"Liebchen," Herr Doktor Dangerous says, flicking his feather boa over one shoulder of his labcoat dismissively, "Biology is not your field, ja? Have you perhaps become confused because there is a terminological overlap between ionised gas and blood plasma—"
"Excuse me?" Hazel's eyes widen over her tea. It's always a little fraught, having a conversation with one's peers, in this community. "You're sounding a little those fools at the academy, Wolfgang."
He turns instantly conciliatory. "Nein nein nein! No. It's just that you ask for domain expertise, ja?"
"Well, yes, of course." She massages her temple. "Just— just a minute."
He politely waits while she ducks out of frame of their video call. The microphone distantly picks up her voice; "I think you'll find it's time for my thesis OFFENSE, Professor—!" and the sharp simultaneous SLAM-squeak of a wooden mallet smashing down on a rubber duck, followed by a long pause.
She slides back into her chair, breathing carefully regular. "I know what blood plasma is, Wolfgang," she says brightly.
"Gut! Gut!" he says soothingly. "Ja! And that is easy! But the high-energy charged gas—"
"Well." She grips her teacup tightly and gives him a brittle smile. "That's disappointing, of course, I had a whole thing."
(A thing. A vibe. An aesthetic. A vision. A perfect ineffable masterplan. People euphemise it differently; and the inmates of other glass houses know to fear shrapnel.)
"But if your science is insufficient, of course—" she says, and he actually gasps.
"Bitch!" he says, hands clasped to his chest. "My science is impeccable. I will show all of them! All of them!" and he giggles. "But seriously, Liebchen," he adds.
"Nobody grows an army of cloned tubermen because they expect them to last, Wolfgang," she persists. "I know you're a perfectionist—" because they all are, in their way— "but if you relax your constraints to assume they're single-use fire-and-forget minions...."
"Liebchen, it's not the durability, it's the energy chemistry. And you expect them to just walk around with hot plasma slopping out of their stomata? Hot gas needs containment, you would need...some kind...of organelle..." he twitches visibly as his brain switches gears fast and hard. "Lined with, lined with charge pump cilia — don't bother me, I am working —" and he hangs up.
He's a ridiculous dramatic little man, but his bioscience is impeccable. Hazel puts a big tick on the "PLAN" whiteboard, next to "turnip minions".
"Where's the other one?"
Most of Hazel's peers — which is to say, most people at a similarly advanced stage of Hyperproductive Science Fugue Disorder — are long past the point of caring about something like a secret identity. They blew their lives already.
So did she, but she consciously worked on incorporating her reasons into her thing, laying down habits right in the foundations of her divergence from reasonable behaviour, where they persist. She has a costume for grandstanding: an outsized leather jacket, a helmet, heavy voice processing, men's heeled boots. Sexism and implication have writ her alter ego large in the imaginations of those she faces, a pissy little guy with Short Man syndrome who thinks he looks big playing at last-minute-halloween-costume Darth Vader.
It's a glorious day to stomp around town in a big fuck-off robot and yell about Showing Those Fools. And here, in all their hyperfixation special interest glory, are the Pilot Princess Soul Defenders, only—
"It doesn't take five of us to kick your ass!" Pilot Princess Soul Defender Sapphire declares, in that protagonist sort of way.
"But where's the other one?" Hazel repeats, because this has really fucked with her routine, and she's already getting a headache. Sapphire and Onyx and Amethyst and Cinnabar, but what's even the point— "Look, none of us are going to have our heart in it if she got hit by a bus or got cancer or—"
"Shut up," Onyx says in an annoyed way. "As if you'd care."
"You shut up. I have a perfect 17-part plan to rule to world," Hazel informs her, "and I didn't devote eleven steps to properly containing and categorising all resistance to have things fucked up because a Concubine, Inadvisable, Personal Interest was out sick on the day—"
"Oh my god, gross," Onyx says. "You think you're going to make us inadvisable concubines?"
The Pilot Princess Soul Defenders are so good for this, because they're talkers.
"Not you," Hazel says. "You're strictly Concubine, Ornamental."
"I'm going to kick his ass," Onyx fumes, while on the video screen in Hazel's cockpit, Amethyst stuffs half her fist in her mouth to keep from laughing.
"What the hell is ornamental supposed to mean?" Cinnabar breaks in, brow furrowed.
"You know. Decorative." Hazel shrugs, and exchanges a look with the Professor, where the rubber duck is chained to the side of the cockpit by means of a thumb-cuff clamped round his yellow neck. "Nice to look at from a safe distance, not allowed sharp knives, that kind of—"
"She's decorative?"
"Well, you know." Hazel shrugs. "Not really my type?"
If Moonstone's not coming, she'll maybe settle for making Amethyst laugh and doing a taunting escape.
Amethyst takes her hand from her mouth. "Oh my god, Moonstone's your favourite," she says, as if she's torn between finding it appalling and hilarious.
"No!" Hazel says defensively, much too quick. "I mean, you're Concubine, Ornamental, obviously, but it's not as if — I mean, Sapphire isn't!"
Sapphire takes a breath to say something suitably protagonistic.
"Because, I mean, without a mech and a clique she's just a mean girl stuck forever in high school, and the smart money is she'd join a straight pride parade if she could find one, and who needs that vibe."
Three faces make the ooh that you make when somebody says out loud what everyone knows and the shit is going to hit.
"The fuck did you just say to me?"
Hazel leans forward and pushes up the bass sliders on the voice modulator's equaliser. "Release, Surveilled, Surplus to requirements," she says deliberately.
"You're a real sicko," Sapphire seethes.
"I'm walking around in a huge fuck-off fisticuffs robot," Hazel tells her. "You're the one who wants to talk about my problematic Fuck, Marry, Kill choices and I didn't even opt to have any of you killed—"
"Pilot Princess Soul Defenders—!" Sapphire yells, as a prelude to spitting out attack names, so Hazel punches her brand-new Conspicuous Big Red Button.
"Oh, you don't want to do that," she purrs.
You don't want to try anything too fancy with the first deployment of a new technology, but even tubermen can manage "stay quiet in the back of these strategically placed semi trailers until the doors open, then flood out and mill around in the street."
"BEHOLD!" Hazel yells triumphantly. "Behold the results of my insidious BRAINWASHING RAY! See these aimless sheep civilians fill the streets with no regard for their own safety! WILL YOU WALK OVER THEM LIKE AUTUMN LEAVES?"
Her brain supplies a cryptic numerological pattern of radio station call-in lines to make a taunting song request on later: Panic! at the Disco, Lying Is The Most Fun A Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off. (And that, that is the madness talking.)
The temporary tubermen will break down within about twelve hours, and that, too is part of the game: a baffling mess on their hands, a desperate search for forensic clues, the gleeful flaunt of turnip genes in the face of the very one who suggested it. People with Hazel's problem are a self-limiting issue; but the doctors never tell you how much fun it feels to sow your own destruction.
She toggles the Interspace Portal, and brandishes two big metal middle fingers as she turns to step the mech through it, then stops.
"Okay, look, actually," she says, head audibly buzzing with the cognitive dissonance. "Is the other one okay, though?"
"You shameless evil brute!" Sapphire bawls. "You won't get away with this!" and Amethyst narrows her eyes and drops her hand to her mech's control board, isolates her audio.
"We're just busy," she says. "She's fine. Since when do you even take hostages?"
"Thank you," Hazel says, then realises how pathetically grateful she sounds, and adds, "I'm not upgrading you from Ornamental," tacks on a weak attempt at a wicked laugh, and dives into the portal ahead of the sneak Soul-Beam attack Onyx and Cinnabar are coordinating.
"Liebchen, I'm not telling you what to do with your own turnip-men, but that was quite an investment to use as a roadblock for five seconds."
"Herr Doktor!" Hazel beams, still towelling her hair after showering; mech piloting is so sweaty. "Oh, they're perfect, thank you so much." She lets her smile grow, turn faintly alarming. "And don't worry; the next batch have already been cooking for fourteen hours! I have plans!"
