WEEK 02

[modmachine]

With Halloween past, the weekend of November 5-6 brings the beginnings of holiday trappings, as businesses begin to put up lights and other decorations for Monday. Residential areas, too, begin to pick up on the trend; throughout the whole month there will be a slow but steady increase in front lawn decorations.

Interestingly, though some are close parallels to the Christmas decorations that those from Earth will be familiar with, many aren't quite right. Locals, if asked, talk about something called the Day of Lights as much as they do Christmas or any other holiday; it's easy to find out that the amber-yellow and blue lights common in shops are for this holiday, and that it takes place on the last night of autumn, before the solstice. Snowflakes and candles are the most common motifs.

Changelings seem especially into the Day of Lights, and it is a near-assurance that they will be picking up blue candles for it as the month goes on.

Weather forecast: In a word: dreary. Small showers through Monday and Tuesday grow into full rain throughout Wednesday, continuing on Thursday and as a light misting on Friday. The weekend looks clear of rain, but is still chilly and cloudy. There is still no frost, though it's expected by the end of the month; gardeners are moving potted plants inside and putting cover over the more fragile ones for winter.

Moon phase: The moon reaches a first quarter on Monday the seventh, and continues to grow throughout the week.

Employment Opportunity: Those who are of adult age in the city can get work collecting holiday donations for charity, or, for those more inclined to physical labor, a park in the residential district is putting up lights for a holiday attraction. Additionally, plenty of shops are hiring for the upcoming retail season.

Free lunch?: Though there doesn't seem to be an equivalent to Thanksgiving in Hex, food banks are brimming with holiday spirit right now, and in addition to their usual offerings, many are handing out warm lunches to those in need, usually soup or hot sandwiches, sometimes pizza. While those at any given food bank will side-eye someone who tries to come in more than once, it's easily possible to make a circuit of them and get quite a bit of food, especially if you're familiar with the bus system.

Photo finish: Hajime gets a mild of small publicity for his candid photos of celebrations throughout the city, and on Friday will get a call about a potential contract for photos of decorations throughout December. He also gets sent an email about a campus-sponsored holiday fashion show at the end of the month - something Ryoji will hear about mostly via various rumours among the students.

Fueling the Art: At a coffee shop on the fringes of the campus, an Art Student can be found most every morning, sipping a latte and working on sketches. The Coffeeshop Manager, a man in his late thirties with a pair of small sunglasses perched on his cheeks in spite of the grey weather, occasionally offers her tips. Those with a keen eye will notice that walls made of gears are a common motif in the art that hangs around the shop.

The Ides of Fall: Out on the Island The Summer Queen is called before her Autumn peer and taken to task for her unauthorized gathering. She leaves his court fuming quietly to herself, and later in the week Makoto will receive a message - "Watch the falling leaves, but don't go chasing them." Several others of the Summer Court get the same message.

Sweet Loot: On the morning of the tenth, Kitty will find a locket and a note in with her stashed clothes. The locket is full of orange glitter that seems to stick to the inside, and the outside is worked with leaves. The note simply says TREAT in letters that are all distinctly different. When Kitty uses a finger to apply the glitter to something, it leaves glowing orange marks that only she can see, unless someone else sees her apply them or she intentionally shows them to someone.

Richter and Corwin, meanwhile, will each find a piece of candy hanging from their doorknobs the same morning, tied on with a ribbon that trails glitter on any surface it touches. The candy is wrapped in clear plastic, and has a strange flavor neither will be able to place.

Right on Schedule: The trains in Hex are going nowhere fast, but they do seem to have changed routes, frequently passing alongside an area of the wall that they used to avoid. New Arrivals, as well as Hajime and anyone else who can see Infrastructure, will note strangely runed plates of metal under this section of track - plates which seem to be directly attached to the Wall via cables. Every time a train passes over them, the plates spark with bright green, though nothing about the train itself seems to change.

Through the Grapevine: Though Network Zero is usually considered a Hunter organization, plenty of supernaturals also make use of it to keep their eyes out for threats - and their eyes on each other. One or two of Hajime's photos of the changeling gathering is making the rounds, with the odd horned skulls in the bonfire circled in Photoshop, but perhaps more relevantly, there's a couple photos of Malin from a distance that have fallen into the grasp of a current meme ("Is this bat ok?") and three photos of men doing construction work on a building in the Sixth that seems innocuous until it's pointed out that most of the men are completely identical.

Comments

[modmachine]

The bottom half of the page is devoted to the Ten of Swords. "Those are for like... When you finish something you really hated doing, and it doesn't come out like you wanted, but at least it's over." She reaches up and tucks a strand of black hair behind her ear. "Which is how I feel about this project sometimes."

[runs]

"If you don't like it, why are you doing it?"

She pulls out a chair and climbs on it, sitting down next to the student.

[modmachine]

"I like it, it's just frustrating sometimes to get things the way I want." She sets the sketchbook down to take a sip of her half-empty drink. "Besides, I need to finish it if I want to get my degree."

[runs]

"Sounds boring." She looks at the sketchbook again and then around the room, trying to compare the style of artwork but really having now idea how to even compare it. "Did you draw the things on the walls, too?"

[modmachine]

"Oh, no, I'm not that good yet!" She blushes a little. "That's the manager's work, actually. He helps me out sometimes."

The student's style is a bit more realistic looking, though it's hard to tell with them just being sketches and thumbnails. The art on the walls is heavily stylized and favors bold, thick lines, almost like street art.

[runs]

"The guy behind the counter?"

The drawings on the walls that show the weird wheels that most people cannot see, apparently...

"Do you know what the drawings on the walls show?"

[modmachine]

"Yeah." She waves a hand. "You'd have to ask him, but I don't think they're supposed to show anything specific."

[runs]

She'll have to hit him up later.

Or now. It's not like the student didn't prompt her. She leaves her drink on the table next to the student and wanders back over, waiting until the single patron at the counter has paid and left to find a place to sit before addressing the manager, pointing back to the student to make it clear whom he is talking about.

"She said that you drew the things on the walls, but she couldn't tell me where you found them."

[modmachine]

There's a couple bar-style seats along the counter - probably for exactly this purpose, as the manager seems the sort to accept people talking to him as he works. When Kitty hops up and asks her question, he stops fiddling with the spout of a bottle of peppermint syrup and gives her a funny look over his glasses. His eyebrows are raised in curiosity even as he's frowning at her. "Now, who says I found them anywhere?"

[runs]

She looks back at the pictures, squinting at them and trying to discern specifics. When she turns back, she shrugs.

"...well, maybe you combined places."

[modmachine]

He makes a bit of a 'okay, you caught me' face. "Kids these days... You're the sort who isn't gonna let me play dumb, aren't you?"

[runs]

"Not if you're so bad at it."

Though she has to wonder if he was even trying. If he had wanted to not reveal that he knew about those things, he wouldn't have hung up his pictures all over his shop, and deny things for a bit longer.

"You seem to be looking for people who recognize those." Which may be good or bad, but she's too curious to not follow up on it. Nobody so far was able to give her proper answers - Nogee obviously knows things, but his answers were fairly uninformative.

[modmachine]

"Well, I do what I can." He rubs the back of his head. "Someone's got to watch out for kids like you - usually not as young as you, though."

A customer comes in, and he has to split his attention away from her to take care of the order. "Come back at close," he says, while he's filling the paper cup. "We can talk more then."

[runs]

She considers him for a moment and then nods.

"Okay."

She'll hop off the stool, snatch her drink off the table, and is half out of the door before realizing that she has no idea when the shop closes. Sure, someone who can read could check the writing on the door, it's probably somewhere there, but... things that Kitty cannot do. So she walks back to the counter.

"When do you close?" She can tell her phone to alarm her when it is time, that won't be the issue.

[modmachine]

"Eight sharp!" he replies cheerfully, swirling a bit of cream into the cup before setting it on the counter. "Six on Sundays."

[runs]

She'll dictate the information to her commlink once outside, and also set an alarm, and then head back to the tent city to leave a note for Tobias inside her tent, in case she doesn't return and he tries looking for her.

That takes a while, because she has to procure a pen and paper first and then dictate the short message to her commlink and then copy the letters down onto the paper like she's drawing.

It's almost eight when she finally returns to the little shop and enters, crossing over to the counter and hopping onto one of the stools as soon as she's inside.

"Hey."

[modmachine]

There's no one left inside now except the manager and a single employee, a blond woman in her mid-twenties who swings a purse over her arm, looks questioningly at the kid, and waves to the manager on her way out. Once she's gone, he turns to Kitty. "Hey yourself."

[runs]

"So you put your pictures up to find people that have seen the corporate machine. Why?"

Or at least that is what her mulling over his words has brought her to assume.

Judging by what Nogee said, it must be pretty dangerous to proclaim that he's seen the gears this openly.

[modmachine]

"Corporate machine?" His eyebrows go up, and he seems a little amused at her description of it that way. As he talks, he starts wiping down counters. "I guess you could say I like watching out for people. Most people who have a run-in with that thing don't have any idea what they're getting into."

[runs]

"Well, it has corporate drones, so it's a corporate something, and it looks like a machine."

She chucks off her boots to pull up her feet, heels to her butt and arms around her knees, and watches him work, her eyes following the movements of his hand.

"I talked to someone who used to be a corporate drone but he just said that it was dangerous and I shouldn't throw pebbles at it."

[modmachine]

"Drones, huh..." He looks thoughtfully at his rag for a moment. "Well, close enough. You're right, it is a machine, but it's more like a god than a company. Those 'drones' are called angels."

[runs]

That gains him a very dubious look, though only for a moment before her eyes drop again to follow the movement of his hand, entranced by the rhythmic movements, her whole head going along with the motion, though to a lesser degree.

"What do you mean by "like a god"?"

People can regard anything as a god. Some people regard specific kinds of shapeshifters as gods. The more interesting question is where they get the idea from.

[modmachine]

"Powerful, inscrutable, tends to generate cults?" He kind of shrugs, picking up an empty coffee pot and setting it with a group of dishes in a nearby sink. "Companies usually have something they want and it's not that hard to figure out the core of their motivations." To emphasize his point, he makes the secondary register ding as he moves it aside to swipe his rag underneath.

[runs]

She scrunches up her nose a few times as she thinks. Well, that would probably still work for Aztech, to a degree, both in the negative and positive, but after her conversation with Ryoji she figured that it would be better to hide that she's not from Hex. After all that seems to be weird, and standing out that way is never good.

"Why can most people not see it?"

[modmachine]

"Easier for it to do what it wants that way, I guess." He keeps scrubbing with the rag for a minute, then moves the register back over. "You probably already know how dangerous it is. People disappear because of it all the time, or they come back changed, if they're lucky."