundie but like. Very impressive.” Devin continued to pat Vidar with soft thump sounds.

“You just want your kids to have things better?” He said with a twist of pain, “She’s just...she’s just... got gud. I don’t know. She was at the evac point before us so I mean- I don’t know. I don’t know.” He had insisted to Veronica that he was not an oligarch. But he was an oligarch’s dad.

“We’ve all done weird shit in the last ten years,” Devin said. “Her biggest crime is definitely dating my fork though. I wasn’t even fun then.”

“Vera is 70 years old why the hell is she dating Grace?”

“Probably for the same reason you’re a hundred years old and fool around with me? I’m a goddamned delight.”

Vidar considered how on fire his life was to motivate him to fool around with Devin and hoped, for Vera’s sake she wasn’t doing the same Krysvinds style self destruct. “You are a delight,” he said and then after beat made a little whale noise and sat up, “God I have fucking Cat-Ears.” He managed to say cat ears like they were a swear. He tched and still with his hands over them said more seriously, “I’m,,, not gonna be able to talk to her ever. Like ever.” And that was the end of the thinking too fast emotion train. She was alive and farther away than anyone could be.

“I mean, that’s allowed. But like. Ever is a very long time, and you both have continued kicking this long.”

“Okay but consider this. She sucks. And I’m dead. I mean I love her but like- LOOK AT HER. Just pure 100% martian hypercorp nonsense.”

“Have you considered kidnapping her and bringing her to Locus and teaching her to love again?”

“No I tried that her whole life. She’s very stubborn- We pushed some sliders on the baby machine all the way and maybe that was a mistake.”

“Good to fuckin’ know.”

“I thought we’d like you know give her our best traits and like she ended up successful wich was good. Like you want your kid to be successful- right? And after Disney came in it really limited her options and when she got out of school- she always always wanted to be a lawyer she loved those dumb ace atourny VR games you know- the whole feild got automated. I don’t even know what the hell she did for her company really.” He slid his hands from the top of his head and to the back of his neck.

“Supervising the automatons, probably. That’s what human lawyers do.” Devin tapped ash out into the hubcap Mach had turned into an ashtray. “At least you tried. Hell, that’s probably why she did so well. Everyone from a hypercorp family is a neurotic mess who doesn’t know how to love. She can just eat them, and they’d thank her.”

“She gave us a cortical stack for christmas. She didn’t hate us.”

“Probably not, no,” Devin agreed.

And that’s exactly when he started to tear up. Devin scooted closer and wrapped him in a one-armed hug around the shoulders. He leaned into him a kept all of the very stupid things he wanted to say to himself hile penny argued that none of them were stupid.

“Shit’s fucked up,” Devin said, after a moment. “But you don’t have to do anything about it until you’re good and ready, yeah?”

“I mean, Shit Devin I’m dead. I’m never gonna do anything about it. She wouldn’t even known me. I bet you a dollar. An American Dollar.”

“A whole dollar. Because you don’t forget your dad. Even if you want to.”

He took a deep breath because that was, wow, Devin wasn’t supposed to be wise. But here he was, talking him out of a weed anxiety attack. “Well... there’s also the part where my subconscious is 67% dial noise,” He said quietly.

“Shit, dude, what internet you trying to connect to that still uses dial up?”

“Lets,,, just hope it continues to be out of range,” he said taking a another drag. Because like wow. Had he jumped the shark on things he did not talk about first thing in the morning. The Star was not something he wanted to add on top of E v e r y t h i n g including cat ears.

“I’ll talk to Dionysus about it,” Devin said.

“That’s Glitter jesus’s boyfriend right?” He asked with a laugh, “Thanks.”

“No no no, you’re thinking about Judas Escargot. Dionysus is the one with the wine and the girls who rip men into pieces.”

“Hot.”

“Extremely.”
 
Euphemia “Eppie” Cross ​

The cool air of Mars is almost refreshing, not so sharp as the 0 Kelvin she feels in her dreams and her APD visions. It’s enough to soothe the last pieces of her dream into dull noise at the back of her mind, joining into an ache of her overusing her sleights that‘s still driving into the base of her skull. She knows she slept, more than she often does, but she feels she has not slept a moment. Her eyes feel almost pressurized, and she wipes her eyes slowly, feeling so painfully fatigued that her stomach turns.

”Starglass doesn’t strike me as someone that gives info that isn’t need to know. Guess we don’t need to know?” She rests a hand on his head, not moving to sit in the offered space, nor does she take his offered food, “No, that’s okay. I still don’t feel very well. I pushed it way too far last night.”

The ache is sharpening, and Eppie pinches the bridge of her nose tightly as she hears beginning hums of the Star’s chorus, even so early in the morning, begin to carry in echoes in her mind. She drops her hand to touch her fingers to RJ’s still outstretched hand as Vidar chastises her for leaving the door open, pulling him through the opening of the tent, “Come inside with us. Everyone is waking up.”

[You have some messages, Euphemia.]

From who? The only person she knew that frequently messaged her was Esteri, and Esteri was well aware that Eppie was away on Firewall business.

[Esteri Lakonnen, Maryam Arikan, and Deep Blue.]

Eppie frowns as she settles down by Devin and Vidar, taking on of the offered blunts and lighting it. What the fuck is he messaging me for?

[I presume opening-]

Rhetorical. I really don’t want to talk to you this morning.

Sezé says nothing else - she simply opens the navigation into Eppie’s received messages. She opens Deep Blue’s first, most curious about what he, a notoriously silent sharkman, would have to share with her. It is nothing but a picture of his sushi restaurant, which appears to have been shifted around, possibly renovated, with a simple caption: Bitchin’.

She smiles, huffing a laugh, because of the messages she could receive from him, this would be it.

The next she opens is Maryam’s, which is an XP recording of her in the water. The white designs across her porpoise morph glow softly in the dim waters:

[Hey, Eps, been a long time since we spoke! I just got back from the other side - trying to get caught up - you know how it is, or - sorry. Not used to you not being with us, honestly. It‘s weird not having you trying to pet an xenofauna that’s out to kill you. I did see your recordings that you sent, and forwarded them to Blue, so it’s good to see that you’re still on your bullshit even in enclosed environments!]

[Promise me that you’ll reach out. I know how hard it’s been for you, with - well, you know. You’re still my friend and I still love you to death. We’re worried about you. You’ve gone radio silent on everybody, which isn’t like you. I know you were staying with Altis? She says she hasn’t heard from you in months. Neither has Blue. We’re all worried. Even Blue’s gotten to the point that he admitted that he’s concerned. I’m sure he’d appreciate a message, just to hear from you. Otherwise you’ll have him showing up at Pandora and causing a panic.]

[We all love you. Even Mirri-]

Eppie closes the message, and takes a pull so deep from the blunt that her mouth, throat, and lungs burn. She holds it then blows it out from her mouth, putting the blunt back in her mouth for another drag before she can start crying. She opens Esteri’s message, and finds the message is an XP from Esteri’s perspective:

The camera pans over an enclosure Eppie recognizes, but there has obviously been a recent incident - there is red, human blood smeared over the rocks and being soaked up by the sand. There is screaming in the far distance from the victim, but there is frustrated chattering more on grounds of trying to get the lost body parts out of the containment so the ”specimen’s diet isn’t absolutely fucked”, along with some laughter following a quip: ”I told him to paint the suit pink. Fucker didn’t listen. Fuckin’ newbies, man.”

Esteri’s gaze falls into a viewing area of glass, giving Eppie the opening to see a group of the stinger hounds, gathered around a bloody stump of a leg. “They’ve been very naughty since mama left. They keep all their little prizes by your entry.“ She taps her fingernails on the glass, which spawns some of the angriest sounding ‘SCREEEEEEEEE’ that she’s heard from the hounds, “Jalapeño, do you miss Eppie? Do you miss her?”

There is a sharp thwip of him trying to sting Esteri through the glass, then, “SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-“

“Hope the ‘business trip‘ is going well. We all miss you. Especially the spicy pepper murder gang. It’s caught on finally, and you’re missing it among the interns. Stay safe. Say bye, Jalapeño!”

”SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-“

Despite how poorly her morning is going, seeing her boys makes her smile, and she looks at the still of them gathered in their enclosure with a fond smile. She writes back to Esteri:

[i love my horrible little murder son. kiss him 4 me]

She replies to Deep Blue’s:

[looks dope!!!!!!!!!!! ill try to visit soon, i promise. just tryna get my footing at work. i miss u n maryam]

She closes her messages, focusing back in the present as she takes another pull of her blunt. Just in time, it seems, as Mach has fixated both Vidar and Devin as he shaves with a literal knife. She looks between the boys and Mach, then whistles, “Damn, Mach. Save some for the rest of us...”

Mach makes a speedy exit, as a Fast Boi is won’t to do, and Eppie keeps to herself as Devin and Vidar speak with each other. She recalls Devin’s words, in reference to her own conversation with Vidar, and keeps it to herself, letting them have their moment. She does, after a moment, send Vidar a private message:

PM, jukeboxmaiden to Heliotrope {TacNet}: things will work out good eventually, but im sorry things are sucky rn. love u
 
Heliotrope {Pm Jukeboxmaiden}: Thanks <3
Heliotrope {Pm Jukeboxmaiden}: My Daughter is alive and hypercorp scum and dating devins fork who is Grace Callahan and aprently shes v. important. And like what the fuck do you even do with that information? haha
Heliotrope {Pm Jukeboxmaiden}: Do you wanna see some babies?
attached was the XP Of the baby swarm rats that were technically too much sugar glider to be labeled swarm rats, because swarm rats had to be 50% rat.
Heliotrope {Pm Jukeboxmaiden}: Also. I'm getting a divorce. You didn't tell me I had cat ears.

He had lived on locus long enough to learn to pretend that sitting five feet apart was a semblance of privacy and he was stoned enough, that suddenly realizing there was two people right there witness to him discovering cat ears didn't bother him as badly as it should.
 
jukeboxmaiden {PM to Heliotrope}: oh. oh wow
jukeboxmaiden {PM to Heliotrope}: thats uh
jukeboxmaiden {PM to Heliotrope}: wow. u cannot catch a break. personally i might cry to cope
jukeboxmaiden {PM to Heliotrope}: also i would do anything for them. tell them. i would do anything for them.
jukeboxmaiden {PM to Heliotrope}: u can divorce if you want but whos fault is it that u missed that u had extra appendages on ur head? yours, yeehaw

Eppie smiles at Vidar, then, through a lungful of smoke, says, “Hey, the ears are cute at least. We could pierce them and give you fancy earrin-.” She promptly has a coughing fit.
 
Heliotrope: I can't believe my children were born while I was away at the war :< They. Are. Perfect.
Heliotrope: 1. I'm dead; my subconscious can literally convince me of anything.
Heliotrope: 2. I have cat ears now and that's it. That was the line in the sand. The breaking point. I'm just going to be absulutly fucking unhinged from here on out. I'll think to myself; Vidar be reasonable what would your mothers think and I'll just fucking wear crocs and hate eurovision. I don't hate eurovission. That's how you can tell me from a pod people. remember that. Jot it the fuck down.

"Straglass, send us to Clair's, it's important" He said to the ceiling, laying on the floor, his head on Devins leg.
 
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"No fucking comment," He said. He was too stoned to be annoyed and too embarased to be clever. He did however love having his hair touched so he was goingto move never.
 
Euphemia “Eppie” Cross​

In hindsight, Eppie should have seen this coming; she had smoked with way more gusto than one should have, trying to erase the reminder of the deep, lingering sadness of losing Miranda. It hits her hard, and it hits her fast. Heat rises in waves in her skull, soothing her migraine but giving her bouts of vertigo that turn the ground into jello. She swears she can feel her veins.

”Viddy, I’m too high. Way too high. I-“ She bursts into a fit of giggles, “I love your ears, bro. I know you‘re embarrassed but you make them look dope. The snazziest lil neko-sword-goblin. Take that, capitalists.”
 
"Okay okay, we're cutting you off," He said reaching for her spliff. "But, Thank you. Now that I've reached my final form as derange cat girl my sword powers have increased ten fold."

Heliotrope {Tacnet}: So... I'm realizing. As I sit here. with cat ears and all my many powers, that uh,, last night didn't go so well on my end. Do we have a lead?
 
Rushing Jaws
(Thanks to CelticSol CelticSol for supplying Eppie dialogue)​

Rushing Jaws had been content to follow Eppie back into the shelter dome and watch the spectacle of, among other things, Mach shaving with a goddamned cherufe knife, Vidar only just now realize he’s had the cat ears since Upload the Nematode, and now Eppie get stoned right into a higher level of existence. He eats the rest of his chow mein in relative quiet, only humming to himself between bites, the hangover from last night still dragging him down like an anchor tied to his tail. He has his muse remind him to clean the guns from last night as a meditative ritual in order to help shake off the doldrums, then places his now empty bowl by the fabber for recycling.
“Pretty sure you oughta be able to hear a cat’s step with those ears,” Rushing Jaws quips, grinning at the spectacle that is Vidar Kryssvinds as it finally comes around to him. “I remember a thing from back when I was a pup - mighta been a sim, or just an ol’ style movie - about a group of cyborg commando catgirls n’ their wizard boss. You wouldn’t look too outta place in the Black Rabbit Company there, Viddy-”

Rushing Jaws feels something- someone, Eppie, bump into him as he takes his seat: she is well and truly blazed, and giggling uncontrollably. Rushing Jaws instinctively puts an arm around Eppie to help steady her, but Eppie seems liquid under his grip, like a cat that doesn’t want to be pet. She ‘eeps’ in minor surprise, a note that only interrupts the fit of laughter rather than break it. He can’t help but catch the giggles, laughing softly as he does his best to steady this very pink and very stone doe.
“Hey yo, how you feelin’ doe??” He asks, just loud enough to be heard over the laughter.
“AbsoLUTELY fucking spectacular, how are you?” Eppie replies, her speech as putty-like as her stance.
Rushing Jaws can’t help but laugh: “Ah, had a rough night there but I think we’re gonna pull through.”
Eppie steadies herself enough to look at him for a long second, blinking at him like her response is still loading; Rushing Jaws can practically see the rainbow wheel of doom where Eppie’s coherent thoughts should be. She blinks, and then grins, and just before another fit of giggling overtakes her, she asks: “what?”
“Ah, don’t you worry none,” Rushing Jaws says, deciding that it’s too early in the morning to explain that he’s hungover from the MRDR and still vaguely sore from, among other things, caving in a synthmorph’s chest with his bare fist, being tagged with a stunner beam, and having to fire on a moving vehicle from a moving vehicle at recklessly high speeds.
Eppie simply replies “okay!” with a shrug, stretching her arms up before the high drags her back down to slouch onto Rushing Jaws, who does his best to catch and steady her, making the approximate calls that he would make to an orca pup with the spins. In the fluid manner of a cat, Eppie lays herself out on Rushing Jaws’ lap, stretching again before relaxing with a grin that threatens to spill over into more giggling as she marvels at the movements of her own fingers. Rushing Jaws keeps a hand on her head to steady the sape, who he is beyond the shadow of a doubt by now is way too fucking stoned.
“RJ?”
“Yeah?”
“I bet you’re the fattest fuckin’ whale.”
Unlike sapes, calling an orca fat isn’t an insult: blubber is useful for insulation, and size is an indicator of strength. So where another person might have been put off, Rushing Jaws simply grins, starting to laugh in a ‘yeahhh, you’re right’ sort of way-
“You got… you know,” Eppie starts to say, grasping for the words with her hands as if they’re literally hanging there, “you got…you got that thick bitch energy-”
Whatever she says next is drowned in the tide of laughter that comes rolling out of Rushing Jaws. He laughs a deep, hearty belly laugh, and even feels tears well up in his eyes. Eppie isn’t even wrong - his birth morph is one hundred per cent neo-orca beef - and the certainty with which she said it is simply too much for Rushing Jaws to take.
“Fuckin’ - they don’t come much thicker than me, baby doe-” Rushing Jaws is just able to squeeze out between fits of cackling, fighting for control over his own breathing (wow did he need that): “ancestors - I’m a mix of southern resident, bigg’s, and type two eastern north atlantic.”
Eppie blinks at him in utter incomprehension.
“Mr. Jaws, do you have a graph? I turned Sezé off. I can’t remember how to look things up on the mesh. The world wide net, if you will.”
This not being the first time Rushing Jaws has ever shown off how big killer whales are to sapes, Rushing Jaws loads up a chart onto the TacNet before projecting it into ARspace of a set of killer whales, highlighting each subspecies from which his genome is drawn… along with an addtional orca, the largest by degrees, with gold scrollwork and designs that evoke the art of the indigenous peoples of the pacific northwest. Next to it is a projection of a transhuman of average stature next to his birth morph, comparatively tiny.
“Oh thick. Thicqué.”
“Mhm. Peak peformance.”
“Dummee thicc.”
“Absolute unit, as the ol’ saying goes.”
“YES!!!”
“Also- also, please- Mr. Jaws was my father,” Rushing Jaws jokes, taking the chance now that Eppie’s addled mind has had time to catch up; even so, it takes much longer for Eppie to get the joke than it should, and the smile that breaks out is in such slow motion that the torrent of laughter that comes pouring out just about knocks Rushing Jaws over.
“RJ!! Neo-cetaceans don’t belive in last names!!” Eppie breaks her own laughter to state; “that’s a silly sape thing!! You’re a…dolphin. A fancy dolphin. The most dapper tuxedo dolphin.”
Māz she’s so fucken cute what the fuck.
“I mean we do use clan n’ pod names! My whole name would technically be Maelstrom Rushing Jaws, kinda like a chinese or japanese name - although some folks prefer the personal name first. I got a friend back on Ceres, Serene Ochre Melody Beneath The Crust, she’s a neo humpback with the Beneath The Crust metapod and she went with personal name first, ‘think it had somethin’ to do with being brewed in a European lab originally or somethin’.”
“I like your name,” Eppie says, “you sound like a very fearsome dragon.”
“Aw shucks-“
“Also i was gonna say your friend, Supreme Smoker - she’s got a long ass name, but I’m Russian and high and shouldn’t cast glass when I live in a stone house...or is it a stone?”
“The expression I've heard was ‘shoot off a gun in a sub.’”
Eppie looks at him for a long second, before suddenly saying: “Oh. Not the sandwich…”
“Yes, exactly. It’d be like opening up the window on yer spaceship for some fresh air. Whoosh! There goes your sandwich.”
“Oh! My shipmates did that to me once!”
Whatever Rushing Jaws was about to say next is cut off by this: it’s his turn to look at her for a long, disturbed, and wordless second.
“It was-” Eppie starts giggling again before shaking it out through her hands, “pretty fucked up! Um, the airlock is a window, right?”
“Uh, in a manner of speakin’ yeah...gotta say though, that was pretty rude of yer shipmates.”
“Mmm. They had TITANs in their brain, not their fault.”
Rushing Jaws doesn’t understand right away, and then he does; he looks off like he’s heard something he wasn’t supposed to have heard. “Yeah, uh, that’d do it.”
Eppie doesn’t seem to mind, at this point well and truly stoned out of her mind; she wiggles a bit for her comfort and then reaches up to turn Rushing Jaws’ attention back to her. He looks down at her, and sees the softest, sweetest look on her face that just about makes his heart melt. He laughs softly at that fact, and then starts singing a soft little song: as best as this Fury’s voice can carry it, Rushing Jaws sings a neo-cetacean kulning of his own, one commonly used to call raucous pups from play to join the pod again. It is a song meant to be sung underwater with high, piercing notes mixed with softer ones, and it takes some smoothing to make it pleasing to the human ear, but it is easy enough to make the adjustment to help call Eppie back from the high she chiefed herself into. The way she closes her eyes and relaxes into the song, the peace in her expression, fills him with a gooey warmth that pours out in the notes he sings for her.
Ain’t she somethin?
[She really is.]
I think she likes me, Māz.
[It’s almost like you’re likeable or something.]
Rushing Jaws has to stifle the laugh that would break up his song.
You reckon so?
[You really ought to cut yourself some slack there. Clearly you’re doing something right?]
I dunno. Sapes are tough.
[She’s an outer system sape though, so at the very least she won’t be like other sapes you’ve courted.]
Something about that phrase causes Rushing Jaws to hitch, a brief break in the song resulting and him having to cover quickly.
Whoa whoa whoa, steady on there!!
[Oh come on, look at you two!! You’ve fallen into orbit around each other so fast it isn't even funny!! You really think it isn’t gonna happen??]
He takes a moment to look at Eppie again: her eyes are closed and her attention is square on the music, largely still but for the occasional wriggle. His song softens somewhat as he thinks back on everything so far: the initial simulspace meetup, nerf darts on the Nematode, the Old Chinese Theatre, Lupercalia…
Maybe there’s somethin’ to that.
[Gotta be worth a try, right?]
Another glance: a soft, pink smile that adds to the warmth in his core.
It ain’t gonna be easy.
[When is it ever?]
The question results in Rushing Jaws putting much more feeling into his notes than he meant to, but that no one seems to mind.
Touché.
[The question is, is it worth fighting for?]
As he sings, he ponders.
...fightin’s what I do; ‘may as well be for a good cause.
Cleaning the guns could wait a while yet.
 
The Longest Fuckin' Ensemble Post This Site Has Ever Seen
(Featuring Graystone713 Graystone713 , TrashRabbit TrashRabbit , ValtheStarGal ValtheStarGal , wickedlittlecritta wickedlittlecritta )​

It takes Eppie entirely too long to rub her brain cells together to even register that she had a notification hanging in the upper right hand corner of her entopics, then takes even longer for her to remember how she was supposed to open it. She finally gets TacNet open, which seems structured entirely to thwart a very lost in the sauce Eppie from opening it. The room spins as she tries to read it. She stretches back, until the top of her head touches the ground, as if it will ground her. It doesn’t. It only makes the world upside down.

“Hm…” Eppie says, as if seriously pondering something. “I don’t know how to read.”

“Make your muse read to you,” Vidar said reaching out to pat her foot, wich was closest to him.

“I have ghosts in my muse. Not today, Satan.”

“That sounds unideal,” Devin said. “On all counts.”

Eppie stretches her arms past her head, feeling all the tendons and muscles stretch with vibrant sensitivity as she lays them on the ground, “Can’t even exorcise her. She just… hacks the new fuckin’ muses I get. I get a new muse for a few hours, then… bam. Ghost muse. Like… the gall. The audacity. The sheer nerve.”

“Yo. Real talk. That’s fucked up,” Devin said.

Vidar was stoned enough to deal with Vera being Alive and Devin’s fork dating his Daughter. But Seze being self-restoring made the hair on his arms stand up- especially after after his close encounter with Eppie’s Star.

“She. what?” He said quietly.

“I delete her, clear the cache, clear everything. New muse. Few hours later, Seze is back home like she never even left. I’ve gone through… four muses, with support from some insanely skilled hackers. Seze outdoes them every time. I’ve just given up.”

Eppie raises her hands above her face, giggling through her teeth as the leftover glitter shimmers in the rising sun, “Here’s some real tea, though - I got my crazy through the gate, did ya know? But when we go through, we gotta do a backup. I had like… thirty backups with gatekeeper. I come back after the spook shit? Every single one of them was compromised or erased. And my muse is never the same. How fucked up is that? Isn’t that just freaking you out? I mean, for real - doesn’t that just slim your -” Eppie snickers away.

“That’s so fucked up. Eppie. It sounds like your muse is like-” Vidar really didn’t even want to say it out loud. “Your epicenter. Like. it couldn’t convert all of you so it just stole the next easiest thing from you.”

Eppie nods to herself, hyperfixated on the glitter, “Oh, yeah, definitely…” Her words drift off, simply looking at the shifting holographic glitter across her skin. If she shifts it just right, it matches her skin, but shines like starlight…

… She was talking about something.

She audibly says ‘aha’, then looks at the group,“Oh, right. What’s the gossip in TacNet? Can’t read.”

He watches her lose her train of thought and whether she’s just lost in the sauce or changing the subject on purpose he lets it go “... It was just me asking if we got a lead. Our assholes didn’t believe I was devins beautiful wife from moomintroll so I got jack shit.”

“Oh! I got lots of info. So many info. Info for daaaaaaaays. So much info, it would take me like… Twenty minutes to write it down. So much. It’s like…” Eppie waves her hands around non-sensically, “... You know? Ryong just -” She moves her arm like a squid, “- y’know? He just. Gave me all the deets. So that’s how we do it, going forward. Agreed?”

“‘and just what do those deets consist of?” Rushing Jaws asks, having been humming softly to let others speak this whole time. “Did you find out anythin’ on location, associates, habits, anything on our boy?”

Eppie blinks at RJ with the blankest expression, “... I just told you.”

“At the risk of showin’ my hide for the dumbest boy in second grade, would you please repeat the intel for me?”

There is a long moment where Eppie looks at RJ with bemusement. In her mind, that was articulated. For it to not be crystal clear, she might need to get creative. She takes RJ’s hand, then reaches for Devin, “Here, let’s do it the spicy way.”

“Yo, what-” Rushing Jaws starts to ask, having only done what he thinks Eppie is about to do once before, and that under ideal circumstances; Eppie is stoned as hell and about to try linking multiple people.

“Now I’m the dumbest boy in second grade. What are we doing?” Devin asks, genuinely unsure but full of warning bells.

Eppie grins, giggling as she sits up in RJ’s lap, placing his hand on her waist so her two hands were free for Vidar and Devin, “Oh, babe, we’re bout to join a server,” It’s odd, but the song of the Star is almost soothing through the haze of hash, and she stretches her hands out to them, “You too, Ronnie. You’re gonna have to grab my leg or something. It’s easier if we touch. That’s what she said.”

Veronica is still sat outside when Brumaro alerts her to Eppie’s communication from inside the dome; [Em, make what easier?]

[I think Eppie’s gonna show us what she found,] Rushing Jaws responds, somewhere between flustered and concerned. [Think ‘special talents.’]

[Ah], Veronica responds. She takes one last look at the sun, well above the horizon by now, and a sky that has some more color to it, before making her way back through the dome’s airlock and inside the dome itself.

“Is it worth anything to this that I’m in a synthmorph?” Veronica asks.

“You got a bio brain in the head?” Eppie drawls.

“Ah- why yes, yes I do,” Veronica responds. “It’s safer that way, normally.”

“Then it’ll work.”

“Em- alright,” Veronica says, hesitating before making her way to the strangest intimate gathering she’s ever been a part of before taking a cross-legged seat where she can best take Eppie’s leg and hold it - opting to hold her leg just above the ankle and bracing herself for whatever is supposed to happen next.

“So, I think most of us can speak English. Inside, that’ll be our default,” Eppie leans forward to grip Vidar and Devin’s hand, her leg remaining stuck out for Veronica in a pretty impressive display of flexibility, then closes her eyes. She breathes in and out evenly, relaxing herself as she listens to the song of the Star raise in volume. Mach is outside, and will need to hear this, so listens. The song rebounds in the room, out of the dome, and to where Mach works on the car. She can feel every member of the crew as intimately as she can feel herself, all together in a shared mindlink Eppie has created to bind them all together.

Eppie’s voice echoes in the mindlink, which holds the ambient noise of the deep, bone rumbling hum of the Star, Hola, everybody. What’s shakin’?

Vidar had been momentarily distracted by devin sending him a deluge of cute pokemon memes and checking in with penny that she was not haunted. And at the last moment, when he realized what she was trying to do it was too late. His presence hit the “server” like mic turned up too high and his thoughts coming from behind a squealing wall of white noise.

Jeg vet ikke om dette er en god ide.
I don’t know if this was a good idea.

Devin flinched at the terrible squeal and the horrible feeling of everyone’s minds rubbed up close to his, but Eppie wouldn’t let go of his wrist. He grabbed onto Vidar’s sleeve and said, “Oh I hate that,” out loud, because maybe if he didn’t acknowledge that they could hear his thoughts then it wouldn’t be true.

是的，这仍然很奇怪, Rushing Jaws comments; even as this wasn’t his first time in a mindlink, there was a lot more noise this time around, which he found less difficult than he would’ve thought given how much of his mind was already skilled at processing audio - even if this wasn’t your traditional audio.
Yep, this is still weird.

Veronica, on the other hand, feels something in her mind itself like a gray box being plugged in before the deluge. She knows what it is to be connected intimately, but not like this, not like minds being linked together by...she couldn’t begin to guess at. This lacked the rightness of digital interface, the rationality of ordered code and electriticy: मेजबान के भगवान, यह क्या है?? हम इस तरह से कैसे जुड़े हैं??
Lord of hosts, what is this?? How are we connected like this??

Eppie sighs helplessly, I said English, guys. Y’all some dumbasses. Anyway, here’s Wonderwall.

It’s not the language I think in, Vidar complains.

Is this what it’s like, your ‘special talents??’ Is this how it feels? Veronica asks.

Go easy on ‘em, Eppie, this takes getting used to and you know it, Rushing Jaws counters, this time in English now that the surprise has passed - and hoping that no one notices how flustered he is having Eppie on his goddamned lap amid the chaos of half a dozen minds filling this space.

Eppie grins, leaning back on RJ, Ready for a show? She asks, before she summons her memories of skimming Ryong, and pushes them to the very front of her mind at what she imagines to be full volume.

[Show me Emilio.]

[Eppie buries her head into Ryong’s shoulder, her hand sliding down his face to rest on the curve of his neck —]

[— It’s morning. You’re riding in the shotgun seat of a mars buggy on a highway - a kilometer marker of the old M5 streaks by, the cool Martian sunrise to your right. You watch the landscape shift around you: mesas and dunes, all the rust red you know and love, and all of it natural aside from the paved road before you.]

[“What are you gonna do when you get back?” You ask, turning to face the driver’s side, where Emilio Salgado Vega is seated, eyes forward on the road. In the corner of your eye, you can see Khadijah in the back, happily exploiting the room provided by three-person seating being short two people, her vintage aviators and chameleon cloak hood up as she naps.]

[“Don’t much care for the city,” Emilio responds, “but I know good people in Palembang who I aim to pay a visit.”]

[“Yeah? Who?”]

[“Family friends,” is all Emilio says in response. He’s been quiet since getting out of the Zone; not unusual first thing, but it’s been days since clearing the cordon and rest-stopping at Portmanteau. Even now his face is expressionless, focused on the road ahead as if he couldn’t just let the vehicle AI drive. You’d think someone who’s about to be set for life ought to be happier.]

[“I’m looking forward to a taste of the high life, myself,” you say, grinning as debauched fantasies fill your mind. “This is the shit we dream of, ‘mee.”]

[“Yeah, sure,” Emilio says. ]
[“Still worried?” You dare to ask.]

[“You’re not?” He asks back.]

[“Look dude, all of that shit’s deaᵈ... ᶦᵗ ᵃᶦⁿᵗ ᵍᵒⁿⁿᵃ ᵇᵉ ᵒᵘʳ ᵖʳᵒᵇˡᵉᵐ…”—]

[— Eppie drags in a harsh breath through her teeth, tasting blood on her tongue and feeling a thickness build in the back of her throat. She coughs hard, the sound drowned by music, and tastes a mouthful of blood that she forces herself to swallow. Her mind spins with possibilities, her eyes searching Ryong’s face for any recognition that she browses his thoughts like one could browse the mesh, and finds none. Her next inquiry spawns a deafening crescendo from the Star— ]

[Show me TITANs.][/I]

[— “Why did you back out???” You demand, looking at your old friend with tears in your eyes and fury choking your throat.]

[“I can’t forget what we found in there, Ryong,” Emilio replies.]

[You are both in a simulscape: you are aboard a simple sailing boat, on the great northern ocean that will come to be following centuries of Martian terraforming. The sky is overcast, and the day is cool, but the winds blow fair and the sea is steady; if only the same could be said for your conversation.]

[“You backed out and now they’re going to hunt you down!!” You shout, the fury giving way to fear. You want to be afraid for this man, but you hate him. You don’t want to hate this man, but the hatred stabs into your mind like a knife. You just fucking wish he’d taken the deal.]

[“They can try,” Emilio says, the stupid motherfucker.]

[“What, are you going to ground?? Are your little friends going to protect you??”]

[“Yeah. They are,” Emilio replies, the fucking stupid motherfucker.]

[“And when Valentina the Viper finds you and plugs your stack into a fucking torture sim for backing out after we made the fucking deal, do you think your dead friends will thank you???”]

[“She has to catch me first,” Emilio says, the absolutely fucking stupid motherfucker. “Ryong? Do you even remember what we found in there?”]

[“No?? That was part of the deal??”]

[“TITAN shit-”]

[“SHUT THE FUCK UP,” you scream, wanting so badly not to hate this man but absolutely despising him. “If you tell me, I’m fucked too!!”]

[“Then we don’t have anything left to discuss,” Emilio says, before his simulmorph turns and heads below deck.]

[“EMILIO,” you shout, a demand for him to come back, rushing to ᵗʰᵉ ᵈᵒᵒʳʷᵃʸ. ʰᵉ ᶦˢ ⁿᵒᵗ ᵇᵉˡᵒʷ ᵈᵉᶜᵏ... ʰᵉ ᶦˢ ᵍᵒⁿᵉ… —]

Å jævla hestepisse, Vidar thinks to himself- only it’s broadcast loud and clear. The both of them were in cahoots with the cartel no wonder they had people already there. I feel stupid. He’s Glad he’s stoned for this because the shapes of so many minds together puts him on edge, he could walk into any one of them without trying- and the soft sound of the star is there and he thinks if he tried hard he could understand it to see how it shaped the server. Out loud he says, “So Valentina is definitely going to kill us.”

Crash, Crash, CRASH, DAMN IT. WHERE THE HELL IS THE CRASH? Can you even hear me?... Do we not have it loaded?... fuckfuckfuck, CRASH! REACTOR SCRAM! ANYTHING! The screaming wasn’t ordered, wasn’t in a voice the team would fully recognize, but it was obviously Mach. Why can’t she hear me? Nanti?... Nanti?... What the hell is going on? I have to do something. Reel back. I’m not… Asleep. I can do something. Rapid-fire images run through his head. The plasma bolter? Stack himself now? No, he could just psyche himself out, right? He made an effort, but it just made a TON of mental noise, like the roar of an engine that was on the verge of shaking itself to pieces.

Yo yo yo mach!!! It’s RJ, yer favorite neo-orca - listen to me!! Focus on the sound of my voice - yer gonna be okay, my sape, easy now!!

Psi. Mach had known. He’d never personally encountered it. He tried to convince Nanti to find some kind of Narcoalgorithm to dampen it, or crash his systems before it got too far. He’d asked her to crash him. She wasn’t. He couldn’t even be sure she was listening, focusing was hard. Distance. PSI was easiest to use when touching. The distance made it harder. He knew this. He could get distance. The roaring engine in his mind translated to the beep as the real electronic engines of the aircar flicked on and started warming up. The engine started sounding less rickety. More refined. Honed. A jet engine. An F-Zero’s main thruster. I AM LEAVING. In the real, Mach put pedal to medal, and within two seconds he couldn’t hear anything. He still moved out the full mile, just in case, before he stopped the car.
[Holy SHIT boss, the fuck was that? Your brain was flippin’ the shit, everything was CRAZY garbled.]
PSI. Fuckin… I thought Vidar wouldn’t pull shit like this! I-... FUCK!
[You… Sure that WAS, VIdar? I just looked at Tacnet, and you should too. Eppie was talkin’ weird about… Something.]
… Oh no we have TWO.
[Hey, don’t you be discriminatin’!]
… I mean. You’re right. But she also stuck her finger in my brain without prior consent.
[Fair. I think we’re still in uplink range. Just a lil exposed out here.]
Back to work, I guess.
So, from a distance, some Eurobeat hits could be heard as Mach got back on fixing their very broken car.

He’s driven off with my car!!
Mekhajakumaar: [@ Sleipnir, I am going to have to ask you bring the car back to where you’re not exposed out there. If anyone is monitoring, you’ll stick out like an exposed node.]

Devin watched Mach go and said, “That’s the smartest man I’ve ever met,” in slightly stoned awe.

Sleipnir: [I’m not coming back ‘Till Eppie learns the meaning of CONSENT. YOU CAN’T DO THAT TO ANYONE OUT OF THE BLUE. ESPECIALLY IF THEY STILL REMEMBER THE FALL!]

Aw hell.
Azathothwakes: [Alright okay yeah, we shoulda been a little clearer about what was goin’ down, this was kinda outta the blue. If you need a minute out in the desert to sort yerself out, then take it; Eppie ain’t out to hurt anyone, she was tryin’ to show you what she got from Lupercalia.]

Mekhajakumaar: [You’re more than welcome to stay out there if you need, but the car needs to come back. I’ll task the vehicle AI to bring it in, do you want a lift back now or later?]

hara: give him a fucking minute, would y’all?
Devin stood up and brushed the back of his pants off. “I’ll go talk to him. One Fall survivor to another, right?”

“Good call,” Rushing Jaws says, holding Eppie a little closer. “Call out if you need any help.”

It dawns on Eppie in a moment of blinding sobriety that she has made a major miscalculation.

She nods to herself, her good spirits deflating like someone had popped them with a needle, her words ringing hollow through the mindlink as the Star hits a bassline that chatters teeth, Right. People hate asyncs.

She moves to stand, but her legs are unsteady and her arms don’t behave the way they should, but she needs people to not look at her with so much fear and disdain. Maybe they were only looking at her in concern, because she was moving with no aspect of grace or coordination, but it doesn’t take a genius to put it together what her teammates will always think of her. She can feel the fear in the air -

The song sharpens as the mindlink suddenly ceases, snapping back to only Eppie like an elastic as she pulls herself from the touch of her comrades. The world is sharp, and wavers, but it’s no longer delightful and beautiful - it’s painful across her skin, itching and stretching, as if tendrils of the Star were moving beneath her skin. She stands - or tries to. She stumbles as she tries to push herself from RJ’s lap. Anxiety and the burning hurt of rejection form a riptide in her gut, filling her with heartbreak but also overwhelming shame, and despite herself, she can feel tears rising in her eyes.

She feels revolting, wrong. An unwelcome alien trying to masquerade as something else. The exact picture of fear and monstrosity that she saw when she mindlinked with Miranda when it all fell apart.

[Euphemia,] Seze purrs. There was no noise to indicate Seze had been turned back on or activated, and yet, here she was. Eppie tries not to sob as she can feel the caresses of the Star’s song far too close in her mind, [Perhaps it’s time to rest.]

“Don’t,” Eppie says, outloud, raising her hands to her eyes and pressing the heels of her hands hard into her eyes to ground herself. It pulls stars to her vision, and though her morph is modded to ignore the cold, she can feel Europa’s ice biting her feet. She won’t uncover her eyes. She won’t. She won’t. “Please, please, don’t.”

[Allow someone stronger than you to bear this burden. Your mind is too tired to keep this fight. Let go, Euphemia.]

Cold fingers grip her arms, a soft hum directly in her ear, so close she can feel it’s breath on her neck. Eppie’s arms drop slack, suddenly beyond her control, and she breaks into a sob when she realizes she can’t move her legs, and her voice will not speak. When she looks up, Mars and her comrades are gone, and she only has a moment to gaze into the face of the towering being before her when it snatches her body into the dark.

To the eyes of the Firewall agents that stand around her, Eppie’s body language shifts from intense distress to complete relaxation within moments. Her hands raise to her face, caressing her own skin with an unsettling vacancy in her eyes, pupils blown wide enough to envelop her iris, as if she were unaware of the texture or function of her skin. She stretches her fingers in front of her face, moving the appendages as her eyes methodically follow the movements, like her hand had never existed in this way prior to this moment.

Her eyes snap to the wall of the dome, as if seeing through the walls and into the far off distance of Mars, a soft hum rumbling in her chest. It is a keening sound, in warbling, awkwardly shaking notes, as if trying to make noises her vocal cords were not capable of creating. Her eyes close as she presses her hand to her temple, stiffly turning onto her heel as she wobbles unsteadily, like a newborn foal, towards the door without a word.

“Eppie?” Rushing Jaws calls, noticing a change come over her right away and rising to turn her around and ask what the problem is, hearing Veronica curse from off to his side and mention something about a backdoor override. Something is wrong, that much he can tell: Eppie was the very picture of serenity not a second ago, and now something has stolen and fled with the peace she enjoyed and has her stumbling to her feet and holdng her face before…

The moment it happens is imperceptible, but the change that comes over Eppie is undeniable: Rushing Jaws thinks he can hear her muttering - almost pleading - until it stops all at once, and her arms fall to her side as if the guiding ego just...vanished. He can’t see Eppie’s face, but he can tell that something is very wrong. He watches her begin to stumble and fall over herself as if she’s forgotten how to walk, and make noises that remind him of his attempts to mimic neo-orca calls with sape vocal chords…

...Rushing Jaws doesn’t like the conclusion he is tempted to draw one little bit.

“Eppie?” Rushing Jaws calls out again, with more volume; there is no response from Eppie aside from more fumbling, and at this rate, she just might make it to the airlock door out into the tablelands. He rises from his seated position in one smooth motion and walks toward her, arms out and ready to steady Eppie. “Yo, Eppie, can you hear me?”

“What’s wrong with her?” Veronica asks, in a tone of voice like she has only just noticed the change that has come over Eppie.

“A fantastic question,” Rushing Jaws says as he circles around - and sees that her pupils are dilated to the point of mydriasis, as if she is strung out on some powerful drugs: the stumbling and the strange noises could easily be explained away as a drug trip, but unless anyone was holding out on him, he didn’t know of anything that could reduce Eppie to something like this.

“Did the hash hit her that hard?” Veronica asks.

“Not sure,” Rushing Jaws says, stepping between the door and placing his hands on Eppie’s shoulders to try to steady her: “Hold on now, Eppie, you gotta sit down for a second-”

The scream Eppie lets out the minute RJ’s hands touch her skin is bloodcurdling - it is a piercing, inhuman cry of unrestrained rage and fury. She wrenches herself back to leap from RJ’s grasp, who holds her too tight to escape. With animalistic spasms, Eppie drops down into a crouch and skitters away on all fours.

The instant she holds distance from RJ, her feral snarl washes away into the same vacant expression as if her anger had never existed. She turns on her heel in an unsteady gait on the verge of collapse, then continues her course towards the airlock. Her hands grope the airlock, searching for the release with single minded focus.

Rushing Jaws had fucking sworn when Eppie shrieked at him like a feral animal, and how she’s carrying on like nothing happened. If she’s drugged, then it isn’t anything he’s ever seen. With the only other obvious conclusion staring him in the face, he asks: “Eppie, what the fuck is going on-?”

“...are we sure that’s Eppie?” Veronica asks.

“What do you mean, ‘are we sure?’”

“She’s...wrong,” Veronica responds, squinting. “This isn’t just drugs, that much I know.”

“Eppie, come on-” Rushing Jaws says, putting a hand on her shoulder to turn her back around from fumbling with the airlock.

Oh this is very bad and I’m very stoned

[Not ideal. You should do something.] Penny demanded with the frustration of some one who was unable to tackle the problem themselves.

I’m pretty sure that’s seze and the starboys playing.

Things had happened a little faster than his stoned human emotional processing would like. He was uncannily good at predicting how things were about to shake down- enough so that some one had put it in his file- and right now he was pretty sure that shit was about to hit the fan. He was seated on the ground where devin had left him, staring first at Mach departure and then at Eppie’s sudden change. He had the item he’d found earlier in his hand- because the part of him that was smart was still moving regular speed- even as the sensible slow part of him was still thinking things like “What the hell?” “Really not good.” “Don’t like this.” “Brain linking didn’t suck?”

Okay. Idea.

“RJ don’t touch her-.” And as he tossed the smartrope in Eppies general direction.

When RJ’s hand touches her shoulder this time, she does not scream. Instead, a feral growl rumbles in her chest as her head snaps back to regard him, twisting at an unnatural angle that makes the tendons in her neck quiver with effort. Her eyes are vacant, empty, nothing but the fathomless darkness of her too-wide pupils. They fixate on RJ’s face with an acute fixation, as if she could see more than just his face - that she could see every part of him, from the matter of his cells to the minute details of his past. She stares into him, long and hard -

Her mouth opens wide and she lets out a furious, piercing scream. It is louder than her first, and accompanied by a sudden violence of movement - she jerks away from him in a flurry of movement. Her lack of coordination and lack of connection to her body throws her back into the airlock, and moves her from the cover of RJ. The lasso wraps around her as she stumbles to the ground, binding her arms close to her body as she hits the ground.

She screams and growls furiously, thrashing to try and free herself. She kicks, pulls herself into a back breaking bridge to attempt to wriggle out, to no avail, which makes her shriek in animalistic frustration. She kicks out, landing on her stomach, glaring with burning, feral rage at Vidar as she struggles against her binds. She snarls at him, but what leaves her mouth isn’t Spanish or Russian - it is a shaking, alien interpretation of Osloite Norwegian, and resonates with her effort to use psi to force her command, “Sĺ̗͔̮i̶̦͉̬p̹̲̦p҉̺͚̜ me͟g͟ ͉̮͚fr̦i̗͕! S̥l̜i̟̳̠p̛̟p̰͓ ͙͉̲m̖͍̺eg ͎n͈ạ̊!”
Norwegian: Release me! Release me now!

That jarred him. He was still getting to his feet as the rope did its work. It was a moment of disorientation as the unfolding sensation inside him he loathed did some sort of unfamiliar origami. He came close and kneeled and and squinted. It wasn’t just Eppie having an episode, it really was like something else was in her. And he hated that. He hated that a lot.

“Lukk munnen når du snakker med meg. Jeg har hørt sangen din, og jeg liker den ikke. Faen av Seze.”
Shut your mouth when you talk to me. I’ve heard you song and I don’t like it. Fuck off, Seze.
The star had taken a pop shot at him, and he’d gotten lucky that part of him that was smart and fast and never seem to be bothered by too much weed.

jukeboxmaiden has been kicked.
Heliotrope[Tacnet]: Anybody got something to sedate her with. Considering an entire Devin-joint seems to do nothing. All I got is. Fucking whirling scourge.
Heliotrope[tacnet]: Y’all should probably clear out.

Eppie thrashes, kicks against the group as she snaps her teeth at Vidar in a vain attempt to take a bite out of his face. When she sees no intention shift behind his eyes, she thrashes and screams, pulling so hard against her binds that her skin rubs raw to the point of bleeding. Her attention turns to RJ, her voice shifting from animalistic fury to the hunt-driven notes of a neo-cetacean song, “S̲̙h̦͙̮͠ā̦̮!̨ ̷̳S͜h͟ā͏̺͖l̨͙͖e ̮͔t̰͎͠ā̙̩̀me̞̘̤ṉ͔̖!!” She pulls against her binds, her voice growing desperate, “Shìfàng wǒ!”

Mandarin; Kill! Kill them! ; Free me!

Having heard desperate screaming enough to be able to ignore it, Rushing Jaws is instead caught off guard by the hunt song that Eppie - or whatever has possessed her - sang. He feels the sensation of being immersed underwater, feels the response rise in his throat, feels the prey drive that characterizes a hunt, like Eppie is a fellow hunter and Vidar is the prey. He looks at Eppie, desperation clear in those unnaturally deep black eyes, then to Vidar, as if going after him somehow feels the right thing to do.

“No,” Rushing Jaws says, recognizing the influence of psi for what it is and shutting it down by force of hardened will, “no, this isn’t- that’s not-”

“No,” he snarls, his fury turning on the thing that has stolen Eppie from them. Rushing Jaws knows several ways to incapacitate someone, and many more ways of neutralizing them - and he feels an urge to retaliate against whatever tried to manipulate him, tried to turn him against his squad. He turns back to it, rage balling his hands into fists-

-and melting away when he sees that it’s still Eppie. Still the bright pink exalt, bleeding from how hard she pulls against the electronic rope, screaming and thrashing like a snared animal, still with those too-dark eyes. It isn’t Eppie that wails and writhes, but she has to be in there somewhere. He starts to sing another song, a lullaby for frightened pups, to see if it will work at all on Eppie and to give him something else to focus his anger and lament on.

Azathothwakes: [my kingdom for a dose of fucken sandman]
Azathothwakes: [best I got’s a bunch of different hand-to-hand techniques for knocking someone out, and i’d like to save that for a last resort given what we’re dealin’ with]
Heliotrope: [Cool cool.]

2sday{Pm to Seze.}: Okay. you have till the count of three to fuck off. Or I’m gonna teach you the Song of Vidar.

Veronica, for her part, is keeping silent and alert on the TacNet for any signs of a breach, this horror sim episode reminding her of how Eppie seemed to hack a mesh site without even knowing how she did it. Knowing that the brain inside her synthmorph isn’t safe puts her on the kind of edge that has her ready for just about anything; she can’t hope for much if whatever demon has possessed Eppie decides to try for her, but she hopes that the lack of bioneurology would inhibit or even prevent the thing from getting its claws in her. Veronica lets Rushing Jaws and Vidar do the talking, remaining silent and doing nothing to call attention to herself with the two of them doing an outstanding job hoarding it all for themselves

Mekhajakumaar: [Well out of my area of expertise, here. We should neutralize as soon as possible, or clear to a safe distance to think of something.]
Mekhajakumaar: [How long can she go on screaming like that??]
Heliotrope: [I’m gonna guess until she passes out.]
Heliotrope:[I’m trying to ping her muse- since that seems to the foci of her strains hot nonsense. Clearing out might be our best bet.]

Vidar sat back on his heels in the cat girl rendition of a slavic squat as Eppie screamed and screamed. He was extremely glad he was stoned and his only emotions available to come to the phone was anger and a kind of sluggish alarm. This might as well be happening. And he was slightly to sedated to decide that he should have seen something like this coming, only that he had not wanted to put two and two together.
---

Mach had gone a rather impressive distance on a still busted car, and Devin huffed a little by the time he reached him. “So. That was fucky,” he said by way of greeting.

“Yeah. I didn’t want anything to do with that… I mean. Is it WRONG to ask for consent these days? Glitter in my face is one thing, but My Mind?... Fuck. You don’t touch that. I’m not even sure you CAN ask for consent on that.” Mach said, having already denied Veronica’s request to the AI. as he continued his work on the vehicle housing it.
Sleipnir: [I am working on the car over here now. Outside her service area. If someone comes this way for a scrap, I got a plasma bolter. And Hara.]

“You’re not wrong. She could’ve asked us all a lot clearer. Her heart’s in the right place, and she wouldn’t do any harm, but still. It’s not much fun to have somebody else in your head all of a sudden.” Devin sat on a rock not far from the car, but far enough that he was out of Mach’s way. He can still hear the ghostly echo of dial-up ringing in his ears. “I dunno why everyone’s on your case, this is the most sensible response to anything wacky I’ve seen ever. And I’ve seen some wacky shit.”

“Yeah. I probably didn’t need the car, but… Well, it’s not like they teach ‘how to avoid Telepaths’ in school. I mostly know about… ROB, from the fall. And my time with Nerrix. And the crime boys. I barely know anything about Psychic stuff or Asyncs!... I’m… Sure Eppie wasn’t trying to fuck me up.” Mach said, trying to keep on working.

“Most people don’t. Hell, I don’t think the Asyncs know that much more, honestly. At least as far as I can tell,” Devin said. “They’re just kind of along for the ride too, most of the time. Or Vidar is, at least.”

“Yeah… I mean. I dunno what that vision quest nonsense was, but I at least think it was intel?... Fuck if I know.” Mach said, getting the welder back out and going at it. “Man, you just know the rental company’s eventually gonna notice these welds. Gotta patch the paint, too. At least the next car’s ours, and we get to go wild on it. Blues, greens, a touch of gold… What do you think?”

“What she got on Emilio,” Devin agreed. His eyebrows went up as Mach kept talking. “Oh, talk dirty to me,” he said, delighted. “Everything’s better with gold.”

“Ehhh maybe not everything. There’s a few shades of green or purple that would just be awful with gold. Also you gotta keep the gold to accents, let it be the bit that pops out instead of the whole deal. It’s just tacky that way.” He said, finishing the weld on another bullet hole. “But what pattern to use? I don’t necessarily wanna call out that I’m Fong…”

“Most everything. Hmm. Stars? Splatters like you drove through a big puddle of gold?”

“Splatters. Definitely.”

“Hell yeah.”

---

The pings on TacNet suddenly came in abruptly, and Devin leaned over a little to peer into the dome a little better. Not that he could actually see anything except for vague shapes.

hara: what the fuck
hara: can’t leave y’all alone for a minute
hara: where would we clear out to???
Heliotrope: We’d clear out to where you folx are.
Heliotrope: No body has any better ideas? It’s that or I put her in a sleeper hold and do fisticuffs with her brain.
hara: those are the only drugs i got. i’m useless.
Heliotrope: Does no one have anything to peacefully taze this child?!
hara: i left my eelware mods at home on my other morph!!!

Seze_the_Assistant {PM to Heliotrope}: I have no more power over the manifestations of Euphemia’s Watts-McLeod virus than Penny has over yours. I am beyond your reach, little wolf. Use your sleights on Euphemia if you wish; it is of no consequence to me.

Her screams die as her eyes dart between Vidar and RJ’s prone bodies, breathing harshly to recover from the long, sustained cry. Her teeth grit, sneering, as she attempts and fails to pull herself to her feet, watching them with rage in her dark eyes. As she struggles on the ground, and as the lack of movement proves her sleights have been useless, Eppie’s breath grows quick and hard. She screams in absolute frustration, pulling so fiercely against her binds that blood flows from the gashes she’s created in her arms.

She thrashes, pulls, kicks, moves in ways that are likely painful, but the rope doesn’t give. Her screams shift from rage to desperation, and her screams of threats, or even just wordless rage, beginning to dissolve into begging cries. She rolls on the floor, tears beginning to stream down her face and mingling with the dirt that has gathered on her face, and she sobs through clenched teeth, “H̪̦͜ọ͕m͇̲͠e̳̬!”

She breathes hard, exhausted and losing fight, “H̪̦͜ọ͕m͇̲͠e̳̬! ̬͔͔B̝̙͙̀r̻i̵̼̩ng̯̙̠͞ me̖ ho͚̮me̸ ͘to̮ t͠h̨e h̭̠̫iͅl̗̹ļ̠̦s̘̩!̗͇ ̬B҉ri̺̦̖n͕͢g ̣m̹̻̫e ҉t̵o t͏h̨̞͓e̷̪ ̹̹A͍͖l̙͎͖l̶! ́Br̻̤̬in̗͍g̶͔ ͇̬͠me ͍̦hom̠̱̯e ̛̰̰̺-̳͙ ̝̮̼I ̠cạ̴̥n ̩̲̱̀h̜̣̼͢e̶͍ͅa͔͞r̲̫͈ ͖t̶̺ḫ͉͙e͉̙i̬r s̀o̰̜n̠̫g ̡-̗ ̯͙̯l̥̦e̷͇t̀ ́me ̶g̪͙̪o͓͇̼͠!̢” Her face presses into the dirt, her whole body trembling, “T̴̬he͎̬̻y͓͈ ̻̳l͎͇ͅe̟̱̱f́t ̨̲m̵e ͘b̫̞ę͖̦h̺͙ͅi̡ņd̯,̭͙͍ ̜̺leṭ̙ ̡̣͕͓m̛͚͇͇e ͘g̜͍̲o̥͎ t҉o̰̬ ͜t͔͢ͅhęm!̦͍ Let m͢e ̰̹̀g̘̹o!̹ ̬̠̙L͏e̷̳̠t ͚͇͞m̡e ̠g̦̻̭o̧!̧”

hara: have. have we considered just shooting her?

2sday{Pm to seze}: thats what I thoguht’d you say you dumb fucking republican.
Seze_the_Assistant {PM to 2sday}: You are such a small, small creature, little wolf. One day the Star will give me my turn, and I look forward to showing you what He is truly capable of. You know nothing of horror yet.
2sday{Pm to seze} Hot.

Azathothwakes: we are not shooting a fucking teammate. @ Sleipnir - aint you got Eelware on that security pod of yours?

hara: sometimes you get infected with shit, and you gotta shoot people about it!!
hara: i’ve done it before, i’ve had it done to me, i’ll do it again

Azathothwakes: we wouldn’t be able to work with asyncs much if we shot ‘em at the first sign of weird shit. i’ll grant you make a good point but i’m lookin to exhaust all options before we resort to that.

hara: loverboy, there is a world of difference between “weird” and “homicidal”. we’re way past weird.

Azathothwakes: yeah well we aint anywhere near homicidal yet. not with this peformance. @ Sleipnir, I’ll get you a big fucking gun if you come back here and give Eppie a good defibrilatin’

Sleipnir: I was trying to get some work done, but yeah. I got Eelware. Gimme a minute.

Mach frowned as he drove back, the car protesting just as he did. When he saw Eppie… Well.

“So. We need 10,000 volts of forced peace?”

“That oughta do it,” Rushing Jaws replies, looking ready for anything. “Enough to give her a hard reset.”

“Okay. But I do gotta touch her, so… if I go nuts, you got full permission to knock me the FUCK out.” Mach said, turning the Eelware on, electrifying his hands, and briefly hesitating before those hands came down on Eppie’s temples.

As Mach approaches, Eppie begins to wail, tears spilling down her face as she struggles to get away, “T̪̥h͇ey're̼ ͈̫͍w̗͚̤a̫itin̞͍͎g!͈ ̱̬T̫̖h̤͕e͈̯͔y̜͓'̯̣̫re-̲”

Mach’s hands touch her temples, and the shock makes her entire body seize sharply. She makes a soft groan of pain, then her body falls slack, her head hitting the floor hard, and stays eerily still.

“See? Why use a bullet where a good shock will do?” Rushing Jaws says, getting down on his knees and getting to the work of checking for a pulse: it’s weak, but it’s there, and just needs a little coaxing. Alert for any signs of movement from his charge, Rushing Jaws gets to work on reviving Eppie, not wanting to leave even an exalt morph unconscious for too long.

“More heart than sense, eh doctor?” Veronica quips, allowing some unease to slip through her mask of carefully cultivated Hypercorp cool.

“Hard - won - at - that,” Rushing Jaws retorts between counts.

Devin didn’t say anything, but made a mental note that if they ever did have to shoot a teammate, it was going to have be his job.

She stares into a sky filled with stars, and the stars stare back.

Eppie breathes hard - but, in the same sense, doesn’t breathe at all. She inhales the void into her lungs, feeling dark matter flutter in her chest, collapsing into a supernova and expanding into vast nebulas. She sees the icy surface of Europa from all angles - eyes over her entirely body blinking out her vision in waves that traverse her entire being. She feels the planets - their blinding heat and their crushing darkness, their scorching heats and their glacial colds - she feels them more acutely than she can feel her own body. She is keenly aware of the universe, connecting to something vast, unfathomable, esoteric in nature - she is so small, so lost in it’s ebb and flow, an infinitely small pulse compared to a heartbeat that could break a planet in half.

The caress of space is soft, an attempt to placate her pounding heart - perhaps hearts? - she is too disconnected to be sure she only has one - she sucks in the vacuum into her lungs, trying to steady her mounting panic. Peering out of the corner of her eye, she can see a flash of pink, before a creature the size of a house hides her body from view. She can hear murmurs, whispers - growling, flanged notes. It clutches her body so tight that she can feel it’s claws pierce her arms.

It’s mine! Whe wants to say, but her voice is stolen, and feels, rather than hears, a long, drawn out scream - her voice! her voice! - emits from her body, kept away as if it did not belong to her. Eppie feels tears in her eyes - tears all over. The eyes over her body weep, blurring her vision, Please! Please!

The creature shifts only a moment, hearing her voice barely through the star. She can see her body out of her peripheral, hanging limp but mouth hanging open in a scream that is swallowed by the void, her head wrenched painfully to the side so the creature has a better angle to whisper instructions. It snarls at Eppie’s ego, gnashes it’s teeth in threat, never missing a beat of it’s whispers.

She stares into the sky, tears floating from her face and into the expanse. She cries, and sobs, and screams voicelessly. She can’t bear to listen to the creature, by the chance she understands it’s instructions so she can dread what her body has done with her ego absent. What if she hurts someone? What if she kills someone? What if-

- and then everything is pain, just for a moment, before Europa and it’s eye filled sky are swallowed by darkness.

--

Eppie wakes to forceful compressions to her chest.

It’s not her first time getting CPR - lots of things can induce cardiac arrest on the other side of the gate - but it is the accompanying feeling of absolute pain and shock coursing through her body, similar to the after effects from when she took over the effects of Vidar’s electric shock. Her body is tingling painfully to the point that tears begin to drop down her cheeks, and she wants to move, but her body is stiff and numb. She can see and feel someone doing compressions on her chest, but has no ability to tell them that she’s awake - no ability to tell them to stop.

Fear and helplessness flood her system, and a keening sob escapes Eppie through locked teeth. Tears pour down her face as Eppie sobs, trying to drag in a breath but not able to get her air in her lungs. She hiccoughs, choking, then tries to breathe in again, only for her lungs to seize painfully and for her throat to close tight around her breath. She forces out a shuddering exhale that’s too short before she tries to breathe again, but it’s as hopeless as the last few tries. The compressions on her chest make it impossible to try and fully inhale, and it feels like cold hands are slowly closing around her throat as the edges of her vision darken and blur.

“Hey-hey!! There she is,” Rushing Jaws exclaims, trained to recognize and adapt to the changing signs of treating a patient. “There she is,” he says with some relief, not sure just yet as to who’s come back but leaving that question to one side for the moment. “There she is,” reassuring Eppie that - if indeed it is her - that she is back from whatever hell ride the Watts-McLeod strain took her on. “There she is,” Rushing Jaws declares, getting a bag he spots among a small pile of detritus doubtless meant for the hungry fabber and holding it up to Eppie.

“Here, Eppie, if you can hear me - hold this up to your mouth. Breathe into it for a hot second, i’ll sing you a song to time yer breaths too, you been through hell and we gotta bring you back to- well, Mars, but I feel like that’s gotta be better than the alternative.”

Eppie only looks at him like she’s still in hell, and so Rushing Jaws takes the initiative and positions the bag up to her mouth himself, somewhere between delicate and combat paramedic-precise. His motions are slow and clearly telegraphed to ensure Eppie can see them and know what he’s doing. He is just firm enough that the bag is secure without manhandling a doubtlessly fragile Eppie with one hand, while also holding a hand on the back of her head to keep steady.

Perfect for this occasion, Rushing Jaws starts singing an old marching hymn he learned as a pup when his instructors were teaching him how to control his own breathing: the Mandarin lyrics of marching on to revolution time out almost perfectly to the five-seconds-inhale and seven-seconds-exhale that these tiny sape bodies need to steady themselves, and so he sings a relaxed version of the song - soft enough to not agitate Eppie while still having the complex rhythm for her to keep time to as she gets ahold of herself. When she feels a little more steady, Rushing Jaws eases up on the hand supporting her head from behind and begins gently petting the top of her head, running his fingers through her hair, with a gentleness that would surprise him were he watching himself from afar. It may be an awful analogy in the circumstance, but Rushing Jaws knows when someone’s dived too deep, and so he knows he needs to be extra tender to help Eppie back from whatever crushing depths she’d been plunged to.

Eppie trembles and shakes, her entire body aching and tingling. She blinks rapidly as her head is propped up a bit. Everything is so blurry and the voices so far away, hands she can’t identify on her skin, and she sucks in a hard inhale, trying to will her body to movement. Her brain sends signals her body seems happy to ignore, her fingers barely twitching even when she feels something unknown press against her lips.

She can hear, and even feel, a song. Though her heart seizes a moment in terror - a second episode, right on the heels of another? - she realizes it is a human voice that sings her a lullaby. She cries anew as Eppie realizes she is being held not by some strange creature, but by Rushing Jaws. It brings her back to Mars enough to focus, realizing that he holds a bag to her mouth to help her hyperventilation. She breathes into the bag, in and out in controlled motions to the tempo of his song.

She rolls her head from the bag when she feels she has her breath enough under control, struggling to speak through the connection errors her brain is having with her body. She bears through it regardless, guilt sitting like a rock in her gut, eating her from the inside out at what her body may have done while she was away, “I’m so - I’m - I - I’m so sorry - I’m sorry - I’m sorry-”

“Hey, hey, hey hey hey hey, welcome back,” Rushing Jaws says real soft to Eppie; she may have her breathing under control but it doesn’t take a paramedic to tell that Eppie is still in a state of mental shock from whatever just happened to her. “Easy now… whatever that was must surely have been fucking awful, take it easy for a sec.”

“I’m happy to report that no one got hurt,” Rushing Jaws says, thanking his ancestors that he doesn’t have to lie about it. Thinking back on what just happened brings the song of the thing that was not Eppie back into his mind. The hunting song plays in his mind like an unwelcome tune, even now trying to dig in and influence him despite any compulsive power failing to give it the teeth it needed. He glances at Vidar, who looks like he needs to go right back to bed, and Rushing Jaws feels the thought cross his mind as to whether he too had to contend with the thing that was not Eppie and how close that contest was. He is tempted to contemplate just how close they came to getting really hurt, just how close whatever thing is folded into Eppie’s infection came to having its sadistic way.

None of that matters now: Eppie is here. She is back, she is safe, and she is scared.

“No one got hurt,” Rushing Jaws says. “It got hot for a second there but we handled it. No casualties, no fatalities, just a rough morning for everyone involved. Take yer time, we got nowhere to be right now and no one bearing down on us.”

Azathothwakes: [i, uh, don’t know how we’re gettin’ back into town just yet but if anyone knows where we could order a good fuckin’ breakfast or somethin’ without giving us away, i’ll pay for it in good M-credits or call whatever favors in i can find out here.]

Veronica is also downplaying her response to the events of the morning, the mask of professional calm back on comfortably secure. Her own experience with asyncs is limited - and she’s never witnessed an outburst quite this bad before - but her networks remain secure and Eppie seems back to rights again. As much as she would like to get back to work and have done with the mission, even she has to admit that this morning has been off to the rough sort of start that calls for a diversion like a good breakfast.

Mekhajakumaar: [I might know a few places in town. Generally not cheap though, do you think it’s worth it?]

Azathothwakes: [almost certainly not but we can’t live on weed alone and breakfast’ll give us somethin’ to look forward to that ain’t the mission. what d’you got?]

Rushing Jaws will take anything serviceable to help ease tensions around here; squad-building is hard enough in the best of times.

Mekhajakumaar: [Just a moment while I compile a list!]

hara, pm to heliotrope: [so, uh, if you ever do something like that, i have permission to shoot you, right?]
Heliotrope, Pm to hara; [If Eppie ever over rides me to hurt you, you better shoot me fast. I’m a fucking weapon.]
hara, pm to heliotrope: [i know this, and i’m very squishy]
hara, pm to heliotrope: [otherwise i’ll just throw a blanket over you and put you to bed like a cockatiel]
Heliotrope, Pm to hara [Thanks.]
hara, pm to heliotrope: [ <3 <3 <3]

Vidar stays in his squat as Eppie gathers her bearings, recoiling the rope up. He was too stoned and the implications of what had just happened were nuanced. He hated nuance.

“That was a rough Vibe Check if I ever saw one,” He told Eppie sympathetically. He had on his best poker face, but his ears were pressed back to his head like he was facing high winds.

“St-” Eppie tries, her teeth ground together. She feels disgusting, wrong, her own ego not sitting right in her morph. Their reassurances feel empty and filled with lies meant to soothe her, but it only makes her feel angry and humiliated, tears in her eyes spilling down her dirty face, “Sto- Stop. It - This - I’m - I wasn’t - Don’t. Don’t pretend this - that - this was okay. When it wasn’t. I-”

Her stomach rolls to her unease and the physical strain from the episode, and it rolls hard,“RJ, I need - outside - sick-”

“C’mon,” Rushing Jaws says, helping her to her feet, the airlock already pinged. He helps her through the door, through the short air cycle and out into the cool Martian morning, finding the rock he’d taken his own first breakfast on and helping her to it. Any thoughts of second breakfast are pushed aside: the priority must be ensuring the squad is operational, whatever that takes. If it means he has to be on hand while Eppie is sick, so be it.

Mekhajakumaar {PM to Azathothwakes}: Do we really have time for all of this?
Azathothwakes {PM}: sorry yer workin with transhuman beings ‘ain’t fully acclimated to this kind of work, ronnie, but we’re gonna have to make time. watts-mcleod don’t run on corporate time, and if we don’t, then we may not be so lucky next time it happens
Mekhajakumaar {PM}: Our enemies aren’t going to wait for us to get it together.
Azathothwakes {PM}: yeah well we’re in no fucken shape right now. besides, i figure you’d have more respect for someone who fucken got us all into Lupercalia and out of the hands of a fucken top tier hypercorp security group
Mekhajakumaar {PM}: She’s going to have to get used to the tempo of an operation like this.
Azathothwakes {PM} yeah well she aint right now???? ancestors, ronnie, you here to help or what??? Eppie’s squad, like it or fucken not!! she bailed us out of trouble - fuck, she’s the reason this op isn’t stalled at all - and you shitsquids don’t seem fucking concerned by the fact that she’s bearing up under an alien infection that is putting her through intense fucking strain.

Veronica has no response to that. She feels a twinge like she has received new information she has to consider, and pauses for a moment as Rushing Jaws helps Eppie. Why she was assigned to Rincewind after her last few ops was never disclosed to her, and while she is able to set aside her opinions for the good of the mission, the clash of personalities she’s witnessed seems counter-productive. Eppie has definitely earned her keep on this mission, that much is true, and Veronica is forced to concede that she doesn’t have the context to understand what Watts-Mcleod is like. Despite his background, Veronica had considered Rushing Jaws something of a fellow traveller when compared with the other members of Rincewind, and for him to have such harsh words takes her aback. His sentimentality is a liability, of that Veronica has no doubt…
...and yet it may have a place here.

Mehkajakumaar {PM}: So what do we do?
Azathothwakes {TacNet}: @ Mekhakakumaar you wanna know what we do? proportionate response. tryin to get into a secure club? we talk our way in. mach gets freaked out by psi? we go help him out and make sure he’s okay. eppie has an episode? we contain it with as little collateral as possible, and we fucking make sure shes okay. caught up in a fight with bad guys or monsters or nanoswarmsor whateverthefuck? then we go sapeshit.
Azathothwakes {TacNet}: sure, we got enemies, and sure they aint gonna wait on us, but how the fuck are we gonna be a match for them if we can’t even fucking trust each other, let alone help one another??? Azathothwakes {TacNet}: the whole.
Azathothwakes {TacNet}: fucking.
Azathothwakes {TacNet}: point.
Azathothwakes {TacNet}: is to protect what’s left of us.
Azathothwakes {TacNet}: and that means grinning and bearing it when shit gets rough. that means slowing down and helping when someone’s having a time. that means a proportionate response to when someone’s dealing with heavy shit, such as goddamned watts-mcleod.
Azathothwakes {TacNet}: to be clear: if i go john carpenter and split open into a mass of whirling fangs and tentacles hell bent on your destruction, that is the fucking time to gun me down. that is the proportionate response.
Azathothwakes {TacNet}: if one of us is having a breakdown and needs the squad to help ‘em back up, even if that breakdown gets real fucken messy, the proportionate response is to fucking help them.
Azathothwakes {TacNet}: watts-mcloed is a motherfucker of a thing, but that doesn’t mean the person bearing up under it doesn’t feel just as afraid, doesn’t feel any less fully, doesn’t want to hurt anyone, or isn’t any less of a transhuman fucking being then the fucking rest of us. we respond proportionately when shit goes down, and we help our squadmates.
Azathothwakes {TacNet}: Am I fucking clear?

“Fucking sapes,” Rushing Jaws mutters under his breath, holding Eppie’s hair back all the while.

“Oh boy,” Vidar says out loud with an awkward stoned laugh.

The comment is enough to shake Veronica from the stunned silence that has come over her. She thought she was being efficient. She thought she was keeping the mission front and center. She thought that keeping everything moving was making sure everyone got through this. Intellectually, she understood that she was working with operatives from all over the outer system, but for Rushing Jaws - again, despite his background, still someone she could relate to as being from the belt - to turn on her so viciously like that, even as he, having had more operations under his belt than even she does, surely knowing that missions for Firewall are no time to get sloppy…

Veronica says nothing as she cycles the airlock, steps out into the tablelands, and finds a spot to sit and meditate to quell the storm of outrage clouding her mind.

Vidar continued to chuckle to himself as she left, which seemed a usual Vidar response to something like that. Everything was a lot at the moment. And the idea that, his own intense strain induced panic attacks would very likely get him shot eventually because unlike Eppie he actually was a weapon bounced around his head like the DVD screen saver of yore. Vera was Alive. The Night Cartel was not going to wait on them. And he was on M A R S, The giggle grew into hyperventilating and his face flushed red before he burst into tears.

Despite ten years of safety on the swarm, arguments still made Devin freeze. Somehow, the fact that this argument was over tacnet made things worse—his brain could interpret the angry words in his father’s voice, rather than RJ’s.

Stay still. Maybe he won’t see you. Maybe you won’t be next.

It isn’t until RJ and Veronica have both left the tent that he could thaw. He only had time to exhale once, his hands shaking in his pockets, before Vidar started crying.

“Oh, big mood,” Devin said, feeling like they all ought to go back to bed and try the morning over. “Fuck Mars.”

Marcus Speedwagon, Dai Ruogang, Mach infinity, whatever the fuck this fastboi called himself was so tired and done. He’d been awake for maybe twenty or thirty minutes and he was already exhausted. Async bullshit, Tacnet arguments, shitty fabber food… He wanted to go back to bed. Or out on a long drive. But he had work to do.

“I live here, Dev. But fuck Mars.”

He said, plodding out to the car, and hoping that they’d reached their daily drama quota. At least he understood the car. And though it wasn’t sentient (or so he thought) he somehow believed it understood him.

Vid wiped at his face and tried to act natural now once he got his breathing under control.

“Big fucking mood,” He said to Devin. He pulled the hood of his kigarumi up over his head and continued to collect himself. Devin didn’t say anything, but he leaned into Vidar a little, and hoped it helped. And hoped Vidar couldn’t tell he was still trembling like a frightened rabbit.

Veronica should be reciting the mantras that she has known since her youth to help still her storming mind, but out in the red desert a good distance from the camp, she instead listens in on the TacNet feeds. It had been a simple concern, and Veronica had been berated for it. Rushing Jaws had called her out onto the TacNet feed for all to see, and it was as foreseeable as sunset that there would be additional fallout for it. Her synthetic hands are balled into fists, crushing sedimentary rocks into fines that she will have to get cleaned out of her outfit later. The set of her jaw is tense despite no good reason for it. This morph, despite being tailored to her preferences, feels confining. She feels small, cut off despite having full mesh access to both her team and Mars as a whole, like she cannot process what just happened.

[Well, Shambhavi, what a morning this is turning out to be,] speaks her muse, Brumaro, with a request to access her AR; Veronica takes a breath she does not need - an old habit - and then grants it.

The landscape of Mars vanishes behind wooden walls and gas lighting illuminates spaces where the sun would not reach. The sound of clockwork, soft but omnipresent, fills the ARspace, not fully harmonized but ticking along in a pace like a resting heartbeat. Veronica can smell lacquered wood, incense, and mechanical oils in the air as shapes materialize on tables ranging from simple clocks to fantastic automatons. She is still seated on Martian dust, but Brumaro’s workshop banishes the landscape surrounding her, a fantasy to give her mind respite from the dreadful morning.

Directly opposite her, hunched over an elaborate clockwork bird of paradise, is a wizened old craftsman in simple garb and with graying hair. Brumaro looks up from the automaton he is working on; Veronica didn’t have to stay with this model for her muse, but she’d had it ever since she was a little girl in the slums of New Delhi Below, and it had grown on her over time. Somehow the kindly old man act and the workshop setting always served to calm and focus her, and the crossing of italian renaissance with classical indian had a charm that never seemed to dim. Even Brumaro, managing to speak hindi with a crisp italian accent, helps her slow down from the time-is-money pace she thinks and acts at when it is called for.

What a morning indeed, Veronica responds. I don’t get them, Brumaro.
[How so?] Brumaro asks, as though the two of them are going over a technical problem.
Listen to them! Listen to them berate Mars, as if this planet isn’t our best chance!!! Surely, it isn’t perfect, but Mars represents our future. The TITANs knew it too, look at how they devastated our world, look at how hard they tried to kill it!!! This is where the future is being built!! This is where we are getting things done.
[Thus far, Mars seems to have made a poor impression on our guests,] Brumaro points out.
Yes, well, we’re on a mission for Firewall, did they expect a pleasure cruise??
[Shambhavi, please,] Brumaro says, his hands out to beckon peace; Veronica takes a breath and recites a mantra. [They most certainly did not, but that does not mean they are not allowed to have their own struggles.]
Veronica groans at that.
We need to be preparing. We need to find Emilio.
[Yes, and we will,] Brumaro says.
Not if we sulk around here in a grotto out in the tablelands while Valentina gathers her forces to hunt us down!!!!!! We humiliated her people at Lupercalia, there’s no bloody way she’s going to take that lying down!!!!!?? Her people have to be in disarray right now, we need to be capitalizing on the advantages we have while we still can!!!
[Have you considered that our uplift comrade may have had a point?] Brumaro asks.
Of course!! I understand that it’s got to be difficult dealing with-
[Shambhavi], Brumaro says, like a tutor trying to call attention to a mistake she is in the process of making.
What??
[You’re being dismissive.]
I’m trying to refocus our efforts!
[-and being reckless in so doing.]
What would you have me do, Brumaro??
[I would have you remember that our comrades are here for the same reason you are. The motivations will be different, yes, and their perspectives will be confusing and vexing, but you cannot dismiss them out of hand and claim to have the team’s interest at heart.]
The sooner we get this done, the sooner we all get to return to our lives, with one less threat to us all.
[We do not have the luxury of being able to hand-pick professional teams] Brumaro points out. [We are gathered up from among those who understand the importance of what we do, and who chose to stand up rather than remain content to pretend the threats we face don’t exist. You are used to life on Mars, and they are not; you have had a long time to perfect your craft, and it is likely some among them have not; your definition of professional may not align with their own, and theirs may make allowances where yours does not. Open your mind to their ways of thinking, and find the common ground that will help you see this through.]
Isn’t that what I was doing??
[You pushed where you should have not] Brumaro counsels. [You are a woman of relentless action, well adapted for the cities. Your comrades have distinctly different paces of life, and this mission has been a difficult test for them where for you it may be simply another day on the job - and before you speak, it is your problem in that you need to help them acclimate and slow yourself down to meet them.]
Veronica grunts, scowling.
[Liking it was never the point] Brumaro says. [This work is too important, you understood that when you volunteered.]
Yes.
[You’ve known ever since Earth.]
Yes.

Veronica thinks back to her narrow escape from indentured servitude, seemingly a lifetime ago. The station she was aboard was built to last, but the TITANs carved it up like carrion. She can remember the system alerts as their attacks burned through the mesh like an evil wildfire, how close she came to that evil touching her, how different she might be if it had succeeded…

...whether she would even be here at all.

Veronica takes a breath, tastes the air of the workshop Brumaro has conjured for her, feels it pass into simulated lungs and back out, and lets what she and Brumaro have discussed sink in, leaving it to one side for a moment and allowing her mantras to settle and center her mind for the work yet to come.

Eppie’s stomach is too empty of anything to do anything but dry heave, spitting nothing but bile and saliva onto the Martian ground. She can feel RJ’s hands smoothing her hair back from her sweating forehead as her body lurches with every gag, muttering encouragement - and responses to a conversation she can’t see happening through TacNet, likely - as they kneel together on the ground.

When her stomach stops rolling with so much force, she spits the vile taste from her mouth, sitting back on her feet as she breathes hard. Rubbing her mouth with the back of her hand, Eppie tries and fails to keep tears from welling up in her eyes, closing her eyes tight. She apologized so much already, even just in the span of being outside with RJ; every breath she could take was exhaled in a million requests for forgiveness, and she’s sure he will chastise her if she tries to apologize again. She rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands, trying to keep her anxiety from taking over.

“I’m sorry,” She says again, anyway, because anxiety gnaws at her, “This is so fucking gross and messy and you already had to deal with whatever happened when I was out and I - thanks. For being nice to me when I really don’t deserve it.”

After everything, Rushing Jaws can’t help but laugh. “You kiddin?? I appreciate the apology but doe, this is nothin - I’m a blooded battlefield medic, this ain’t even top one hundred grossest things I’ve ever had to dealt with. If anythin,’ you are a star patient next to some of the crybabies I’ve had to stitch back together.”

“Also, I’m gonna be so bold as to say ‘it don’t matter whether or not you deserve kindness - you’re squad, so you’re gettin’ it.”

She reaches back behind her, gripping his wrist where it rests on her head. She moves it with a gentle touch so she can turn to look at him, searching his face with a wary, tear-filled expression. There are a million things she wants to say. Tell him of the very real threat she and the millions of voices that make up the Star’s chorus pose to the team. Remind him that, although no one was hurt this time, there was always going to be a next time. That maybe he spoke through the lens of trusting her too deeply because she was, by his own admission, one of the few humans to engage him like she were neo-cetacean, and he might be blinded to her danger because of it. That, despite his lack of fear of Eppie and what she was capable of, she just shared minds with the rest of the crew, and feels that she knows, without a shadow of a doubt, what they thought of Eppie and what she was capable of. Anxiety eats her alive when she imagines those fearful gazes on her back for the duration of this mission.

“Okay,” She says instead, burying those thoughts deep as she slides her fingers down his wrist to grip his hand. She intertwines their fingers, breathing deeply to try and weaken the heavy ball of anxiety crushing her lungs, “Okay. Thank you, RJ.”

“I know it’s tough being around a whale like me, but try to remember to breathe, doe,” Rushing Jaws jokes, the anxiety on her face so clear that even he - notoriously bad at reading sapes - can see. He wishes he had the magic words to reassure Eppie it’s going to be okay despite the echoes of her hunting song in his mind. He wishes he could take the part of himself that knows how to deal with this shit and put it where it would help her keep it together, even as he knows the price to be paid for that kind of hardening. There is no silver bullet, no way to guarantee peace of mind to someone as badly shaken as Eppie; so he goes for the next best thing.

“Being dealt a bad hand doesn’t make you bad,” Rushing Jaws starts to explain, very much feeling like he’s laying the train tracks as he’s riding over them as he throws together an adaptation of counsel he’s had to give before: “I can’t imagine what it’s like bearin’ up under all that, but it don’t make you a monster when shit goes bad. It means you just gotta…you just find ways of dealin’ with it. Find the people who’ll help you through the shit n’ help you remember why it’s worth it in the first place. Things work different for you, and that ain’t a bad thing. It just...is. You got people out there who care about you despite the shit, Eppie, who’re gonna be there for you to help you bear through it. If a washed up ol’ killer whale like me can do it, then I know a charming, kind, and extremely pink sape like you’ll find yer pod.”

The words hit home with Eppie, but in a way different than what RJ is probably hoping for; the words strike her with a distinct sense of deja vu. She blinks once, twice, then she remembers where she knows it from - it’s a speech similar to those she had to give to neo-cetacean pups and other obligate carnivore uplift babies that felt guilty about needing to eat meat for both cultural and biological reasons. She raises an eyebrow at RJ, “I mean, yes, point, but… We can get back to me in a second… But did you just give me a remixed ‘Obligate Carnivore’ speech?”

Rushing Jaws laughs the laugh of someone who’s been fucking had, underestimating how obvious his attempt was: “I mean- yeah, but I just- listen, you can’t tell me the parallels ain’t there!! I can’t pretend to know what it’s like, but baby doe, I can see the same guilt in yer eyes like a dozen pups I’ve had to give that talk to. Yer afraid of what you are, just like those pups are, so maybe you gotta hear that it’s okay to be the way you are.”

Rushing Jaws collects himself for a second, taking a breath to banish the fluster and make sure the words are earnest: “It ain’t a one-to-one, I’ll admit it, but I feel like you need to hear the words all the same: you’re not bad for being what you are, Eppie. You’re still transhuman, and still deserve a place in the pod.”

The sentiment she knows RJ is trying to express is one Eppie feels strongly about, but it is one that makes her falter when it is placed in the perspective of herself. Because, although she looks and talks and lives like a transhuman, she isn’t really, not anymore. Her fear of what she is, is dwarfed by her fear of what she will become. The minute she becomes okay with what she is, is the minute that she loses her grip and becomes whatever it is that Seze and the Star seem so eager for her to become.

“I appreciate it, RJ, I do… But this isn’t a story of a pup not wanting to kill and eat an animal,” she sighs, her worries bubbling up to her lips and spilling out in a wave, “My guilt is that I could’ve really, truly done damage to a person. No one was hurt this time, but that’s just it - this time. There will always be a next time. And the rest of the team seems to know that. They’re afraid of me. And as soul-crushing as it is, I can’t even blame them for it. It’s all fun and games when the powers are in my hands, being used to get us into a club or out of trouble, but what about someone else’s hands? Hands that doesn’t care about you guys at all?”

“I could’ve not only hurt somebody, I could’ve killed somebody. Easily, even sleeved like this. The guilt I feel is that I have to walk back into that tent after this and look into the faces of people I know, deep down, are probably very afraid of me, and probably don’t trust me. This is not the same as them bearing bias. They have good reason to be afraid, and - fucking honestly?” She tears up, and tries to aggressively rub her tears away, “This fucking blows. I just wanted this to go well. I just wanted one fucking thing to go right.”

Rushing Jaws will be the first to admit that he’s never been great with words. He gave words a try, and he watches Eppie reason her way right back into trying to isolate herself, right back into depths that Rushing Jaws knows all too well and cannot in good conscience let Eppie sink into. He gets up from his seat, arms out, and scoops Eppie up into a hug that he’s willing to bet she badly needs. He will not let her go on thinking like this.

Not after the kindness she showed him.

“Nothin’s gone right since the TITANs nearly killed us all,” Rushing Jaws points out, his hug secure while leaving room for her to let go. “Ain’t your fault we’re up against fucken cosmic forces, and that wasn’t you who tried to hurt us. You’re doin’ more good than you know, baby doe.”

What she expects is more words, and expects the responses she’ll need to deflect them. She’s had this conversation before, over and over; people trying to reassure her in ways that ignore the issue of her Watts-McLeod and the dangers it poses to the people she loves most. Her responses, for most, are irrefutable, and impossible to counter.

He doesn’t meet her where she expects him to meet her. Instead, he uses the hand she holds to pull her from her knees and into his arms, holding her securely in his lap. He is warm, strong, grounding, and it is so utterly not a reaction she expected that her hands hover awkwardly, shocked into aimlessness. She blinks at the Martian sunrise, chin resting on his shoulder as his hands hold her tight around her back, feeling both overwhelmed but also more at peace than she’s felt since she left Miranda.

“Oh,” She says to his words, because she can’t really remember the last person that’s touched her, knowing she’s a dangerous async, and wasn’t afraid. He doesn’t feel afraid, his heartbeat steady and his grip unwavering, his mouth breathing hot air evenly against her neck. She hesitantly lets her hands come around him, waiting for the moment he would flinch away when her fingers touched skin, as if a sleight may spring up at any moment, but all he does is hold her closer when her arms rise to wind around him.

“Oh,” She repeats, voice breaking, as she realizes he’s not going to let go. Eppie shifts, to get more comfortable, to move closer into his embrace, and he only leans his cheek onto the top of her head as she tucks her head into his neck and shoulder. Biting her lower lip to keep it from quivering, she nuzzles her brow into his neck, feeling full and overwhelmed but so, so glad someone would just take a moment and hold her without fear.

Unable to help the sob rising in her throat, Eppie whispers into RJ’s neck, “I’m going to cry a lot now, is that okay?”

“Take as long as you gotta,” Rushing Jaws promises, nuzzling Eppie back and thinking back to a doe on a dock in what felt like a dream. “I’ll be here ‘long as you need me for.”

She grieves better times where her life wasn’t plagued by what she was becoming, but as much as everything hurts, she feels safety wrapped in RJ’s arms. Eppie nods, leaning into his touch as she lets go, letting herself sob into RJ’s shoulder in the light of the Martian sunrise.[/I]
 
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As far as contacts on Mars went, Devin’s list was small, and the number he was willing to approach while wanted were even smaller.

Fortunately, there was one person he could contact, even if he knew he would feel like an absolute dipshit the whole time.

th3R4tK1ng: hey. you got a minute?
tr0ubl3: oh baby boy what have you done??
th3R4tK1ng: :/ :/ :/

The next message was an invite to a shared VR space, and Devin accepted, closing his eyes so that when it was finished he’d see it all at once. It would be nice to pretend he was anywhere other than the corner of the little Martian hidey-hole, where everyone was still tense and awkward.

The VR was a Glitter Christ service on the swarm, all neon and shine, sweat and sex, and Devin pressed his hands to his eyes, willing himself not to cry.

The pit of his stomach ached with wanting to be home for real.

“Thought you might be homesick, love.”

Cathal McKay had a thick Irish brogue and an impish grin, and was wearing body glitter, tattoos, amber fairy wings, and little else. “Wanted to take you to church.”

Devin collected himself. Cathal had seen him cry before, but it was a matter of principal. Never let them see you sweat. “I appreciate it.”

“I hear you picked a fight with the Viper.”

“I tried to make a business arrangement with the Viper, and she tried to get me somewhere private. I didn’t appreciate it.”

She wanted to kill us. He didn’t think Elias would have stopped her—he might love his sister, but Valentina had effectively replaced his spine with a string of mozzarella cheese. And you could convince people to do all kinds of monstrous things in the name of love. Valentina probably could have gotten Elias swearing his love for his sister while hacking her apart with a hatchet.

“That true?”

“I don’t lie at church,” Devin said, offended.

Cathal tsked. “And now she’s goin’ after you like you’re more than an earth diver with a silver tongue.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you spooked her, lad. You ever hear of the Black Carnival?”

Devin paled, the heavy bass thump of the service going faint, like it was a ship away.

“Oh, fuck me.”

“You’re too good at what you do.” Cathal had a blunt tucked behind his ear, and it pulled it out, toying with it a moment. “Word is her people from the Lupercalia are going to be back in action in a day, and she’s called in the big favor.”

“How’d you hear about the Carnival? I don’t imagine she’s advertising calling them in.”

Cathal grinned and preened at his long red hair. “Met a boy,” he said, with enunciated vagueness.

“Are you telling me you fucked one of the Black Carnival?”

“I never kiss and tell, love,” he said, smirking as he lit the blunt.

“Liar,” Devin said. He rubbed his forehead. “This is not what I sighed up for.”

“I’d go back to the swarm, were I you,” Cathal advised. He took a drag and passed it to Devin.

“I would if I could.” He took a drag. Even in VR, Cathal didn’t skimp on weed.

“It’s like that?”

“Unfortunately.”

Cathal tsked again. Somewhere on Mars, Devin knew he was climbing over hypercorp checkpoints, smuggling things for one gang or another. But he was still making sacred space and time for a scum boy who’d gotten in over his head, and Devin owed him.

He owed Cathal for a lot of things.

“What exactly did you try and sell her?”

“...Old Earth tech,” Devin said, and Cathal crossed himself.

“Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph. You know better than that.”

“Apparently not.”

“The Queen of Wands doesn’t raise fools,” Cathal said severely, and Devin glared at him.

“Don’t drag my mom into this, come on.”

Cathal took his blunt back. “Anyone ever tell you about the too clever fox?”

“Did his mouth write a check his ass couldn’t cash?” People kept telling him variations on the same damned story.

“And he nearly got skinned for it. And if Valentina gets a hold of you she will skin you, and I won’t ride in to save you.”

“I’m not asking you to.” Cathal depended on being neutral. No one in guanxi would trust him to ferry anything again if they knew he took sides. Devin wasn’t stupid or cruel enough to ask him that.

“Your ma will be pissed at you lot.”

“It’s only me,” Devin said, and felt relieved and lonesome about it in equal measure. “Freelance thing.”

“Cut the contract and run, you feckin’ ijit. You’re not coming out of this clean no matter how it turns out. A gambler’s gotta know when to fold it, and you should’ve folded last night.”

“Mama doesn’t raise quitters,” Devin said.

“Feckin’ ijit,” Cathal repeated. “Come here to me, then.” He tucked the blunt behind his ear again and took Devin by the face with both hands, glitter scrapping between his palms and Devin’s skin as he ran his hands down to Devin’s jaw. Devin closed his eyes and inhaled.

“Joan, Our Lady of Fire and War, you tell us to destroy those who would harm us. You tell us death before dishonor. We ask you be with our holy fuckin’ fool as he does your work, doin’ unto others before they do unto him. For your guidance and your strength and your sword, we pray.”

Joan of War wasn’t an apostle Devin reached out to much, mostly because he loved her deeply and felt weird about it, like he had lost the right to petition her with his transition. But he was glad Cathal had chosen her. It felt like permission he hadn’t quite realized he needed, until it was given. “Ne me plaignez pas,” he whispered. “C'est pour cela que je suis née.”

“Amen, you absolute dumbass,” Cathal said. He kissed the top of Devin’s head before letting him go and stepping away. The glitter still clinging to his palms was red and gold, like blood and ichor. “Keep yourself in one piece, will ya?”

“I’ll do my best.”

And then the VR simulation dripped away, and he was back in the quiet redness of Mars, the thrum of a heavy baseline echoing in his chest.

“Fuck,” he said softly.

hara[to tacnet]: so…good news/bad news y’all
hara: good news is that valentina is resleeving her goons from the club and it’ll take a day
hara: bad news is she’s bringing the black carnival in for help
hara: guanxi fuckin’ cryptids with a rep for getting shit done and making it ugly
hara: we should, uh. we should wrap our shit up fast and gtfo
 
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Euphemia "Eppie" Cross
Featuring A Cameo From ValtheStarGal ValtheStarGal ​

lilpinkpunk: [i can’t tell u why, or tell u who im involved with or what ive done in the space since we last met that’s gotten me here or details on what to expect but i need u to come to elysium city on mars asap, and i need u to come to mars ready for combat. i will secure ur gear and everything u need. the most expensive favour ever. im okay, im more or less safe, but i need the extra firepower and u are the most capable person i know. please. a favour for a friend.]

Eppie tries not to scrutinize her message for too long, lest she lose her nerve. Every aspect of this message screams ‘I am in horrible danger’, which Eppie supposes is true, but it brings the possibility of spawning questions Eppie can’t answer in an unsecured server, which is often accompanied by a threat of no help until those questions have answers. Eppie sends the message anyway, unable to look at it another second without feeling like she should abandon that hope. It’s the right decision. It’s help they will sorely need. She can’t feel guilty asking for help.

Now that the request is squared away and sent to the moons of Saturn, Eppie has to fulfill her side of the bargain. Arming someone on Mars isn’t the most difficult thing, but doing so without ready access to money is far trickier. Lacking the contacts that Eppie has in abundance among the scum and within the outer systems is a pain in the ass she should have expected from this romp out into the inner systems, and since she’s on the run from her most obvious contact, Eppie has to think harder about who is the best person to contact. Most of her contacts on Mars are the scientists employed in Pathfinder City, and Eppie definitely doesn’t have enough of a reputation as a gunslinger to not raise eyebrows when asking for some pretty extravagant weaponry.

For free. In a hyper capitalist environment.

Rubbing her eyes aggressively, Eppie tries to think of anyone that might be able to offer the equipment and discretion she requires. She runs through rep profiles of friends, flings, and familiars that might fit the bill of someone she’s looking for that isn’t beyond the Gate, when a name pops into her head. A surprisingly sparse rep profile pops in front of her, but it offers her what she needs - Annie Blackwater is still on this side of the Pandora Gate.

lilpinkpunk {PM to ilaamaruq}: [BABE]

The response comes far quicker than Eppie would expect from a notoriously not personable person, and Eppie is almost vibrating with glee.

ilaamaruq: [Hey. You’re a long way from home, aupayartok.]

Inuktitut: Pink

lilpinkpunk: [oh, u know how it is. i just love capitalism.]

ilaamaruq: [Ah, yes, of course. How could I forget that you, a staunch anarchist, loved capitalism? My mistake.]

ilaamaruq: [How long are you in town for, aupayartok? Heard you’re stirring up trouble, and it would be nice to get a drink and catch up before you die.]

lilpinkpunk: [me? in trouble? impossible]

ilaamaruq: [You’re nothing BUT trouble, Eppie Cross. There are few people in this galaxy that’s as prone to trouble as you are, and there are fewer that are as pink as you are. You’ve got a pretty unmistakable description.]

lilpinkpunk: [who’s describing me? ive never gotten in trouble in my life >;3c]

ilaamaruq: [You know I’m on Guanxi, aupayartok. You’ve got the wrong sort of people looking for you. Valentina is a snake in more than just name. You have no business getting involved in that world.]

lilpinkpunk: [maybe i wanted a change in career!!!! im dangerous. im spicy]

ilaamaruq: [I’d play along with your jokes if I didn’t know how much shit you were in. I can’t protect you, and you know that. Why did you reach out?]

lilpinkpunk: [don’t worry abt me. i got backup n shit. i need… well, guns. big guns.]

It takes a few minutes for Annie to respond.

ilaamaruq: [Guns. You, Eppie Cross, need guns.]

lilpinkpunk: [you dont have to say it like that]

ilaamaruq: [Is someone besides yourself going to be using them?]

lilpinkpunk: [ye]

ilaamaruq: [Thank fucking God.]

lilpinkpunk: [don’t say it like that >:( ]

ilaamaruq: [The last expedition we did together you almost took my head off. I reserve the right.]

lilpinkpunk: [ok point but ur still rood]

ilaamaruq: [Never proclaimed to be nice. When do you need these guns?]

lilpinkpunk: [asap, n i can pay for u to transport them?]

ilaamaruq: [Got it. I can get you some close and mid-range weapons. Hope that’s fine.]

lilpinkpunk: [thats perf. thank u ily]

ilaamaruq: [Also, I was serious about those drinks - you can pick up the bill for those drinks. I wanna see you before you end up in the Viper’s cold storage.]

lilpinkpunk: [sap]

ilaamaruq: [Shut the fuck up.]

lilpinkpunk: [<3<3<3 see u soon. message me when you’re ready to meet.]

ilaamaruq: [Roger.]

She reads the messages from Devin, which are as much bad news as she expected. She doesn't have as much time as she'd like, and it gnaws at her.

jukeboxmaiden {TacNet}: [well fuck]
jukeboxmaiden: [i've reached out to two contacts about backup + extra firepower asap, so fingers crossed]

Eppie closes the messages, sighing a breath of contrasting relief and terror. She looks up, searching the tent for the resident neo-orca, then saunters over to him, “Hey, fancy a stroll into a city infested with cartel that wants to kill us?”

“There’s easier ways to ask me out on a date, you know,” Rushing Jaws jokes, getting up from the sleeping pad they’d all shared the previous night and rubbing the sleep of forty winks out of his eyes and stretches himself while prone.

She grins as she goes to her knees, crawling up beside him,“The danger is what makes the date sexy.”

Rushing Jaws has a hearty cackle at that as he rolls himself onto his stomach and does some light stretching: “Well in that case, you picked the right beaux for this ball - what’s the op?”

“Nothing actually crazy. Just within the next few days, I need to go pick up some firepower-”

She has a message back.

Her heart jumps into her throat as she throws open the conversation, then her heart soars.

Blucifer {PM to lilpinkpunk}: [Give me three days. See you on Mars.]

“- and I need to go pick up an old friend.”
 
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Veronica Jhadav and Vidar Kryssvinds
(Collaborative post with TrashRabbit TrashRabbit )​

[Thank you for booking your appointment with Nouveau Vous, Veronica! Please arrive fifteen minutes prior to your scheduled appointment, and be aware that intensive neural surgery will require twelve hours in a state of unconsciousness while our system-class technicians integrate your Multitasking augmentation into your brain’s neurology. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any further questions or concerns, and we will see you soon!]

Veronica smiles at the small victory of swinging a same-day booking at her preferred morph clinic, and dismisses the message. She is still seated in Brumaro’s workshop, a circular patch of Martian soil surrounding her where wooden floorboards simply stop, as if to leave a hole to reach the ground beneath. She has booked the appointment for later on in the day, to sort out transportation and any other preparations that need to be taken care of first.

Such as processing Devin’s news of the Black Carnival.

Mekhajakumaar: [Agreed. I have made an appointment to get a multitasking augmentation installed to assist us in what’s to come. If we’re facing the Lupercalia squad and the Black Carnival, then we will want every edge we can get. I will see what I can find out on them through my own contacts.]

Heliotrope: [I’d like to hitch a ride into town.]

Vidar had spent some Time in Devins lap and checking in on Eppie before going for a long walk in the cold, on mars in a kigarumi to clear his head. And it had down the trick. There was a lot in the air. But things needed doing. What took him the longest was setting up a false lead on Devins wearabouts. It hadn’t been a huge favor- just he was useless at how to do it himself and ended up branching out the dregs of Ducky’s friendlist he found a person- who recommended a guy, who said he should try another guy who had an @rep handle of EU currier he’d heard of once or twice in the day.

2sday: hey. You the same Manicpixielitchking?

Manicpixielitchking: Me whole life. Since 2080. What’s up kid?

2sday: I’ve got a favor that’s been routed your way by @.TeethTEETHteeth

Manicpixielitchking: Oh Judas in his jumper. Okay. sure.

Vidar explained his plan and was met with;

Manicpixielitchking: Devin. Fucking. Murphy. Sure. Fine, alright, I see what the universe is laying down in front of me own fucking eyes and what am I to be telling Mr Death who take and who to trust. You got it kid. I’ll do it.

2sday: Thanks <3

Manicpixielitchking: I know he wont but feckin tell him to go home!

2sday: Can do.

The other message was more straightforward.Mars was feeling smaller and smaller.

2sday: [Not to sound like me, but where can a guy get a sord for totally normal and reasonable purposes on this fucking planet?]

HermesPython: [I’m surprised it took you this long to ask!!]

HermesPython: [Outside of like, martial arts dojos like mine or LARP fairs, not very many options for those. This is not a civilized age we are living in.]

HermesPython: [actually]

HermesPython: [you could help me with something.]

HermesPython: [how much do you know about smartswords?]

2sday: [They make great noises when they turn on.]

HermesPython: [oh, you!]

HermesPython: [I got a set of them to play with for stuntwork, they’re really something.]

HermesPython: [imagine having the sum total of all human swords at your fingertips.]

HermesPython: [smart materials means that not only can the blade be disassembled and concealed, it can take the shape of just about any sword you can dream of.]

HermesPython: [while still cutting at the caliber you expect of a monofilament sword.]

HermesPython: [they’re not easy to come by, but i’d be happy to let you take one for a spin, see what an aficionado like you could do with one!!]

2sday: [Are you asking me to review one?]

HermesPython: [kind of?]

HermesPython: [i know you well enough to know if you have a sword then you’ll use it sooner or later]

HermesPython: [i’m choosing not to ask why because i’m curious to see how one of these things holds up in a,,, live fire exercise.]

HermesPython: [i only ever get to use them in XProduction]

2sday: [Can’t be worse than a smartfridge. Sure. I’ll take it for a spin. They get mad small and that looks useful. For, you know. Live fire exercises.I’ll owe you one.]

HermesPython: [done! Stop by HCMA anytime, it’ll be waiting for you at my desk.]

2sday:[Oh my god. You have a desk? The real fucking thing. Alright. See you there.]

His walk brought him back by Veronica, who had been stock still since she had fled the tent. He pinged her and sort of loitered, not wanting to interrupt her if she still needed some time to swallow that savage burn.

[Ready to rejoin the others, Shambhavi?]

It had to happen sooner or later.

[Remember to be patient with them-]

Yes, yes-

[-and that these are your comrades.]

Careful Brumaro, I may have to check to see if you’ve been compromised by a Barsoomian agitator.

[Perhaps it will smooth things over to invite him into the shop?]

Veronica acknowledges Vidar’s ping and - detecting that he is within the bounds of the ARspace that Brumaro’s workshop takes up - invites him to share her reskin of local reality, remaining crosslegged before the clockwork phoenix Brumaro tinkers with. He accepts and finds himself standing at the edges. It was not the sort of mind palace he expected from veronica, but then, he suspected that Veronica was not exactly the person she was always trying to pretend to be while people were paying attention.

“I don’t want to bother you, but can I sit for a bit? I have something I need to ask you.”

Veronica looks over her shoulder at Vidar, just a glance to register his reception of the space: “of course, as long as you don’t mind Martian fines in your pyjamas. How may I be of service?”

“Martian fines are the last of my concerns,” He said coming to sit at the AR Table, “I know it might be a big favor, but uh,, this set of smart armor is stuck in pyjamas. Can you,, help me.”

Veronica smiles, even laughs a little despite herself at the sight; while the kind of rights management software on any product can be irritating, so too would the possible consequences of being caught wearing something like that in Elysium City.

“Of course. DRM on these things is a pain in the neck but it will give me something to chew on. Was there anything else before I got started on that?”

“Oh my god, thank you. My muse picked it while I was asleep and I am suffering.”

Veronica can’t stop herself from laughing at that: “I can get wanting to be comfortable but surely she had to know that was your last reconfiguration?”

“Oh I’m sure,” He said fondly. “She also knew some one would be able to fix it and that I would probably need to change it multiple times more. Listen- She knows how to play me like a fiddle. My comfort is her priority and she puts up with so much, she reverts to setting traps. It’s a miracle I get anything done.”

“Ah yes, I know it well,” Veronica says, glancing at the AR avatar of kindly old Brumaro - who quickly looks back to the gears he was working on. “I’ll just need administrator access to your PAN in order to get to the right bits of code and see what all needs rejiggering to get you a few more changes, whenever you’re ready to provide them.”

Penny that made sense to you right?

[Got it. Don’t worry boss. I told you she could fix it.] She told him and then sent the codes off to Brumaro.

[Here you are,] Brumaro says, a stylized AR window opening like the unfurling of Vincian schematics on parchment, codelines spilling down its page faster than the eye can track. Veronica loads up her armory of exploits and boots up her software analysis apps, the trusty tools of an ace hacker, and sets the latter to work on scanning the code faster than she can, learning about the structure of the DRM woven into the suit in order to best find a way to subvert it. Within moments, analysis has combed the complexity of code into a comprehensible codex, and Veronica studies that to begin planning her attack.

“Damn,” Veronica blurts, somewhere between impressed and incredulous, “all that for armored clothing?”

[So it would seem,] Brumaro says, stopping his work to examine the long scroll of code on parchment.

Seems excessive, don’t you think??

[You’re not going to tell me that a little copyright protection is going to dissuade you, are you??]

Of course not - I’ll just need to take my time with this.

“I would expect this sort of protection on blueprints for bloody plasma rifles,” Veronica says aloud for Vidar. “I hope you don’t need to be anywhere soon, this is going to take some time to crack.”

“Take your time,” He says. He wouldn’t have known the difference for what was a reasonable time to get the job done if she hadn’t said anything.

“I suppose it’s a good thing to have sturdy code for your armor clothing,” Veronica muses. “I do like a challenge.”

[Roaring awfully loudly, are we?]

Hush, you.

Brumaro complies, but does allow himself a soft laugh.

“So,” Veronica says, this time directed at Vidar, “you seem to like your knives - tell me about the most eccentric move you’ve ever seen someone pull.”

That catches him off guard, and pulls him right out of wherever his mind had wandered too.

“Oh. Wel,” he half smiled, “I mean...” on a technical level he could think of a lot of things, Five pulling a torneada and decapitating two in one stroke, Hex pulling some literal anime bullshit. But he didn’t think Veronica was looking for technicals. “One time we were following these Triade folks in a hummer- it doesn’t matter why, and we got four of us on two bikes right. And pulled the bikes up in front and slammed the breaks. Swords out. Split the thing horizontal.”

“You what?” Veronica demands, utterly incredulous as she tries to work out how that would even bloody happen to the point of stopping her work. “Was the car made of cheesecloth?? I expected some kind of like, crazy wallrunning knife fight - what kind of swords were you using??”

“Monofiliments. 2043. The structural integrity of everyday things wasn’t ready for it yet. If you ever see me take a swing at a wall. Please don’t laugh. It used to work.”

“Lord of hosts, what a time that must have been,” Veronica says, doing her best to suppress laughter. Her attention returns to the puzzle that is the code for a moment, making but feeble progress against what someone put way too much work in for what Veronica imagined they were paid for. In the way that unbidden thoughts do, the number 2043 echoes in her mind, a small detail that - much like the commands she has to unravel - has so much wrapped up within it.

“What was the world like back in 2043?”

“Man. I could say whatever I wanted and that’s just way to much power,” He says with a laugh, “Its easier to say by what we didn’t have. There was no unified @ rep yet. There was no hypercorps- not as they are now. VR was a whole ass head set that could put your neck out and people were like junkies for it. Prosthetics were functionable but bad. There was no fabbers. Still had paper money for a little while more. I don’t know. A little slower.” he had notable switched from his usual upbeat mcelroy english to norwegian when speaking about the past.

“And you had swords that could cut through whatever fabrics they made cars from back then,” Veronica jokes.

“Reinforced steel- Yeah. Okay we had fabbers, they were not in public use and we called it 3d printing. So we were printing these swords, and Oslo, was sort of a weird international limbo, cause of bullshit that doesn’t matter anymore. So Knives and dueling and was legal so it was just, goblin hours all the time.”

“And you participated in gang wars against Triads in Oslo? I’m only broadly familiar with the history, I’m afraid - what state of affairs was the city in that you were slicing up Triad prowlers in 2043?”

“Well Brexit had finally gone through and norway had joined the EU and the economy was tanking and they hadn't quiet sold Oslo off to Disney yet. But Oslo was also a designated climate change refugee zone so it was more of a mash up of people than the rest of the country- hey what do you care about this shit anyway?”

“Curious,” Veronica answers, listening as she studies. “I never knew a world before the oceans rose, before the world was divided into the people inside the walled gardens and the people outside of them. Back in New Delhi was raining - always raining an acid rain harsh enough to eat through your clothes over enough time - I had a phase as a kid where I didn’t even believe the sun existed. I guess- I wondered if Earth was ever not horrid.”

“I’m sorry we ruined everything,” he says quietly.

“I don’t know that it ever wasn’t horrid,” Veronica says, pretending not to have heard that. “I only know that some people refer to the BF-80s as a golden age, back when things were only ’getting’ bad. Sounds like they always were though, weren’t they?”

Vidar says nothing. Wanting to take his own turn to pretend not to hear that but not bieng able to sit with it. And while the fall had been its own unspeakable climax of a crisis that had started years before the guilt of watching it all happen was heavy. He had tried. Buying in to unified @ rep had seemed so important at the time, and it had been, but it hadn’t really done much to save the idea of Earth. And he still wasn’t sure if the idea of Earth was important. It had all been bad all the whole time.

“People always want to glorify the past,, but,,,Well to quote a wise man; There’s some good in this world Mr. Frodo and worth fighting for. And that’s been true in the all the years I’ve known. No exceptions.”

“True enough,” Veronica says, wanting to believe it. “That is why we’re both in this like of work, after all.”

“Just so,” He said with less feeling because mars had put him in mood. And he was just a guy from oslo. And Just a firewall asset. “Speaking of the world ending; I,, found out my daughters alive.” He half blurted out. Because when judging the goodness of the world and the qualities of the past; Vera was at the forefront of his mind. If there was one completely good thing he’d ever done it was her. She also embodied everything that destroyed earth in such a profound way that he never wanted to unpack it.

“Oh! That’s good!!” Veronica says, the good news registering with her before she realizes that something is off with the way he said it: “Em, that is a good thing, isn’t it?”

“She’s dating Grace Calihan,” He said, unsubtle clenching a fist. Though in all honestly that was the least of his concerns but the straw that broke the camels back.

“Oh right, Vera Kryssvinds-” Veronica says offhandedly like it’s some bit of trivia before the connection hits her like a maglev freight train; it would have been a violent spit take had she been drinking something.

“Wait,” Veronica says, more for her own benefit, her train of thought blasted off the tracks and needing a minute to recover: “Okay, alright, on top of being bloody ancient, you mean to tell me that one of the leading figures in the Consortium’s Ministry assembly is your daughter?? Okay- I’m- lord of hosts, I’m sorry but how…?”

“Oh I don’t know Veronica, The baby making kits used to come with instructions-” He sighed, and then more seriously, “I have eight years of lack, you tell me. She used to be a legal consultant for nonprofits doing contracts with hypercorps and, and, fundraising and advancements- or whatever.”

“Alright, I’m sorry, I deserve that-” Veronica responds, “It’s only- you’re from the outer system, aren’t you? Vera Kryssvinds is one of the top judiciary officials in the Planetary Consortium, you could have a ticket to an executive suite on Progress with a connection like that. It’s only…”

Veronica lets the words trail off, having absolutely no idea what to make of Vidar being the father of one half of one of Mars’ most notorious power couples-

-and steers herself hard away from thinking about the fact that Devin is the fork of the other half of that couple. Further complicating all of this is Veronica’s own experiences with ‘family’ in Delhi Below have lead to her having a tenuous grasp of the very concept, and what she does know does not lend itself to uplifting possibilities for what could have happened.

“Were you two...particularly close?”

He nods, “I mean, It gets complicated when your baby girl is only 30 years younger than you but yeah. Magni was her favorite parent though, thick as thieves,” He said with a laugh. He gives Veronica a quickly disappearing but pensive look before asking for her to confirm reality; “I don’t know how how I ended up in the outer system Veronica. None. This is wild right? Striaght fucking Texas, yeah?”

Brumaro? What does he mean by ‘Texas?’

[It was an old US state, used here as an expression to mean ‘beyond belief.’]

“Yes, I’d say this qualifies,” Veronica answers. She has had a lot of time to hone her bullshit filters, and she’s had to cut off more than one liar at a bar looking to impress her, but as far as she can tell, Vidar is either telling the truth or is the best liar on Mars. Eight years of lack, ending up in the outer system for unknown reasons, a daughter in a position of incredible power…

Veronica swerves around the obvious and very poor taste question of ‘Where Were You When We Fell’ to instead ask: “Where did you wake up, if you don’t mind my asking?”

He looks hesitant, while it was far less taboo than her initial question it was still close to the mark, “I think it was simulated. I was,, extremely feral for a while. Then Locus. I’ve been working for the office the whole time.”

The possibilities as to what might have happened in the eight years Vidar can’t remember, or what might have lead to his ending up on Locus or in the employ of Firewall are dizzying enough that Veronica has to quickly put them aside to avert a vertigo spell she shouldn’t even be physically capable of having - and if she can’t begin to guess at them, it is hardly fair to expect Vidar to know, either.

“I only hope someone threw you a belated ‘We Fucking Survived’ party at the very least,” Veronica jokes, in a bid to lift the mood.

“They did. But I’m dead.” He says, “So I declined.”

Whatever Veronica was about to say next deserts her in a moment of supreme cognitive dissonance; “but, you’re...um, you’re standing right here? and talking with me? and making witty comments at me? three things dead people don’t tend to do?”

The ping from Penny was polite and informative about her human’s coutard’s syndrome and did not include any threats involving monster trucks as she besearched Veronica not to argue with him. On a good day he could admit he existed. That his morph was physically alive. But he had recently ingested the song of the star and looked to deep at his inner working and he was so very very dead. He was visibly doing a breathing exercise. Today had already been stressful enough.

“Sorry,” he says and then moves the conversation though his embarrassment is still obvious, “I used to be a private detective. You’d think I’d have asked more questions. But at this point. Things are as the office wants it and what am I to do about it? Thank you for listening- I,,” He trails off, that sentence destined to never becoming a full thought.

“No no, it’s no problem,” Veronica tries to console, “it’s been a hard ten years for all of us, regardless of how present we’ve been. I could a tale unfurl at how dire things looked when I thought I had escaped Earth, only for it all to come to Mars…”

“I haven’t walked your road, but I can appreciate how hard it’s been,” Veronica says. “Making all the adjustments, even with the immediate danger passed, it’s...difficult.”

“Goblins make do. When people talk about the first few years after, I can’t even fucking imagine it. It doesn’t feel fair to complain. I came to ask you to fix my pjs and now shits heavy. ”

“Ah yes, I’ll get back to that,” Veronica starts to say, before a thought strikes her; “at the risk of this continuing to be heavy, do you...want to know more about Vera?”

“If you know more than Tabloids and the News I’d love to hear it,” He said with out hesitation.

“Well, it’s something that you mentioned she used to do legal consultancy, because she earned a position within the assembly about five years ago. Long story short, the assembly is the judicial arm of the Consortium ministry, handling high-level legal affairs and criminal cases. It’s rare that a transhuman judge needs to oversee a judgement themselves, but Vera has been involved in several cases within the past few years. The thing is, no one really knows how she got her position? It was a chaotic time during the formation of the Consortium, goodness knows, but the majority of executives and leaders in the congress and the ministry were well established figures in the hypercorp world before the Fall, and while what I know of Vera tells me she’s bloody determined enough to have earned her position, it’s simply that the Ministry is…selective in who gets a seat in the assembly. It’s mostly legal AIs and a handful of transhuman legal authorities, of which Vera now counts herself.”

“From what I understand, Vera and Grace Callahan are a relatively...recent phenomenon, and there are already cries of ‘conflict of interest’ going up from members of the Ministry, but there’s nothing that’s stuck so far. One persistent rumor is that Vera’s trying to make friends with Oversight by way of Grace, and that’s harder to play off as tabloid speculation given how frequently Grace is seen to deal with both of them, but Vera is also very good at being where Secretary Noorne isn’t, so her detractors haven’t really been able to get her with anything in that vein. Some have also tried to accuse her of insider trading given how much money she has relative to her position, but her books always come back spotless. It’s tough to explain if you’re not familiar with Consortium politics, but essentially Vera came from nowhere and knew who to be friends with when the time came to move to Mars and she’s been a controversial figure ever since she took her seat.”

“It isn’t uncommon for people in her stratum to keep a low public profile, but Vera isn’t seen planetside much; a lot of her work keeps her on Progress up in orbit - effectively the administrative center for the entire Consortium, Deimos remade into a capital habitat. Funnily enough, this recent affair with Grace is as much as Vera’s been seen to have a public face, and her detractors haven’t hesitated to point out how the Callahans’ rising star has coincided with the two of them becoming an item. Even as it’s all about who you know, in a lot of ways she's dancing on a knife’s edge with her open associations. From what I know of her, though, she knows exactly what she’s doing and she can wield statutes and laws like you wield a blade...which I guess does put some things into perspective.”

Vidar was quiet for a long moment. Vera had always been viciously ambitious just like Five, but the things and metrics Vera typically used were not wealth or status- or not wholly that. They had raised her with basic empathy skills and while she succeeded in the capitalist markets and certainly wasn’t an anarchist like her parents, she had been in her own way something of an idealist. So the power grab stuck with him. Either she had had an alarming change in motivations or she was after something. Something she needed all that money for- not just because she could. If it was just because she could, she’d be living a different lifestyle. But Vera letting loose was a rare thing.

He sighed, “Interesting. I don’t know what it is- but she wants something. She always had a vicious streak, but hmmm This is a lot. Even for her. Like. Everything on the line. Not her style- unless when it is. This is fixing the Mixed Kendo Martial arts world championships level of bullshit. She can move mountains when she needs to, but she’s kinda a grey hound. She’d rather stay home and play dating sims while drunk. Yfm? Like. Hmmm. She had a heavy attention based nervous system even in the 00’s. She either was in it or over it... She knows how to make things happen, it’s just not like her to go all cylinders without a tangible goal.”

“Should we be happy or concerned about that?”

“Concerned,” with an gravitas.

“Understood,” Veronica responds. “I’ll have to talk to my contacts on Progress, maybe watch her a little more closely. In the meantime though, I ought to get back to cracking the DRM on your, em, armored pyjamas. Was there anything else?”

“No. Thank you. I needed that,,,” He paused for a moment and then with a half smiled added, “I should go,” quoting a well used phrased from npcs in UC9.

“Maybe see about getting a nap in while you’re at it? Everyone seems to have had a rough sleep and I get the feeling that things are going to move fast once we get back to it.”

He nods, she’s not wrong “I need swing by HCMA before the shit hits the fan, you think that’s doable?”

“Ought to be! My appointment at Nouveau Vous is later on in the day so we can make stops for ‘office supplies’ along the way.”

“Its a sword,” He whispered conspiratorial just to try and make her laugh. He slapped his palms to his knees in a final sort of way and sprang up as only a tactical cat girl could and said, “Wake me up when you go, then. Gona make the PJ’s count while they last. You’re right; always depression nap while you can.” And with that he was off, the back of his Kigarumi stained red from where he’d sat on the martian fines.

At the whisper, the seemingly impossible character of Vidar Kryssvinds, and indeed the whole spectacle of his departure, Veronica laughs as she returns her attention to the challenge Vidar has so generously gifted her with.
 
Euphemia "Eppie" Cross​

By the splitting of the crowd, there is no mistake that Annie has showed. Eppie stands from her seat outside the pub with a smile as the busy sidewalk splits to allow the tall woman passage through the masses, dark eyes finding Eppie easily. Annie carries a large, heavy duffel bag over her shoulder, and by the metallic clinking coming from inside, it's the guns she requested for Deep Blue. Eppie smiles even more broadly, approaching Annie when the woman’s free arm opens.

Stepping into her embrace, Eppie feels something press almost painfully against her waist. After a pause, Eppie quips, “Is that a gun or are you just happy to see me?”

“It’s a gun,” Annie says into Eppie’s hair, the pink woman feeling lips press against the crown of her head.

“Not the strap I want from you, babe.”

“Gross.”

“I know,” Eppie parts from the hug, looking up at the woman, “I missed you.”

Annie’s brows raise and her eyes widen for a second - on anyone else, Eppie would see the expression as surprise or shock, but for the Inuit Annie, it reads as the nonverbal ‘yes’, or, in this case, a ‘me too’ that Annie would never say aloud. Annie flags a waiter for a drink as Eppie settles back into her seat. Eppie sips her rosé as Annie sets her heavy cargo on the ground and settles into the chair opposite to Eppie.

Eppie grins, leaning in, darting her eyes downward on Annie so she knows what Eppie is referring to, “So, are you expecting trouble from me?”

Annie huffs a laugh, thanking the waiter as he hands her the bottle she ordered, “Not from you. You really don’t know how much shit you’ve stirred, do you?”
“You seem to know a lot for someone that’s trying to stay within the bounds of the law.”

“Even people with clean records have heard about Lupercalia. Shoot outs like that happen in the slums - Lupercalia is upper echelon, aupayartok. Trouble like that doesn’t follow the rich to those parts.”

“A little trouble never hurt anybody,” Eppie quips with a wink and smile.

“Eppie.”

The seriousness of Annie’s voice draws Eppie’s eyes to her face, which is pulled into a severe scowl, as if Annie was physically in pain, “I physically can’t express to you how much danger you’re in. The B-Black…” Annie shakes her head hard, coughing hard into her sleeve, “Jack - T-They’re-”

Eppie pulls forward in concern, the stuttering curling ice cold fear in her for Annie, reaching out to take Annie’s hand, and finds the unflappable Annie trembling and sweating. “Annie-”

Annie holds up a hand, taking a long drink from her bottle before she gulps in hard breaths, like she had just done a hard sprint. The response from a woman she’s never seen waver, even through the horrors they’ve encountered through the gate, through the struggles Annie saw on Earth even before the Fall is so jarring that Eppie is left at a loss to even try and read Annie’s response. She can’t even fathom the fear in Annie’s expression, having never seen it before on her face. But what strikes fear in her most, after seconds tick by, is that she remembers where she’s seen it before.

The Uplift Rehab Center Eppie worked with, back when she was just another refugee from the Fall, served the improperly uplifted, the traumatized, and the survivors of the Fall. But the highest demographic they serve among the community were Fall veterans, especially those that served mercenary companies that never got held to the law. Gaps in memory, extreme reactions of anxiety and disgust when attempting to share information a human had decided was not theirs to keep, carving it right out of their minds and leaving avid aversion in it’s place.

Eppie squeezes Annie’s shaking hand as her heart crawls up her throat, “Annie, did you work for the Black Carnival?”

The fear in Annie’s eyes is answer enough, but even so, Eppie is frozen as Annie slowly nods.

Eppie has a thousand follow-up questions that she wants to ask, but her brain is nothing but static. Annie grits out, through her teeth, “They’re crazy. If they’re - if they - you won’t-”

“It’s okay,” Eppie murmurs, covering Annie’s hand with her own, “I’m going to be okay.”

Annie hardly looks convinced, but she clutches Eppie’s hand like a lifeline nonetheless. “You better. You’ll break a lot of hearts if you don’t.”

Eppie smiles, “I promise.”


It takes chugging the rest of her drink for Annie to settle back into her usual nonchalance, but after that it’s nice to be able to catch up with an old friend - swapping stories of both the horrors and joys of working beyond the Gate, and sharing some adventures Eppie has had with the live specimens of aliens kept on Pandora, particularly Jalapeno and the spicy pepper murder gang.

Checking her inserts for the time in a small break in the conversation, Eppie swears, realizing she is past when she and RJ were supposed to rendez-vous. “Shit, I’m fuckin’ late-”

“You’re still the same, then,” Annie comments with a smirk.

“Oh, shut up,” Eppie grumbles, standing and gathering her things, “It was really good to catch up with you, Annie. Try to come out to Pandora sometime? Its your turn since I came here.”

Annie rises, closing the distance to press a kiss to Eppie’s forehead, “I don’t think that’s how that works, aupayartok.”

Eppie leans into the contact, pleased, “Mmmm, well it is because I said so. And I’m always…”

She trails up as she looks up at Annie, who is looking off behind Eppie with perfect stillness, like a human confronted by a venomous snake. Eppie looks behind her, following Annie’s eyeline, and feels her blood run cold and as she makes eye contact with a black-haired woman wearing sunglasses, sitting at a bench across the street with a smile and cigarette, two other women - one very pale and freckled, the other dark-skinned - on either side. She takes a pull from her cigarette as the dark-skinned woman at her side leans into her ear to whisper something, and grins broadly at the secret she hears.

“Eppie,” Annie hisses, pulling Eppie close to her.

Eppie can’t even respond, so fixated on the woman seated at the bench that she is frozen in place, fear freezing her from the inside out. The woman lifts her sunglasses from her eyes, and Eppie finds piercing blue eyes staring at her - into her. Old training from her father makes her focus on the details she sees - blue eyes, black hair, pale skin, tattoo of a heart under the right eye -

The woman’s grin grows impossibly broad, diamond fangs glinting in the light, as she raises a hand to wave.

The spell breaks as Annie yanks Eppie by the arm, pulling her fast from the patio of the restaurant and into the crowds of the street. Eppie breathes hard, barely able to make sense of the rush of her surroundings. Annie thrusts something into her hands, and Eppie unravels the bundle with dream-like dissociation.

“Put it on,” Annie commands, and Eppie realizes it’s Annie’s jacket, and in the next moment, Annie has shoved her ball cap on Eppie’s head, “You’re too recognizable.”

Eppie puts the garments on with clinical detachment, feeling the urge to cry, crushing terror pulling her breath from her lungs, They watched us the whole time. They could’ve killed us at any second-

“R-RJ,” Eppie stutters.

“Is that who your meeting?”

“Y-”

“Are they any good with a gun?”

“Y-Yes.”

“Good, they’ll need it. Send me the address on the mesh.”

Eppie does, but makes the mistake of looking behind her, and, after a few movements of the crowd, spots the dark-skinned woman and swears she can see the hulking, freckled woman behind -

“Don’t look back,” Annie snaps, and Eppie’s head jerks forward as Annie’s arm wraps around her shoulders, pulling her close and lowering her head, “They’ll see your skin.”

Eppie pushes her head into Annie’s side, trying to breathe evenly as Annie tries to navigate them from the eyes of the Carnival that have found them. Annie pulls her into an alleyway by the hand - the minute they’re off the street, Annie breaks into a sprint, dragging Eppie by her wrist. Eppie hears their pursuers swear behind them, and pushes harder, feet pounding the ground.

At the exit of the alley, Annie almost rips Eppie’s arm off as she ducks into a luggage store. Annie throws the duffel bag onto the ground, tearing the jacket and the hat off of Eppie’s body. She yanks a similar duffel bag off the shelf and shoves smaller bags inside it to resemble the bag with Eppie’s cargo, “Take the fucking duffel bag-”

“Annie-” Eppie starts.

“We won’t lose them together, and they’re not after me,” Annie looks away from Eppie to the clerk. Annie pulls her gun from her waistband, aiming it at the clerk, “Give me your sweater.”

The clerk obeys with no struggle, taking it off and tossing it to Annie, who throws it at Eppie. Annie gestures for the clerk to approach, who rounds the counter in tears, flinching as Annie puts the leather jacket in their hands and the baseball cap on their head, “Put it on,” Annie commands. When the girl does nothing, Annie growls, “Put on the fucking jacket.”

The girl complies with a sob, and Annie picks up the duffel and throws it over her shoulder, pressing the barrel of the gun against the girl’s side.

“Annie, wait-”

“They’re not after her, they’re after you. Go out the back door, I’ll go through the side and distract them. Go and don’t look back. Go! Now!”

Eppie picks up the duffel bag, lifting it over her shoulder with a grunt from the immense weight, and runs as fast as she can to the back door, and doesn’t look back.
 
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Veronica had come through with jailbroken smart armored clothing and Vidar managed, without any prompting to look like an average martian cat girl in a hoody and industrial style romper and boots.. And on the tram up to Palazzo he had ironically not been the only one in the car and had received a Crep friend invite. Wich he declined, making the other member of the subculture he was dipping into pout on the far side of the car the rest of the ride.

Veronica, for her own part, breathes a sigh of relief to have been able to arrange for some last-minute additions to her appointment at Nouveau Vous, even at the cost of some rep; knowing how dangerous could get, Veronica decided the addition of some armor, a neurachem core, and enhanced vision to her morph would be worth a little in the way of some minor burns to her rep score. She has Brumaro make a note to take Sergeant Ncusi out for another nice dinner some time, then returns to the moment - glancing over to Vidar to see how he is faring.

Mekhajakumaar {PM to Heliotrope}: [You know, that’s not a bad look for you.]

Heliotrope: [Thanks >:3c]

Mekhajakumaar: [I’ve seen that look a lot in Noctis, it’s popular with infopunks. Some even go for the tail too, use the freerunning courses in the city to get around.]

Penny had presented him with three fashion options before they left and she had not provided context, and he had gone in for the one that reminded him the most of home, because that’s where his brain was.

Heliotrope; [Do infopunks suck?]

He could search it himself, but the art of conversation was not his forte so might as well ask to fill the silence.

Mekhajakumaar: [Depends on who you ask. It’s a lot of young people getting into trouble, for the most part, messing with city infrastructure and hacking away at anything they can establish a connection to.]

Heliotrope: [Oh. TechGoblins. Got it.]

Veronica makes a soft sound like a laugh.

Mekhajakumaar: [Some of them are a pain in the neck, some of them are doing some very interesting things as both black hats and white hats, and most end up being accused of working with barsoomian agitators sooner or later. Mostly, they’re just kids, messing about and testing boundaries.]

Heliotrope: [That’s what Kids do best.]


You tricked me into a youth movement
Penny; [You picked this.]

It’s. Fine. I guess.


A chime from speakers throughout the tram sounds, accompanied by AR graphics that guide the eye to the approaching Hyblaeus City station, announcing the tram’s arrival. Glittering office buildings envelop the view, sleek and with AR graphics that hint at the media production happening in and around them, and the opulent spires of Palazzo - the jewel in the crown of Elysium - rise above them in the distance. The tram glides into the station with a graceful stop, its doors opening out into the entertainment capital of the entire inner system.


“This is us,” he says as people start to jostle off and on, and they make their way onto the street. He wonders how far off they are from the good retro 711 he’d gotten his juul at.

“Do you want to see the studio or do we divide and conquer?”

“Let’s go see the studio!” Veronica answers, her arm out for Vidar to take. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and be able to watch a sparring match.

“Oh, probably we can, you can see into the classrooms- fancystuffs. My studio was just a converted warehouse with a ball pit. But like. Mars is Mars I guess.” He says making a more is more joke at mars expense.

“They’ve got a lot of people to impress,” Veronica points out as they set out on the walk for HCMA; “everyone between EPM officers and Experia executives wants to see the training in action. They’ve nailed self-promotion even as they’ve carved out their niche.”

“ Good for them I guess. We had to covered up our front windows cause we had so many gawkers ,” He said with a laugh, Mostly wanting to be contrary to Veronicas attempts to explain martian hierarchy. “That was after the tournament though.”

“Right - didn’t you say something about fixing that tournament?” Veronica asks, in a tone begging an explanation.

“Ooooh yeeeeeah,” He says like he’s proud, it was long story and he wasn’t telling it.

“Oh fine, keep your secrets,” Veronica says in half-joking disappointment. “Still - you didn’t want people seeing your studio? I would have to think you had an excellent opportunity to get a lot of new students.”

“You ever actually been in the public eye? Veronica. It sucks. Five about lost zer mind, ze was always an extremely private person and then on top asking zer to throw the championship we got fucking paparatzi hanging around the studio- and like I could not find a legal loop hole to kill them. Grinds my gears just thinking about it and it was like 30 years ago.”

“You’re telling me in a world where fame often meant access to resources in a time of great scarcity, you got famous for making the championships...and hated it?”

“Yes!” he said, “We already had cortical stacks. That’s why we fixed the tournaments. What else could we need? Its was a pile of stress and coat-tailers. And people bothering us.”

Veronica has to consciously steer herself around the phrasing ‘you could have seized the chance…’ and instead puts it like this: “Were it me, I would have been glad for the opportunity to get out of Delhi Below. I don’t know how similar your Oslo was to my New Delhi, but I can absolutely say the latter was a trap for anyone who couldn’t find their way offworld - the prestige of making a championship would have beaten the hell out of indentured servitude.”

He paused. Veronicas anger that he hadn’t taken more than he needed because she a less well off kid in a bad place would have appreciated the same break threw him.

“Veronica, I was 70. I had two businesses and a cortical stack. We didn’t want it. We didn’t need it. We were already feeding most of our profits into Circle A to buy out people's contracts from Disney. So you can throw out your weird unthankful narative out, please. J bloc was my home. And the only way it was gonna get better, is if people started giving back to it.I’ve heard about Dehli. And I lived at the bottom of oslo my whole life. It sucks. I’m glad you made it out. But don’t be mad at me cause I didn’t take more than I needed- it hurts my brain.”

“Not mad - merely perplexed,” Veronica answers, in a ‘nothing meant by it’ tone of voice; she hadn’t anticipated the exasperated reaction from Vidar, and plays her own perspective off as cool and detached. Would it not have made since to obtain wealth and prestige to give more back to J bloc? Veronica doesn’t ask, knowing better than to push it with anarchists she needs to work with later. “You’re a fascinating person with a fascinating life.”

He squinted at her cause he really for the life of him could not tell if it was a back handed compliment or not, “You can’t serve the goblin king and sell out,” He said as if that might help her grasp his situation. He was glad the doors to the studio were looming up on them. Veronica confused him- she felt so much like some one who should be his people and yet at every turn.

Veronica smiles at the metaphor, the response coming to her in an instant: “Why serve an unfit king when you can take his throne?”

Vidar laughed, “Gurl. Pls. We were all of us the Goblin King.”

Veronica gives him a bemused smirk before seeing the look on his face and laughing, giving his arm a playful squeeze as they arrive at the entrance of Hyblaeus City Martial Arts. The holography above the doorway displays what appears to be a scene of total chaos - a free-for-all where all the combatants fight with skill, ferocity, and awareness that a one-on-one can become a two- or three-on-one at any second. Projected beneath the footage is [FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHY] and the name of the instructors in charge of the effort - including one J.D. “Quicksilver” Olsen.

“I’m going to sue,” He says pointing at the Quicksilver moniker as they enter.

The interior of HCMA has been changed up to open the entire training area into one large room, rather than a number of smaller ones, with a long set of bleacher-like seating set up for dozens of spectators watching - and no doubt streaming to audiences within and beyond Elysium. Sure enough, there are dozens of fighters clad in second skin or other outfits suitable for the extreme physical activity of stunt fighting. Fights flow and blend into each other with the grace of a tightly choreographed and exceptionally violent ballet. Overseeing it all, the choreographers wear bright and colorful uniforms emblazoned with the HCMA logo - including Jenni, clad in silver and red and watching with the appearance of a general inspecting troops. By chance, she glances the way of Vidar and Veronica, her smile gone as quick as it appears beneath a veil of professionalism.

HermesPython {PM to 2sday}: [Hi!! Big day for us here, i’ll step out of i can - it’s on my desk, just take the left hall to the back, my office is the second one on the left!]

2sday{Pm}: Gods, this is- so many people...Wow. AND thanks! You need anything while in the neighborhood?]

HermesPython: [actually, if you could get a smoothie for me, i’d consider it a favor - it’s a really big day and i need something fruity and cold.]

2sday{Pm}: [I got you.]

Vidar followed her instructions, heading into the back through the left hall and coming to the office indicated and knocked before opening the door- not sure if maybe she shared it.

Heliotrope;{PM to Veronica} [Whens your appointment? I gotta grab Jenni a Smoothie after this, do you want one?]

Mekhajakumaar: [I’ve got a couple of hours before we need to be heading up to the north side - and yes, if you’re offering!]

Jenni’s office is indeed a shared one - but there is no one inside. It is a utilitarian space, for the most part, with simple desks and lockers for storage, given color and character only by the AR posters of various XP productions and award cases given museum-quality lighting. Jenni has a desk that is kept neat and mostly free of any kind of debris, save for a few plastic dinosaurs, an ecto-

-and what looks like the hilt of a sword, big enough to be comfortably gripped with two hands. It takes him a moment to Identify the smart sword as sword shaped and picks it up. It takes another Moment for Penny to interface the device into his systems.

Before he could even tell the sword what kind of blade he wanted from it a small green sprite the shape of an orb spooled out and around him in the AR.

Thrice:[Hello! Welcome to the beautiful and dangerous world fencing. You’ve chosen your new hobby wisely and I’m here to make you work.]

I- Appreciate the enthusia-

Thrice:[Or maybe your in it for self defense. Either way I think I’ve got the blade for you! With intuitive games-]

Actually-

Thrice: [immersive battle tactic simulations, and utilitarian AR tools-]

“Hhhhhhhh”

Thrice:[ we can and will make a warrior out of you. Lets get started with a personality test to see what kind of blade-]

I um- Uh,,,, my kill count was 69 when I stopped counting.

Thrice: [What?]

Thrice:[With a blade?]

Yes. Please. I have 80 years of experience please stop explaining at me.

Thrice: [ You-you got it boss!]

Thrice: [Should I change settings to live fire?]

Yes please.

Thrice: [ You’ll be the first for that!]

Okay. Do that. Show me your blade options.

Thrice: [I can create a blade to suite any need.]

Okay, I need a hand and half Kriegsmesser, oxidized chrome, Gimme the t guard.

Thrice: Like a Knetch?

Vidar breathed out through his nose. This was the smart fridge fiasco all over again! He shook the sword handle silently.

No like a NKF TACTICAL LONG KNIFE.

Thrice: OH! WORM! I got that! Loading preset quicksilver. For legal reasons I have to tell you not to look directly into the blade handle.

He squeked and stopped looking angry down at the hilt and held it out as it made the tell tale soda can crack of the nanonites forming up. It did take one inhale longer than he was have liked for a sword to be unsheathed but- that extra breath was knocked out of him fast. This was his sword. All that was missing was the

Hey, thrice, how long has this been a preset for you?

Thrice:It was entered by HCMA employees several months ago.

Jenni’s a nerd. Show me your AR tools. Turn the sharps offs plase.

The blade collapsed and disintegrated with the same carbonated beverage noise.

I’m not used to being small can you show me my blood circle? What about rearguard proximity alerts? Can you record and overlay routines in real space? Can you be hacked?

Thrice: YES! Yes.Yes. Also yes v.v

Okay. We’re gonna set up some other blade presets-

He finally tucked the inert smart sword in his jacket and rearranged Jenni’s dinosaurs before heading back out to find Veronica watching the chaos. Instead of playing candy crush he was setting blade presets with alarming speed.

“Magnificent, isn’t it?” Veronica asks, looking over to Vidar as he joins her.

Mekhajakumaar: [Welcome back, king arthur - how is excalibur?]

Heliotrope: [Good. Jenni already had my blade in the library. So maybe I won't sue her for identity theft.] He turns and smiles at her; “It’s very impressive. I’m gonna run and get a Jenni a smoothie if you wanna stay and watch for a minute more?”

“Sure! They cast some good-looking people for these roles - I don’t mind watching them for a little while,” Veronica answers with a wry grin.

He taps his head and then points at her like he is impressed and heads out to find the closest smoothie provider. Which was either going to require a drone or would be unnervingly nearby. It was Mars and he expected no middle sliders.

Penny? She didn’t respond verbally but the arrarow on the ground led him swiftly to a bougie health drink joint just around the corner. He returned with a very large strawberry and starfruit concoction.

“Oh my goodness - is that for Jenni or the entire cast?”

“First of all. This is a medium? I think maybe they use american sizing, I don’t know.”

Veronica squints at the cup like she is trying to remember something: “That certainly looks American - granted, my usual spots use the old Starbucks categories. That looks bigger than a trenta.”

“Oh,” he says gravely ears pining against his head. He takes an entropic shot of the beverage and pings devin on the tacnet.

Heliotrope{tacnet}: [Is this a medium?]

hara{tacnet}: yes?

hara{tacnet}: it’s like a mcdonald’s medium?

hara{tacnet}: i’m confused is this a trick question?

Heliotrope: No. Just. A European one.

hara{tacnet}: u europeans and ur sensible portion sizes


2sday{PM to HermesPython}: They gave me a McDonalds Medium. Where do you want me to leave it. Its bigger than me. Granted I’m not big atm.

HermesPython: Oh!! Give me thirty seconds, we’re about to call break!

2sday: 10-4


One by one, the fights end, and the fighters back off until the floor is clear. Muted by the glass, whatever the instructors say to their charges is inaudible, but the fighters begin filling out through a door in the rear. When enough of them file out, Jenni says some parting words to her colleagues and trots through the open door to where the audience now begins disappointing - and where her smoothie, along with Vidar and Veronica, awaits.

“Oooh, give please-” Jenni says, making grabby hands at the comically oversized drink.

“I don’t understand american drink sizes and at this point I’m too afraid to ask,” He said handing over the infant sized smoothie. “Was it you or someone else who slipped the princess bride reference into the last half of the routine? The pair on the far left?”

“Oh yeah, that was me,” Jenni replies with a wry smile as she takes a big sip of her drink. “Deception of parry isn’t easy to work in without it looking tacky but our X-corder will be looking at them in the right way for it to look really cool for the few seconds they’re in frame.

“I choose to take your word for it, because It looked good to me from here. But the last time I did stage combat I also had an iphone.”

Jenni takes another big sip of her smoothie before replying; “It’s actually some pretty serious stuff we’re doing in there. This whole fight is going to be happening from one guy’s perspective, it’s a scene of a riot and the guy’s going to be smack in the middle of all of it, so there’s just a ton of action and violence and chaos and shit. They’re gonna use live pods and things during recording, full contact, live fire, it’s gonna be nuts.”


Mekhajakumaar {PM to Heliotrope}: [My, isn’t she a darling?]

Heliotrope {PM}: [She’s the real thing!]


“That’s going to be spicy, do you have more than one take or what?”

“Oh yeah, if we need it - the execs usually want it done in one or two takes. That’s the director’s problem, though, we’re just making sure we can get it all done the first time. They usually pack enough bodies that we can get two more takes in if we really need them.”


The words pack enough bodies made his soul leave his body for a second. Wich, when your dead is a little bit more exciting, than it is for others.


“Shit Jenni, stop being cool,” He says while beaming.


Jenni makes a finger gun with her free hand while winking at him; “that’s what they pay me the big bucks for, baybee. You could probably do pretty well in the biz yourself, if you could put up with…”

Jenni trails off as she gestures in the vague direction of Elysium City.


Vidar makes a face. One she’d seen before that said that it was the best worst idea he’d ever heard. “You know. Tempting. But I don’t know if I could hack it. I’m spoilt to a certain,,,Lack of mars.” He says diplomatically. Unlike Veronica he is certain that Jenni would be delighted to wake up on locus. “You’re really knocking it out of hte fucking park though. You know that? Also- This is Veronica, she’s very clever. Veronica this is Jenni, she vibed checked me so hard when she was 15 we had to adopt her,” he switched to his polite proper norwegian for her introduction. “By Vibe check I mean put a knife in me. Just so we’re clear.”


“Why am I not surprised?” Veronica asks, rising from her seat to give Jenni a firm handshake; “a pleasure.”

“Y-yeah!” Jenni says, shaking her hand back with a rising flush in her own face. “How do, ah- how do you two know each other?”

“A friend of my larp buddies,” He says, “Plus- You really think anyone that knows me is going to let me walk around mars unsupervised?”

“No, I guess not,” Jenni replies, laughing all the way to the next drink of her smoothie. “Still, I wouldn’t have figured you two to run in the same circles.”

“I’ve been branching out lately,” Veronica says in reply.

“Ouch,” He says touching his collar bone.

“What?” Veronica asks, playfully; “I’ve been told more than once i need to meet new people more often.”

He flicked his ear, “I have classy friends. Its a thing, Jenni.”

“Good-looking friends, too-“ Jenni blurts, trying to laugh it off before taking a long drink from her smoothie. “So, ah, you do larps now?”

“,,,My mom-friend wont let me do prize fighting,” He said. He was much much too polite and norwegian and full of affection for her to not play along let it never happened, “Says its bad for my mental health. Or Whatever. Next best thing.”

“Worse things to be doing with your days; you could get a job,” Jenni says, affecting a grimace like the idea tastes bad to say.

“Hey, when you’re ready to live the retired life, let me know,” He says. Not wanting to say the words Dark Cast to Locus where a rogue alexa could hear him.

“I think I’ve got a few years of punching snotty XP actors left in me,” Jenni replies. “I’ll keep that in my pocket when I’m ready to call it in.”

“I mean, You’re good at it. But I’m serious. Any time.”

“You love that too much, don’t you?” Veronica asks.

“Oh yeah,” Jenni replies. “Nanobandages heal everything except a bruised ego, and I’ve dealt my share of those too. It makes the hours and everything worth while.”

Jenni takes another pull from her smoothie before continuing; “honestly, the hours and the work have kept me sane these past ten years. With the… move, and the new city, and the hand I’d gotten, I really don’t know what I would’ve done without the structure, y’know?”

“I get that. Thats- yeah. I had to keep busy with everything but swords for a while.”

“Now I’m just used to it, I guess,” Jenni says, a little crestfallen. “Never imagined doing fight choreography for big XP productions in my wildest dreams, but then there’s a lot of stuff I never imagined happening, and, well…”

“And,,,” He pressed. She had just listed off a string of accomplishments while looking distraught in the most quintessentially Jenni way possible.He wasn’t sure if he need to reiterate how impressed he was or if she was about to admit she hated everything about her life and honestly she had always been a little hard to read in this regard. Five had said it was a matter of confidence and she’d out grow it- but here they were.

“I’m glad you found your thing,” Jenni says. “Its been such a fucking crazy ten years with… everything and frankly it’s amazing we can even be in this room having this conversation!! It’s just… amazing. I got here with barely any credits to my name, just my beat-up morph and the skills i picked up running with the goblins, and if i hadn’t found the structure of working in showbuisness i would have gone well and truly technical. I’m glad you found what kept you around, Viddy, I really am.”

“Its still a work in progress.” He says softly. He wasn’t sure how walking around as a tactical cat girl was not an indication that he was currently self destructing via participation in covert conspiracy theory monster hunting and that his brain was on fire and he couldn't handle normal interactions for more than a few hours at a time. But like, things always felt that way versus how they looked. “But I’m trying. I’m really fucking trying. I promise.”

“You always made it look so effortless,” Jenni says with a shy laugh. “You, Five and all them. I mean, I fucking knocked you off your throne, and you came back for it like I was just keeping the seat warm for you. Keeping the dojo up, keeping in the detective agency going, running the business and outsmarting the Mouse… I never really wanted to be in your position, I was so scared of fucking it up. Here I am now, ten years on, running my own shop, running with the tigers-”

Vidar tried to bite down on the internal panic at the list of basic responsibilities he used to be able to juggle. Jenni didn’t need to know he was useless save for when firewall periodically unleashed him to cause mischief. He hoped the smile didn’t look forced, but smiling came easy to this morph. But then so did tears.

“-even doing the odd favor here and there,” Jenni says with a wink, nodding toward the hilt of Vidar’s new smartsword.

“You were thrown into the crucible and came out as true gold,” Veronica comments. “Not just anyone can say that.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Jenni says, smiling and suppressing fluster. “Anyways, if you ever need anything - place to stay, party favors, hell, a job - let me know- I just got one other thing to ask.”

Jenni opens her arms out to Vidar: “Hug?”

He had of course demanded the hug last time but he took a small step back, “-You didn’t tell me I had cat ears,” he said with playful accusation.

“What- I thought you knew!? They just seemed to- i dunno, work with your whole thing??”

He wasn’t sure if he was flattered or insulted so he laughed, “Okay. Fuck. fair.” And came in for a hug.

“What was it you always said?” Jenni asks, her voice soft so as not to speak too loud into Vidar’s ear; “‘you can wear anything you want to as long as you’re good enough’?”

He laughed and gave her a squeeze, “Yes. Fucking. Exactly.” He was on Mars, sporting cat ears and a tits and somewhere Magni Five was rolling in Zer grave about it. And just then, thinking that, standing in a studio too posh to ever replace it- he realizes this was as close to home as he could ever get ever again. He lets her go and holds her at arms length for a second- she was taller than him at the moment, which really hammered home how grown she was, “And in case I don’t see you for a while kid, I’m proud of you. I really fucking am.”

“God, Vidar, they’re gonna make me turn in my badass certification if you make me cry-” Jenni says, half-joking as she wipes away a single tear. She doesn’t get to say anything else as something calls her attention to her entoptics-

-and then to the practice space behind her, where the cast has started to gather and await their instructors.


“Fuck, gotta go-”

Heliotrope: [so you gonna ask jenni out, or are you just gonna let her suffeR?]

Mekhajakumaar: [I had better do it now, hadn't I?]

“Jenni?” Veronica calls, in a voice like honeyed wine, stopping the poor lady short; “Think you could find an opening in your schedule for me some time in the next couple of weeks?”

“O-oh,” Jenni stammers; “y-yes! Absolutely!!”

“Good~” Veronica purrs. “I’ll have my muse contact your muse.”

Jenni has to be shaken out of her stupor by one of her fellow instructors before turning and trotting back into the practice space, giggling to herself all the way. Practice resumes within the minute, Jenni slipping right back into the mode of a professional choreographer and only occasionally glancing the way of Vidar and Veronica.

“The real thing, indeed,” Veronica quips, smiling.

“Our entire legacy,” He adds softly.

~~


The rover was parked in a labrynth of other rovers in West Elyisium and made his way to one with a spray painted master piece of the apostles of glitter christ and on the reverse; a crying Mary, our lady of the big bang done in the style of a moomin valley illustration, complete with a moomin troll in her arms. Vidar Had not seen a Moomin in such a long time that he paused, even as the door opened and a large pad with a sleek plastic plate where his face should have been stepped out. His contact was one @GoodwithpeopleJackson wich Vidar found supiscious and delightful because it broke the 16 character limitation of Arep names. He turned and pinged the man for @rep and was unsurprised when it was him. He was atractive, in the way only a well muscled shirtless man without a face could be. And rational thought left vidars head save for the sound effects of candy crush.They shared a look and then Goody followed his gaze as Vidar slowly pointed at the Virgin Mary.

“Moomin Mama,” Vidar said.

The mans; shoulders shook and he signed laughing hard before- “Fucking exactly!”

In the nature of most anarchists who had talked for more than three paragraphs Goody greeted him as a friend with a handshake and a hug before pulling him inside. It was something of a make shift clinic, with a med tank and sleeping quarters, and a fine layer of glitter on all the seats. The ceiling was painted up and multicolored flags zigzagged across the ceiling. A small shrine to our lady of the big bang, with a gaping void filled cowl dominated what had once been a round port hole style window. Goody moved a pair of cyan boots and scooped up some coveralls and deposited them else where in a moving is futile attempt to tidy the space.

“Just the brain stuff right?” He asks with his hands. He rolls the scan across the inside of Vidars wrist with such finesse that he almost didn't see it coming, prepping the the tank to his specifics. Goody was a large powerfully built man, and this close to him, he wasn't sure if he really was a pod, or just modded to hell and back.

“Yeah. And like. Maybe a skin pocket that can handle this?” he said showing off the inert smart sword, “But like, Don't take this the wrong way- I need the least kinky skin pocket.”

“laughing hard, I got you. Just below the breast maybe.”

“Oh gods, finally they can be good for something.”

“...No cosmetics, you good?” He asked, his fingers churning in hesitation for a moment at the start. Goody is the first person, not just on mars, but since he had sleeved his black rabbit company approved tactical cat girl ghost to even imply that perhaps his presentation not matching his gender markers might be something he needed help with.

He paused. He could. Get rid. Of. The cat. Ear.

But the cat ears had some how locked him in to a persona- he didn't like them persay, but they locked him to some kind of aesthetic. He looked the part now, with big dark boots and leggings and something that half way between a romper and tactical wear that was in style with athletes, with an open lavender big cowled hoody on top. He was almost fashionable. He could pass for not laughable in it, Penny assured him. His presentation, after all, had always been a study in expectations and fabricated persona, and that would have been nice to have figured out before he was ninety-nine years old. Sure he knew gender was performative, he just didn't realize how performative existing in reality was till he had no touchstones left to base it on. On locus he wore a big comfy sweater with a hood that was easy for his smart rat to hide in and climb on- but which lacked any sort of personality markers. But he was giving himself a break because he was on mars, and he'd watched Eppie get tazed before 9 am. For now. Tactical cat girl was fine.

“I'm good.” He said.

“Are you really 108?” he asked. Because, that was probably why he agreed to not only a rather spendy favor but thrown in the smaller ones too.

“Yeah-” He said not feeling up to correcting the 8 years of lack, “You want a bed time story?”

He paused, “Unless you hate that.”

He smiled, “for you, tough stuff, sure. What do you wanna hear?”

Goody pretended to fan himself like he was flattered, “Tell me something good.”

“Something that doesn't suck?”

“Yeah.”

“Hmmm, Pigeons used to just live inside the cities.”

“Just around?”

“Real live pigeons. Just around. Feral. living life. Round.” He said making his hands like he holding a hamburge shape.

“How bout something that sucks?” goody asked. Vidar had seated himself and made to take off his boots, but ended up just fiddling with them until they withdrew- morphing into the leggings around his feet and then the who set of armored clothes, hoody and all shrank into cat suite.

“My mouth,” vidar said as a joke and then regretted it so deeply and intensely because a glitter christ priest might just actually be down for that- because that might be nice. But he could not commit to the act of being known with out thinking about his dead. With out wishing he was Hex. With out thinking of how Five would roll Zer eyes and kiss him if he told zer about him, because Goody was just his type. But how nice- it might be if he was game, in that way that anarchist passing favors might some times.

Goody stopped short and for a moment Vidar thought maybe he'd just put his foot in his mouth. But wasn't he a Glitter Christ priest. “You're very cute.” He adds quickly. And goody proves to be a man of the cloth, more than ready to see his vows to fulfill his vices at all consensual opportunities.




He is making his way through west Elysium smoking his vanilla vape and thinking about what Goody had told him- after all was said and done before he'd taken his dip in the tank. He'd asked about emilio- wellhe started by asking about emilios blog wich he was sad wasn't updating anymore. And Goody had agreed. Had gone on about the guy like he was a local legend, braving the tqz to raise money for the reclaimer efforts. He gets goody to tell him more about the reclaimers and the local politics and in exchange tells him about the founding of ö@, how he had bought all in with 500k long before the more unified EU@. And that seemed to please his curiosities.

He blew vape into the martian ari and watched it crystallize. That meant Emelio was likely here, in West Elysium, if he understood local politics right- It seemed to be the hotbed for the reclaimer movement at the moment. He forwarded the intel to tacnet. He was going to be delayed because while Goody had helped him set up a series of favors and deal while in the tank, he had to weave a circuitous route through the neighborhood to get to the rendevous points. His skipjacking was not what it had once been But he met a delightful couple sharing a pod with pink hair, a neo orangutan by the name of BigChungus and finally an infomorph who did business out a replica of the Opportunity Rover. It was nice, just to meet some folk. And for a little while- Vidar thought, maybe Mars was more like home than he had given it credit to because- people where always people. Throughout all history and mars should really be no exception on that.

"How do feel about lowfi hihop beats?"
"Before my time."
"Damnit."
"how long did it take you to think that one up?"
"I'm not telling you that man."

"Oh my god your an entire spc."
"Thankyou. For getting the reference."
"Your hoody says 3portlands water polo on the back of course I get it! Give me a spin gurl."
He gave a spin.

"so, its your first time on mars, what do you think?"
"sure is,,, red." Vidar said straining to be polite while they laughed.

The novelty of being an octogenarian+ from the outer system didn't exactly net him rep, it did however swing people's decision when he asked “Pick me!” when some one was offering something on the pure basis that the giver wanted a chance to say they met him. And that. Was strange. He walked out of Elysium with more than he ever anticipated he would be able to give back- a feeling he did not like.

He activated the new ai he'd made room in his brain for. Big chungus had said it was an old and seasoned unit but completly up to date. And vidar had felt a deep trust of Big Chungus, based on his love of hello kitty and collection of rat like smart dogs.

Dixieflatline: Are you more a vending machine sneak thief or fucking cowboy?

The Ai said re configuring his mesh to strength security in a way that made Penny ping him multiple times to confirm the changes. Vidar paused. The voice was familiar, the same way a 2025 Siri or Alexa was.

Dixieflatline:[ I'm a modified MischiefMaker, lined by @FokkAFF + @Raygunsupreeme in 2072, if that helps you place the voice.]

Oh worm.

That breed of opensource AI had been kicking it around since he was a kid. He instructed Penny to sync with the new Ai, sharing his peramaters and prefrences, and effecttivly brining it into the fold.

Hey penny your related.

Penny: [Please don't say things like that.]

You're just a feral Industrial Alexa from an amazon bot sliced with a mischiefmaker- though the updates and the memory loss sure did a fucking whammy on you. not gonna lie.

Penny: [Please Boss. I turned out just fine : ) ]

Dixieflatline:[ Please answer the question.]

I haven't been a cowboy since '45

Dixieflatline: [Ouch. Well. I've got you covered Boss.]

You're my only hoe

Dixieflatline:[ ( v.v)7 ]
 
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Cathal pointed Devin the direction of someone who could replace the smg he’d accidentally lost out the window (and Cathal had cackled like a goblin at him when he’d told the story). So he’d followed the others into West Elysium and now found himself at the foot of a building descript only for the quality of its graffiti. Devin had chosen a less flashy and more practical outfit for adventures in West Elysium, and was glad for the chance to blend in. He also liked all the pockets on the high-collared dark jacket the Grim had found, and longed for interesting things to put in them, as he circled the building, looking for the back entrance that Cathal had described.
Said door was solid steel, with a good lock, and an honest to god buzzer—low tech in a way that said security conscious. Hack that, it dared. Devin grinned at it and pressed the buzzer.
“Ciao,” the voice on the other end said.
“Ciao,” Devin replied. “A friend called Trouble told me to ask for the sommelier.”
“Oh, Signore Rat King,” the voice said brightly, and Devin grinned. “Come up!”
Upstairs smells like tobacco and coffee, and someone in a fury morph with shaggy brown hair in a baggy hoody met him, with a Gunaxi profile reading “ch4rl3yXh0rs3xoxo”.
“Hey,” Charley said, “You the same Rat King that pissed Valentina off?”
“You I never thought I’d miss getting asked if I was the guy with the vinyl, but here we are,” Devin said, and Charley laughed. He had a handgun in easy reach at his hip and a gentle slouch to his stance, like he was slightly embarrassed about his height, or maybe his tits, and Devin liked him immediately.
“I almost got to punch her once,” Charley confided, leading Devin a short way down the hall into a rather cluttered office. “Bas wouldn’t let me.”
“It wouldn’t have been worth the hassle,” said his contact, Gunaxi handle “th3S0mm3l!3r”. He had better posture than Charley, which gave him the illusion of greater height, and an angular face and dark red hair.
“It would have, because I would have enjoyed it,” Charley argued.
“I’ll let you know if I manage to punch her,” Devin promised.
“I’d pay money for XP of that,” Charley said.
“Charley,” Bas said.
“What? I would.”
“Anyway,” Bas said. “Cathal said you were looking for some firepower?”
“Yes, to shoot Valentina before I punch her.”
“I like him,” Charley said.
Bas said, “Oh my god,” exactly the way Armand did when Devin or Kostya were up to some nonsense that he didn’t want to be enjoying, and Devin decided he liked him too.

An hour and a half later, a duffle bag with his new smg tucked carefully inside slung over his shoulder, Devin was heading back to meet up with the others when Vidar’s intel hit TacNet.
hara{TacNet}: on it
hara{TacNet}: also, was there any particular reason you cut out for an hour there with the glitter christ priest?
hara{TacNet}: :3c
He knew why. He was just. An incurable shit.
the_Magpie: hey, maggie, you got a minute?
the_Magpie: i need a favor
grungeneverdies: wait wait wait back up
grungeneverdies: are you on MARS??
the_Magpie: tragically!
grungeneverdies: well come hang out!! I’ll buy you a beer
the_Magpie: margaret. u kno i don’t drink horse piss
grungeneverdies: i’ll buy you sad grape juice then
the_Magpie: that’s more like it
Cathal was the one to refer Jack and Maggie to Devin and the Fucklings, some four or five years ago now. They’ve always suspected that Jack and Maggie might actually be Cathal’s kids, whether from genes or raising or both, but they’d never asked, and the twins have never said.
Maybe that’s what his life on Mars would have been, one of Cathal’s strays instead of Marina’s.
The twins were in a little pub that smelled like artificial pine and yeast, bent over several scribbled maps (the Grim notified Penny before Devin had to ask, in case Vidar tuned in). It was loud and full, and Devin appreciated that, appreciated the difficulty of being heard over the laughter and the shouts and the band joyfully murdering Rocky Road to Dublin in the far corner.
Most reclaimers were idiots, in Devin’s opinion, but the twins were less concerned with making Earth livable than they were with holding transhumanity accountable for what they’d done, which Devin didn’t think was ever going to happen, but was as good a goal as any. They were accompanied by Foxglove, Jack’s boyfriend, whose smart sword lay in easy reach on the table, and the shepherd mutt cleverly named Dog.
“Murphy! I didn’t know you came to civilized places,” Foxglove said.
“Strange place to call civilized,” Devin said, and Foxglove laughed.
“Have a drink,” Jack said. “What’s up?”
“I’m trying to track someone down, and he runs in your circles more than mine.” Devin crouched down as Dog came over to sniff him. “I smelled different last time. You won’t remember me,” he said apologetically. Dog wagged her tail and licked his hands.
“She remembers everybody,” Jack said. True to her word, Maggie had gotten him a syrupy red wine, but it was still better than what they were drinking, which smelled like it was bread dough. He let Maggie tease him about his taste in alcohol for a bit before steering the conversation around to Emilio.
“God, what did Emilio do?” Maggie asked. “He disappeared and now the whole fucking Night Cartel’s after him.”
“Well, let’s leave it as the exact reason Cathal won’t let you sell anything black market that isn’t through a proxy,” Devin said, gesturing at himself with his wineglass.
Jack, who had been very quiet even by Jack standards, said, “You aren’t going to kill him, are you?”
“If I was going to kill him I’d’ve brought Cris,” Devin said.
“Good point,” Foxglove said. Devin squinted at him, and Foxglove shrugged unapologetically.
“I just wanna find whatever the fuck he found before Valentina does, and blow it up so she can’t have it,” Devin said
“Petty,” Maggie said. Jack scratched Dog’s ears and kept studying Devin thoughtfully.
“You should try Palembang,” he said finally. “We didn’t really know Emilio—he’s TQZ and we’re Earth, right?—but he was close with Marah Simaremare. If anyone knows where he is, it would be her.”
“Thanks, Jack.”
“And don’t let the Night Cartel get whatever he found. I don’t want our planetary kill count to go up to two.”
Devin grimaced. “You and me both.”
 
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West Elysium - Shu Brothers' Chop Shop
(Collaborative Post with wickedlittlecritta wickedlittlecritta and Graystone713 Graystone713 )​

After a tense few minutes of authenticating triad codes, a seemingly sturdy segment of wall gives way to reveal the hidden entrance to the Shu Brothers’ chop shop, itself kept in a dead alley within the warrens of West Elysium. The normally bustling shop falls silent as the latest ‘catch’ is piloted inside to a waiting bay: all traffic parts before a freshly stolen red and gold Ferrari-Zhuong ZFR900, both it and its occupants gawked at from all sides. The high-end flying car doesn't so much drive as glide to the bay reserved for it, its four turbofans folded up into the body of the vehicle like they aren’t even there. Now fully the craft of team Rincewind, the elite model flying car comes to a gentle stop, still proud despite being put through the hell of a chase across the city.

Its occupants, on the other hand, are quite another story.

If Veronica Jhadav was sleeved in a biomorph, her hands would be trembling: the reality of how close they came to being locked out of the car’s security systems - hell, even being driven directly to an EPM station for processing, all for something intended to help them - has her fists clenched tight in her lap. One of the forks spun up by her new multitasking augmentation is busy going over the logs from the hack, and the other is working hard at making sure that damnable security AI is well and truly dead, leaving Veronica herself to process everything that has happened.

On its face, it should have been simple: hack in, lock out the AIs, take the car’s systems, cut it free from F-Z’s master network, leave the rest to Mach and Devin. That assumption right there, ‘it should have been simple,’ is where Veronica went wrong. She knew that the security protecting a car like the ZFR900 would be bloody tough, and the system didn’t disappoint: the firewall was well and truly solid, and Veronica’s workaround, effective as it was, was rash in a way that took all her acumen to recover from. The dedicated security AI had put up one hell of a fight, and for all of her skill and all of her new augmentations, it had been much too close before she was finally able to lock it out and have her way with the security settings. She had taken care to mask her Mesh ID ahead of the heist of course, to prevent Ferrari-Zhuong’s security audit from identifying her ID, and with any luck they would be forced to conclude the hack came from outside the car rather than from within, but even so they came much too close to the razor’s edge.

“Well… that went well!” Veronica declares, as if saying it in a chipper voice would make the lie any kind of true.

Dai Ruogang knew Veronica wasn’t quite being honest with that one. Hacking the car had been one ordeal. Driving it here was another. One would think that with one of the fastest, most well-engineered cars on the market, and the best racer on mars behind the wheel, it would be child’s play. With police chasing them down in the second-fastest vehicles, using the AI’s snitchy reporting of its current location to try and cut them off, Mach was just about one wild stunt from getting caught. So, sheathing his claws and pulling his hands from the wheel, he took a deep breath and said something true.

“Bullshit. I’ve never been that scared of cops in my life, and Disney went beyond military on the software defense. Fuckers must’ve learned since last time.” He said, slumping into his seat as he tried to release all the tension of the chase.

Devin, sitting in the back seat, looked from Veronica’s tense form to Mach’s, and said, “I kept my seatbelt on the whole time,” in chipper tones, as if not falling out the window was a great accomplishment.

“Well done!!” Veronica compliments him, actually managing a laugh she badly needed. “Well bloody done, everyone. We actually stole this gorgeous fucking car. I propose we take five minutes or so to let all of our souls catch up to us, are we in agreement?”

“Superb,” Devin agrees. “Someone let me out. This car knows I am a child.” He wiggled the door latch for emphasis ineffectually.

“I’d understand you thinking I still have my soul, but… I would’ve thought Capitalism stole yours. Still, I’ll take five.” Mach stated, unlocking the doors and letting Devin escape before he leaned the chair alllll the waaaayyyy back, and buried his face in his hands, letting out the practiced groan of an overstressed teen.

“I beg your pardon??” Veronica asks, unsure of whether to laugh or be insulted and landing somewhere in the middle. “What in the world is that supposed to mean?”

“We’re all too cool for morality here?” Devin suggested, stretching a little as he landed on solid ground.

“Yeah, maybe. All I’m saying is that I’ve done ghoulish shit in my time with the Fong. If I had a soul at the get-go, it’s gone by now.” Mach said, taking a few deep breaths. “And as a corporate agent, I figured you did the same. Whether it was or wasn’t legal, or you did it indirectly, I’m sure you’ve done something on that same level.”

“Yes, well, I’ve accepted that I’ve got a long ride on the wheel left to go. Reincarnation isn’t what it used to be, though - frankly, I’m willing to put off that journey for a while now that things are, ah, looking up,” Veronica says, sat in the shotgun seat of a very expensive car that she was almost certainly seen riding in and that she will almost certainly have to deflect questions about if she’s ever seen in the wrong part of North Elysium for a while; the thought is enough to renew the smile on her too-satisfied face. “All told, I’m inclined to agree with our scum comrade.”

“Fair enough. Morality is total bullshit. And if there is a god, pretty sure at least half of all religions acknowledge that mankind broke the system to begin with. The second we started resleeving they probably gave the fuck up on souls and afterlives and whatever.” He said, wishing for a joint right about now. But there was work to be done, so he returned his seat to the upright position, stowed away his tray table of anxiety, and left the car. “Okay, so we need license bullshit and chameleon skin. That oughta do us.”

“Talk about a market crash,” Veronica jokes, to herself and whoever may be listening.

S1: [What’s our status?]
S2: [Analysis is going to take time but basically we were baited into a trap. Their software engineering is to be admired.]
S3: [Both AIs have been crashed and burned. Would that I had an actual scorcher to do the job.]
S1: [Marvelous - now we need to get to work on reprogramming the car.]
S2: [I’ll handle the VIN and tags.]
S3: [I’ll get to setting up access accounts, then get the Vehicle AI rebooted.]
S1: [Perfect. I’ll check on our other patient.]

Veronica smiles as she watches her forks get to the software work she would otherwise have to do, and gives a silent prayer of thanks to whichever god inspired the Multitasking augmentation: the forks would be merged with her in a scant few hours, leaving no time for unfortunate ethical questions, and in the meantime her productivity is tripled. In this case, she has two copies of herself to do the lifting while she takes a moment to collect herself after their harrowing ordeal and enjoy the extremely comfortable seating installed in the car.

“I’ll handle the software part of this chop job,” Veronica says, the work already in motion. “I’m also going to check on the rental car while we’re here, message me if you need anything - Devin, would you care to join me?”

Devin, who had been trying to catch the eye of a cute mechanic who had been studiously ignoring him, said, “Sure,” and strolled over.

“Judging from how you’re already back at it, I see you had the easiest time of the three of us,” Veronica comments as the two make their way to her rental car. “How long have you been in this line of work?”

“What, being a slut? That’s not work, it’s a hobby,” Devin said.

“Ah, so fooling salesmen into thinking you’re actually a buyer of high-end flying cars is a hobby, is it?”

“Oh, that.” Devin said. “I’ve been a liar all my life. Easy as breathing.”

“I can tell - you’ve got it down to an art form,” Veronica compliments. “I can nick a password off of an accountant when I have to, but that was some fast talking back there. If you’re free to tell me - what’s the biggest lie you’ve ever gotten away with?”
“I guess it depends on how we’re defining big.” Devin stuck his hands in his pockets. “But...probably telling my dad I’d meet him at the rendezvous point, when everything when to shit. And then I didn’t.”

Veronica makes a sound like a laugh, barely audible over the sound of a welding torch; “Right, all of that business with you being an escaped heir to the Callahans…”
[Shambhavi,] Brumaro chimes in, [remember your conversation with Vidar, and choose your next words carefully.]
“...I can relate to freedom being worth any price,” Veronica continues. “What was it like in their house, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Devin looked at the ground, considering carefully.
[You don’t have to tell her anything,] the Grim said.
She thinks it’s all sunshine and butterflies up there, Devin said.
“It’s like...it’s like being trapped in a game you never signed up to play, and the rules are always changing. And when you fuck up--and you always fuck up, because you never know the rules until you break them--when you fuck up--” Devin raised his hand and made a sharp motion, an immitation of his father’s hand coming at him. “I was expecting to die for good when I got out, and it would have been worth it if I had.”

The almost brutal honesty of Devin’s answer hits Veronica hard enough to wipe the expression off her face. She had been expecting him to feel constrained within House Callahan, something to do with Devin risking everything in the Fall in pursuit of some grand plan, but this - chancing death or worse at the hands of the TITANs to escape a foundationally awful life even with the privileges of the hyperelite - it sends her train of thought grinding to a halt. Every conversation seems to bring a new revelation about her comrades, every surprise a lesson that there is much more to her team than she was equipped to understand. It doesn’t even register that they have arrived at the rental car until Veronica just about walks past it, Devin having to tug on her sleeve to get her to notice.

“I, ah, I can relate to that, in a way,” Veronica says, offering honesty in exchange for honesty as she collects herself; “Family was what you could piece together from the wreckage of millions of lives, in Dehli Below, and it was a churn of people hurting each other in their own pain. It wasn’t any real way to live, and I was willing to sign away decades of my life to corporate indenture to escape it - which, under my contract, turned out to be its own bed of thorns. Then, just like you, I found my way out and I took it, damn the risks.”

“I dare say we’ve both come a long way since then.”

Devin nods. “When you get used to hurting people to get ahead, you stop caring about hurting anybody, eventually,” he says. “My dad stepped on so many people like you, and the people you grew up with, to get where he was that he got used to grinding anybody who might get in his way down. Including me. And it’s not like he’s happy or anything. He’s a miserable shitstain. It’s not worth it.”

It is a testament to the weight of those words that Veronica can feel her forks - two full copies of herself, Veronica reminds herself - contemplating them, having momentarily stopped in their work. She does not tell them to get back to work, feeling her own mind being pulled toward considering Devin’s warning. Part of her knows she should be concerned about the car, and yet that seems so very small right now.
Brumaro, get the report from the tech for me, would you?
[Happily.]

“It puts a lot into context,” Veronica concedes, as S2 and S3 return to their work, unsure of what to say next.

Devin isn’t sure if she means context around him, personally, or hypercapitalism as a whole, but he says, “Sure does,” anyway. And then he straightens up, packing up all the hurt he didn’t particularly want to think about right now into the back of his mind where it belongs, and flashes Veronica a grin. “Anyway, how many bullets is too many before the rental company gets suspicious?”

Veronica laughs harder than she would have expected to; “I believe the answer is ‘any at all?’ Could you imagine being the clerk who gets the warning from their shop bots - managing your inventory only to get word that a car that was checked in had bloody bullet holes in it?”

Her attention returned to the moment, Veronica eyes over the repair being done on the rental car: one of its turbofans has been removed, someone sleeved in a case morph hard at work reinstalling a blade, while another is inside the cabin, fixing something Veronica can’t see from her perspective. Most of the bullet holes have been repaired - but not completely vanished, with round patches where paint should be evidencing repair spray work.

“It would have to be a particular kind of rental company that wouldn’t bat an eye at bullet holes in their vehicles, and I most certainly did not rent this from them.”

“Tragic,” Devin drawls. “Would be the most exciting event of that clerk’s life though, probably.”

“Indeed, the poor soul,” Veronica says, before a thought strikes her; “Say, what would be your angle if you had to explain why your rental car had bullet holes in it - what would you tell that clerk?”

“To be honest, on Mars I think dumping it in a ditch and faking your own kidnapping would be easiest,” Devin says. “In the words of a wise man I keep failing to listen to, you gotta know when to fold ‘em.”

“Duly noted,” Veronica says through a laugh, “I’ll let you know how that goes the next time I have to rent my own car for a mission. In the meantime though, Mach’s contacts seem to be coming through. Now we also have the shiny new car to put in harm’s way instead of this one - just have to hope no one over there recognizes me if I ever need to be in that side of Corinth Parkways.”

Mekhajakumaar {TacNet}: [Ah, the joys of Firewall work.]

“Wear something loud. They’ll be too offended at your outfit to look at your face,” Devin advised.

“You’re a font of wisdom yourself, you know that??” Veronica says, after recovering from her fit of laughter; she was starting to get Devin’s appeal, and understand why it made him so good at his job.

“I’m very good at not getting caught,” Devin said modestly, beaming back at her. Veronica had a good laugh, and he was pleased he could startle it out of her so often.

“An important skill for anyone in the dubious arts!” Veronica says, the declaration a compliment to Devin in tone. “You do with people what I do with software, and I respect that greatly.”

“Likewise,” Devin said. “I just hope we never have to steal a car on Mars again.”

Ruogang, meanwhile, was washing the new car. It hadn’t been dirtied in the chase but the surface needed to be as clean as possible to apply the wrap dry. What wrap? The Chameleon coat wrap he asked the Shu Brothers to have ready. The smart ornament wouldn’t need any work like this done, save for wiring it in. But wrapping the car in that mystical stealth aid was a priority. After all, he wanted access to any paint job he could imagine in seconds. Changing cars? That was old-fashioned, and you needed two cars. Disguising the car? With this, it could be done mid-chase.
“*Can one of you two help me apply this once the car is clean?*”
He said to the brothers in Mandarin. Because he was from China. He was Dai Ruogang, not that silly ‘Mach Infinity’ character…

“[*Hell yeah man!! You actually got us a ZFR900 to work on - this thing’s fuckin crazy.] Shu Gangxin responds on behalf of the brothers from across the shop. [Always wanted to work on one of those beauties. It’s practically made of paper but i hear it handles like a dream. We’ll get the wrap on when it’s ready but yo - do you think we could take it for a drive real quick?]

“*After the wrap’s on and we have one or two paintjobs programmed, sure. Too recognizable right this second. But as the driver, I know you heard it right.*” came Dai’s reply, as he ran his soapy sponge over the car’s thin aluminum skin. “*Might go a little faster with more hands, eh?*”

[Hell yeah!! Be right over!]

A tall, lanky synth to put one in mind of K-2SO with the rep profiles of Shu Gangxin arrives hot on the heels of his reply, a porter bot loaded with the chameleon coating arriving along with him. Shu Gangxin unloads a nanohive from the bot and sets it on a small stool next to the car; the nanoswarm that spills out and sets to work on cleaning the car is invisible to the non-augmented eye, but Gangxin helpfully shares an AR overlay of the swarm like a teal cloud as it slowly envelops the car.

“*... It has been a WHILE since I had the privilege of working in a well-outfitted garage. I’d ask you to stop me next time I go for the sponge… But you won’t.” Ruogang replied, tossing his sponge back into its bucket with a little ‘heh.’

“*I mean I can put the swarm back in the box if you wanna give it a good washing,” Gangxin jokes. “If you need I’ll go get some short shorts too.*”

“*Do I look like Niú ào? If you want to flirt with someone, do it with the poor boy in sequins. He’s scum, and he’s been away from home for a few weeks. He’d probably enjoy it.*” Ruogang said, gesturing vaguely at Devin and grabbing one end of the wrap piece for the hood. “*Maybe you could take him for a ride if you promise you’ll both keep your clothes on. I am going to be furious if the Nanoswarm has to clean up after THAT kind of mess.*”

Gangxin looks to Devin, and while his synth doesn’t have much in the way of emotive expression, what little he can muster would suggest ‘I’d be down if you asked.’ Shrugging, he gets the long wrap of chameleon coating - the coating steel grey in its inert state - and sets it in front of the car as two long robotic arms descend from the ceiling.

“*I do in fact have some extra hands to help us, but maybe you wanna do this part old school?*”
“*I swear, you’re just taunting me Gangxin. How much of this is going on the web?*”
“*Not the wider mesh, if that’s what you mean. Internal use only, my friend.*”
“*Well, I hope your friends get their teasing done fast. If I’m still hearing about this next month, they’ll be inviting a duel on the track, and putting their nicest cars where their mouths are.*”
“*I don’t think that’ll be a problem, especially if they’re racing against this beauty.*”
“*Yeah. Bet you only one guy would be fool enough to take me up on that one. The rest would know better than to give me spare parts, and… Well, you think Tzu would try to cheat again? I’d hoped the boys would straighten him out or throw him to 14K, but… Never mind, your shop is FAST.*”
“*Time is money,*” Gangxin says, drinking up the compliment, “*And we bring in the money, brother. You bring the cars, we break ‘em down for parts - and that F-Z is going to make for some choice carving once you’re done with it.*”’
“*MY OLD CAR, will make choice carving!. This one? She’s mine. But once I get Veronica to share her methods… I’ll get the boys together for a good raid. Think we can get six off the lot, and at least four all the way home.*”
Gangxin tisks in minor disappointment; “*You sure? I could cut you in on that chop job for a good 20k, easy.”
“*20k isn’t near enough to make my car match this. No, this is the edge I been waiting for. Imagine the look on Jingyi’s face. Besides, you can cut me that 20k on the next one I steal. Assuming Disney doesn’t update security before next month.*”
The mention of Jingyi’s name seems to shake Gangxin from his schemes like uttering the name of a demon in his presence: “Yooo, that’s right - you two got major beef. ‘You know that Jingyi and the 14k know you’re in town now, right? Somethin about you askin around for shops for that rental job, ‘trippin over a 14k front?”
“*I didn’t know for sure till now, but I thought he-... Wait, the CAR? Are you saying he didn’t recognize me at Lupercalia? After all that shit talk about my morph, just because it’s a pod? He-...* I COULD HAVE PUT MY HAND IN HIS CHEST AND FRIED HIS HEART WITH MY FINGERS, BUT HE TALKED SHIT TO ME, AND DIDN’T EVEN RECOGNIZE IT WAS MEEE???” Dai shouted, slipping back to english on some odd impulse as his claws came out and his fingers sparked. There was murder in his eyes. A wild anger that you just didn’t know unless every ounce of anger in your body was pointed in one rough direction.
“Whoa whoa whoa hey!! What the hell, man?? You were at Lupercalia when all that shit went down??” Gangxin asks, both sets of arms raised in alarm.
“Is everything alright over here?” Veronica asks, suddenly standing next to Mach and Gangxin.

Mekhajakumaar {PM to Sleipnir}: [Be careful. Not everyone in the shop is Firewall.]
Sleipnir {PM to Mekhajakumaar}: [Old rival. My blood got hot. Still, these guys know me. If they saw any chase footage, I might have to explain something, but I don’t think that got televised-makes the Security boys look bad. And I do have SOME leverage.]

“... Sorry, it’s not easy hearing that your rival didn’t even recognize you when he was being a horrible piece-a-shit to your face. And before you ask, I left Lupercalia pretty soon after the shit talk. Just kind of bumped through some of the chaos on my way out.” Mach said, retracting his Claws and disabling his Eelware as he tried to re-center. Now, he hadn’t TECHNICALLY lied… But he was sure that even if the boys saw through it, he could get them to stay quiet about it.

Gangxin looks at Mach for a long second, his metallic face unreadable; “I know you just got back from boosting this car but brother - I can tell when people’ve seen shit, and you saw some shit that night. Come to think of it - didn’t your other ride have some bullet damage? There was a car chase through the southside that night, wasn’t there??”

“Yeah. Okay, you want the truth? I was the driver for Ver and some of her high-society friends. Not saying who. It’s some old bond shit, she’s helping me with shit I thought I left behind on earth, and she gets favors sometimes. Shit went bad, and I can’t talk about it. But one word of this reaches Laoban, you ain’t getting a damn Pinto outta me ever again, and you can forget that ZFR. But you keep quiet and make that rental spotless, we could cut a deal for a couple of ‘em.”

Gangxin looks at Mach, and then at Veronica, and then over to Devin, and then back to Mach. He laughs, but with his arms up in a surrender posture; “Alright alright, I get it, I’ll leave it alone. You wanna help me put this coating on here?”

“Yes please before we piss off the only Financial advisor in the system who isn’t a goddamn Vampire.”

“I beg your pardon-”

“And it’s too late for that, too. I’m pretty sure I owe her a trip to that really fancy Italian place in the nice part of town again for that. So much for two-hundred creds.”

Dai said, right before he took up the other side of the vinyl and began carefully positioning it over the hood. From then on it would be about an hour of careful placement, pushing out bubbles in the wrap, and maybe a few hits of the heat gun in the few spots where it didn’t want to fit. The hood ornament, the wiring, the programming, that wouldn’t be quite this tricky. And Mach didn’t necessarily want to think about what he’d have to do if he got one of those nice adjustable aerofoil spoilers that were so popular with these flying cars now. But they had three professional mechanics and two cars to attend. This would be easy. At least, it would be if Gangxin kept his eyes on his work and not on Devin.
 
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