holy smokes

That Aegis girl is a wretched curse. Not green nor orange but crimson gold, feather-light coffinsteps, an Artifice incarnate flit on techwear feet.

(Humans are so afraid of what they look like inside. Gushy, squishy, purply-pink ooze; sinew and viscera, everything at rounded angles and inexactly approximate except that the organs are in there, somewhere. Once, she'd lamented about as much: once upon a time I'd been able to zoom out from myself and know exactly which components drilled where, only smudged by thermal paste and cables' coil; once upon a time I'd been rectangular, perfect, mechanically erotic room-sized juggernaut with veins and tendons exploding out - somebody else's problem.

That was before she realized she didn't have the right to make herself everybody else's problem. If she ever had.)

She's red, and flexible, and spangled in hexagons like interstitial plasma discs.

Blood, to Patroka, is both much more and much less than a physical phenomenon, a property of shear and strace. Blood is what's inside you; ether is a petty yet powerful analogue.

All ether should be red, not blue. Blue's basic. Blue's bitchy. Blue's a cool color.

But if you can't have red, and you can't have gold, then maybe electric green is a next best bet.

The Aegis, the one that isn't mist-dark purple, has red and gold both, medals studding eternity, and she's back to making it everybody else's problem.

The bitch is burning. The stars are on fire.

Go on, girlie. Call that fucking laser down.