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The sun has set over Center City on what has been a positively glorious day. The high topped out in the low 70s, and the evening has given way to sweater weather, which makes the guttering light of the Chinese lanterns that illuminate the square all that much more inviting. Despite the Chinese Lantern Festival being billed as a cultural experience for the Asian community of Philadelphia, it's genuinely a very diverse event that draws people from distant states and the suburbs who come to enjoy the sights, the music, the food, and the sense of community that the event tends to foster.
Tonight, less than a week after Mother's Day, the square is packed near to the gills with pedestrian foot traffic. Buskers are out on the corners, strumming guitars and bowing violins. Bike couriers jet this way and that, cutting time from their trip down Race by diverting through the park's bike paths. The city bustles. Practically vibrates with life and activity. The astute in the crowd will spot both Master Yoshitsune and his right hand woman, Esther. The elderly Japanese immigrant is educating the young Israeli immigrant on Chinese cultural trappings, and it's precisely as adorable and charming as it sounds. Generally speaking? It's a fine night.
The only real glaringly discordant part about it all is that the usual PPD presence is not to be found in the crowd. While it might actually be reassuring to not find uniformed police in among the crowd, their presence had been replaced with a squadron of Mark Two autonomous policing units. They don't mill, they don't congregate, they just stand sentry here and there, their blank, visored face plates staring indifferently out at the throng of humanity. Waiting to enforce the law autonomously, if their PR is to be believed.
Kay makes her way into the Chinese lantern festival, approaching Yoshitsune and Esther with a bright smile as she makes her approach, she's dressed casually, blue shirt and black jeans with heeled boots, she does her best to ignore the Marks 2 for the moment, she awaits just the right moment to interact with them, hoping not to interrupt anything rudely there.
It makes her skin crawl to see their blank faces and the way they just stand there when Mark One is so... alive. It's like watching the corpse of a friend keeping watch over a party and just waiting for that motherfucker to turn into a zombie. Still, here's Fox, humming to herself, carrying a Leaping Fish Noodle House bowl in one hand and holding chopsticks in another, slurping up noodles in between bits of humming. Pretending everything is fine, and weaseling her way through the crowd toward Yoshitsune and Esther.
She frowns for a moment, pauses, and turns back to look at one of the Mark Twos, blinking slowly.
Yoshi is dressed in a garish hawaiian shirt and a pair of khaki slacks. They don't mix well with his sandals, but when you're as old as he is, you can get away with being a fashion disaster. He offers Kayla a slight bow, but a bow nonetheless. Esther opts for the more western polite wave and smile. The upshot is that both of them greet the Soul Warden in turn. "It is a good day," Yoshi assures Kayla. The 'to die' is left unsaid, but is heavily implied by just about everything in the guy's character and carriage. "You have come to enjoy the festival? We live not far from here, you know. Never miss a Lantern Festival!" Esther outs him by informing Kayla, "He loves the moon cakes." Yoshi doesn't deny this, but only adds defensively, "And the tea."
Alexis follows along in her cadremate's wake, wearing a light jacket over yet another computer science themed tee shirt along with jeans and sneakers, whispering over to her,"I am wondering if they specifically attempted to make police except worse in every way possible?" She scowls briefly in the direction of one of the faceless cybernetic goons before shaking it off and looking away.
Hetty loved a good party. She loved Chinese food, buskers, and pretty much everything about the evening. Except the Teen Dystopian Drama opening sequence currently playing out in the form of the Mark Twos. In spite of actually working for the city government, she was not a huge fan of program and intended to do something about it if she could manage it... preferably without getting arrested or losing her job.
"Yes, I've been setting aside some time for it for a while now, while I still have some free time to do it." Kay says returning the greetings to both him and Esther. "I'm curious about the moon cakes too, I admit." she laughs lightly, before turning to Alexis. "I'm not sure I like it either. Creepy stuff."
She seems to not be paying attention at all! If, in fact, you believe someone who is very very bad at acting. This sort of thing might be terribly painful to watch, really. Fox, using his expanded animalistic senses to focus, "stumbles" backwards into a Mark Two, just bumping into it, and then awkwardly places a hand on its arm for a moment as they back away; they put their hands up as they do. "Sorryyyyy.... "
The Mark Two promptly sidesteps away from the collision to yield ground to the human pedestrian, adjusting its balance and equilibrium in a manner that would look human if you slowed it down to about an eight of its actual speed. Once it has adjusted its balance and position, it turns towards Fox and lowers its blank face to regard him. It's difficult to peer past the dark visor over the thing's face, but there's the notion of a lens slowly spinning into focus back there, hidden in the subtle glow of its electronic interior. There's a subtle, nearly imperceptible click as it locks Fox into focus, staring for a moment or seven before it states, "Greetings, Citizen. You have collided with a Philadelphia Police Department Mark Two Autonomous Policing Unit. Do you require assistance, Avigail Gratz? There is a missing persons report for you in numerous jurisdictions."
"That's at least 3 different shade of fucked up." Kay sighs a little bit, tilting her head to the side and looks over to Fox, trying to gauge their reaction. Then, her attention spreads around, hoping to see if there's any further movement from the other marks 2.
"It is pleasant to see fewer uniformed officers," Esther admits, "I immigrated in part to escape a militarized police state. But. Yes. I'm not certain this is an improvement, not by any stretch." Yoshitsune offers a gruff grunt of assent to all of the opinions offered, "Arrogant toasters." That's his entire opinion on the phenomenon.
Fox's attainment works in brief, with the not at all startling revelation that the purpose of these units is to enforce the Lie. That's their purpose. Because of course it is. Because they're Seer constructs. But it's nice to confirm those suspicions from time to time.
"Its good to see people out and about in the nice weather. Is there a good spot to get yuanxiao here? I'm not quite familiar with all the vendors." Alexis pokes away at her phone, fiddling with some sort of map of the entire thing. She looks up and over at the action involving the Mark Two.
He smiles broadly, lips pressed together, and stares right at this thing for a moment. "I require no assistance from you," Fox answers cheerfully. "Sorry, wrong number." A chittering laugh slips past her lips, and she insinuates herself into the crowd, heading off on a tangent away from the other Awakened. This moment isn't the right moment to head right toward the Big Importants.
Hetty raised an eyebrow at just how quickly the bot corrected its balance and then identified the woman. She found a seat on the step of one of the buildings and took a sip of the cup of tea she'd bought, and then carefully pulled a little drone out of her backpack. It wasn't an expensive one, just a cheap one with a camera that any kid might buy and use at a party like this one. She sent it out down the street, then circled back around to come towards the bots from behind them.
"Understood, Avigail. We will send a unit to your sister's house, then, and assure her that you are well and that we have located you, and that you do not require assistance." The unit chirps twice, little siren-like beeps that denote some change in operational parameters that isn't outwardly evident. "I will likewise inform the United States Consulate in Saint Petersburg. No doubt the FSB will be relieved to know you have been located alive and well here in the United States of America." The pair of beeps chirp a second time as the unit stares and stares and stares at Fox as he retreats, seemingly comes to its senses, and reverts to its prior position and disposition as though it hadn't just said a whole long list of very alarming things.
"Wow I think my head is spinning from how fucking invasive this is." Kay shakes her head, tapping the screen of her phone with one thumb for a bit before hiding the phone's screen against her body. A roll of her shoulders afterward.
Yoshi, whose single weakness is dessert dumplings, smiles broadly with gleaming eyes at the question of where to get the yuanxiao. "Ahhh! The best cart is right there, Alexis. They make them fresh every hour, or as needed, so if you head over now they'll be very fresh and steaming!" His obsession with dumplings nearly causes him to miss the rather creepy interaction Fox is having. He gives a sharp glance towards the machine at the comment from Kayla, his eyes narrowing slightly. And here he is without his daisho. "Indeed so."
Esther, the mom friend of the consilium, rests a hand on Yoshi's shoulder as she slips away, moving closer towards Fox and the Mark Two without dedicating herself to that decision just yet. She's not the fastest Arrow in the quiver, so it helps to fire from closer in should you need to. This action alone causes Yoshi to forget about the dumplings for the time being.
"There are novels written about this kind of shit." Alexis' fingers twitch like she wants to be typing away at a keyboard, "And they don't end well." A look up leads to her noticing the drone hovering overhead, "Although with a bit of luck you can harness the panopticon for more than evil ends."
The drone buzzing behind the various Mark Twos scattered about doesn't draw their immediate curiosity or interest. They really are just bricks of metal and bullet glass unless motivated to act, and apparently being buzzed by drones doesn't rise to the level provocation yet. At least not at the drone's present distance. Hetty gets a good look at their various unit numbers, though, all three digit number variations behind the letter J.
Fox presses her hand against her chest as she weasels her way through the crowd and drops her ass on a bench. As she moves, the cloak over her Nimbus conceals her work: transmissions glow before her eyes, and the serendipity of it all allows her to find exactly the right bit of signal which refers to her and her own. That little bit of transmission gets chopped right out of the transmission and sent flying off toward Zoya instead; Fox's Supernal will encrypts it along the way so that only the Firebird's resident internet maven can decrypt it. She closes her eyes, puts her hand over her face for a moment. She probably looks like she's not paying attention or trying to catch her breath, but her sharp ears pick up all the movement around her.
"Holy shit, Mom. I'll give you points for all your fucking Russian conspiracies this time," she muttered, immediately tapping a few buttons to save and backup the video stream to a few different places. Fucking hell." She did a wider circle around the bots, then set the drone to hover above them while she dug into her bag of tricks again for a new toy as well as her wallet for some cash. "Hey kid!" she flapped her hand at a kid nearby, maybe fifteen or sixteen. "Want twenty bucks?"
"Not if you've got sixty," the kid replies with the usual brass of a philly street kid.
While all of this is transpiring, a new bustle of activity is occurring on the 7th street side of the square. One of the Action News vans has rolled up to the curb and is setting up. The reporter is chatting with a small collection of people in suits, the most prominent of them a balding, rather portly fellow with the sincerest of sincere expressions, and a tie that probably fit his girth when he bought it sometime in the late 1980s. (You can roll wits+politics to try and put a name to that face, though if you guess correctly I'll count that, too.)
Hetty laughed. "Thirty," she countered. "Final offer or I'll give it to someone else."\
Kay looks at her screen and tap her screen a few times, sending a text back, her gaze moving around to a few times to see the other robots, then finalize a text message again. Her attention shifts to the action news van.
"Forty or I'll tell every kid you walk up to that you offered me eighty." The kid's grinning, though. Haggling is a bloodsport to him, clearly. He's also assuming she's going to say yes, which is why he starts walking closer to her.
"Fuck off then, no one's going to believe you," she scoffed. "Otherwise you'd have taken the job."
Alexis makes her way around to the cart Yoshi indicated to snag herself a snack, now that it looks like immediate action won't be required. As she does so, she activates her legacy's second attainment, directing her observation to the unit that Fox 'bumped' into.
The kid shrugs, "I don't work for less than a benjamin. I got standards." It seems to be his intended response to other hypothetical kids. "What's your stupid job, anyway?"
"It's good to have standards. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise." She smirked and leaned back, then produced a little tiny white dot about the size of a quarter. "You seem like a smart kid. I bet you could put this on one of the Terminators without it being noticed."
"Uh huh. You think they more likely to shoot an adult lady or a little black kid? Fuck that noise. You want me to stick shit on one of those things, you can't afford me." The kid went from brassy to genuinely not interested to borderline 'are you nuts, lady'. "Cops is bad enough when they living."
Kay herself looks to both Esther and Yoshitsune for a brief moment "Hey do we have a plan if things go awry in this case? I feel like something's about to go down."
A few seconds after all that goes down, Fox rolls himself back to their feet, their smile coming back to their face as they just sort of wander over to where Shit Is About To Go Down. This has them sort of aiming vaguely toward Esther, and one of their gold-green eyes winks at the Arrow as they chuck their noodles and chopsticks into a trash can and sort of meander over toward Protest Guy, aka Larry.
She crooked a finger to draw him in closer. "Naw, they're not going to be shooting anyone tonight, not in this crowd and with this many cameras. And if you don't want to do it, don't do it. But just remember that the fucking morons that program the facial recognition systems tend to train those systems on white guys because they are a bunch of white guys. So when shit inevitably happens and they decide to shoot someone, they'll be able to claim that it was just a case of mistaken identity and they'll foist off the blame instead of landing it where they belong. Just remember that it's easier to start up a huge shitstorm and get it shut downnow when the bots aren't fully deployed and in use everywhere, than later when they're normalized." Hetty rolled to her feet and shouldered her bag. "Stay safe, kid. You're too smart to lose young."
Then she headed off towards the bots to do as the kid had suggested, and get the job done herself.
The camera man holds up five fingers, rolling them in one by one until he's pointing at the woman and the man standing in front of the camera. The light on the camera winks on to denote live feed.
"Good evening, Delaware Valley, and good evening Jim. I'm Lisa Balick here at Franklin Square, site of the 2021 Chinese Lantern Festival, and next to me is Assemblyman Larry Gibbons of Delaware County. Larry, as you know, tonight is the first night we're seeing Philly Police's Autonomous Units being the sole law enforcement presence at a Philadelphia event of this magnitude. You've led the opposition to the PAPU program since its inception, despite heavy opposition in the Assembly and the forward progress Philadelphia has been making in rolling out the program. Your opposition has remained strident despite the very real drop in officer involved shootings and use of force complaints in the city since the program began. Can you explain your position to our viewers?"
"I'm happy to, Lisa," Larry begins with an affable smile, "I concede that the drop in officer involved shootings, the drop in use of force complaints-- that all of that is encouraging. But the program is young, and people remain apprehensive about these units walking their streets and interacting with the community. There's every indication that this lull is as much about the hesitance of other officers and the public to run afoul of these units as any other cause. Are there situations where a unit like this might be useful? Sure. Hostage situations. Situations where we might otherwise call on SWAT, or employ a canine unit? Sure. But for routine police duties, a constantly recording, constantly broadcasting roving spy in our communities raises all manner of civil liberties concerns. These things aren't officers, they're tools of officers. Yet they don't need a warrant to employ this tool in surveying the populace. They've magnified the prying eye of the department with no federal oversight, no real civilian oversight, and no real recourse or way to know precisely what information they're collecting and for what purpose."
"Americans have a reasonable expectation of privacy with the respect to their person and papers while moving about in the commons. At least. They did when I was elected to the General Assembly."
Yoshi looks to Kayla and offers a small tick of the head, "We die well, if we can, and take as many of them along with us as possible." Which isn't really an answer, but it's always what Yoshi answers. It's Esther that takes the more pragmatic approach. "This place is lousy with ... people." She means sleepers, of course. "And there's new cameras everywhere. Whatever we do will need to be low-key and believable. And preferably out of the line of sight of the cameras. It would probably be good for us to spread out, to keep our eyes on points within the square, and call out if we see something. But, yeah. I'm not thrilled that Gibbons is here like this." By which she means exposed in a sea of Mark Twos they all know are dangerous as all hell.
All about the square, Mark Twos are coming alive. Their rigid, statuary pose limbers up, grows loose and human seeming, and they begin to glance about this way and that. Apparently they are likewise suspecting that something is about to go down.
Kayla nods and starts wandering the crowd, keeping her eyes peeled for what the Marks 2 are doing, her interest focusing on them in particular, she tries her best not to give too much of a look toward Fox for now, just instead making sure she's in range of doing a thing if things go awry.
The Thyrsus is off on her own mission, apparently: she slips out of notice and out of the sight of machines all at once, slipping through the crowd as well. All she needs to do is get close enough to touch Larry's jacket, like the woman who Luke recorded, but the power doesn't go out of him. It goes in to him, infusing his words not only with the absolute ring of truth but making them a compelling call to action.
Hetty wend her way through the crowds in the general direction of the bots, trackers hidden in her hand. She tensed a little when the machines seemed to become more alert, eyes narrowing suspiciously. Machines didn't need to give human signs of alertness. The entire thing was creepy as hell. She glanced down at her phone and adjusted the altitude of her drone down over the crowd to get a better viewing angle of several of the drone before setting it to hover again, and then moved in. Tracker dots were a simple thing, but knowing where the things went home to recharge could be useful. Knowing how long the dots went unnoticed would also be useful.
"So you concede that this change in policing is improving use of force statistics," Lisa prompts.
"I do. I just wish that my colleagues would likewise concede the drop in use of force complaints in cities that create community response units to address mental health crises, traffic and parking enforcement, and other matters that require neither qualified immunity or a gun to carry out effectively. In short, we'd have a lot fewer use of force complaints if we used less force. But apparently that's a forbidden consideration in the Assembly," is Larry's polite but ... rather cutting response.
"What would you say to the families of victims of police violence who are looking at these reduced numbers as a sign of hope?"
"That if these things kneel on the necks of their loved ones, they'll be just as dead. It's a failure of training, education, and oversight. Unless we're all suddenly willing to admit that humans are essentially violent animals, and we ought to surrender all of our moral decisions to silicon valley."
By this point, the reporter is so much in agreement with Larry that she's completely lost the stream of her approved talking points. She actually stammers. Larry seizes on the stammer and pushes forward, "Yeah. When you put it like that, it's pretty glaring, isn't it."
At the moment, all of the units are holding in place. So Hetty can close on one of the units without much difficulty. And they at least seem distracted, given their behavior. Which is, it must be stressed, programmed.
Hetty brushed past one, lightly touching it without even trying to attach the dot to assess the bot's reaction, and kept moving through the crowd and brushed past another on her way to order more tea from a vendor, leaving a tiny white dot to blend in on the bot's backside. Did she just feel up the robot? Perhaps...
Alexis unfortunately misses everything else going on in the process of attempting to figure out who was controlling the drone she spotted earlier, and she turns to head towards Hetty as she noms on a dumpling, oblivious to the fact that excrement was, in fact, about to hit the rotary impeller
Kay moves to try and get in the Tacti cool guy's path, enough so that he'd have to shove her aside, trying to obstruct his path, hoping to make it look like something like an accidental collision in the process.
Hidden in the crowd, concealed by her magic, Fox spots the incoming asshole and stays right near Larry. She's running out of both Potentia and Willpower, though she's got enough left to fire off a Life effect cranked to fit any human, no matter how tough. Time to have a little fainting spell, buddy.
Kay's intercession occurs just in time to catch the guy as he lurches forward and starts to collapse due to a vasovagal syncope reaction, eyes rolling quite suddenly back into his skull.
The crowd nearest the fainting man reacts as most crowds do when something interesting and medical happens; they gawp and gasp and cover their mouths with hands, and wonder aloud if they should call 911. Someone starts to do just that, in point of fact. Two of the nearest units begin to stride in the direction of the collapsed man, their pace unhurried and carefully tailored to appear non-threatening. They could be responding to the medical issue. They could also be programmed to murder. Who knows! That's the fun of technocratic dystopias.
Kay acts the part of an helpful bystander, laying down the man on the ground and making a bit of a fuss about him collapsing "Shit, somebody help this man!" trying to get someone from the crowd, indeed, the crowd to pay attention this person.
Hetty had caught the guy running through the crowd with all the subtlety of the Uruk-hai with the torch to light the bomb at Helm's Deep. She turned her drone toward him, and was wondering if she should kamikaze the drone into him when he just... collased. She blinked. "What the fuck is going on tonight," she muttered, circling the scene with the drone to make sure she could see the robots in the background as well as the idiot.
Kay looks at her phone as it lights up and activate her mage sights, turning around under the pretense of seeing if anyone would be coming to the man's help, hoping to maybe counter one of the effects she's been just warned about.
"Well crap." Alexis finishes off her dumplings and dumps the container as she realizes Kay is in the middle of that mess, reaching into a pocket for her dedicated tool
The interview continues, despite the disturbance nearby, though judging from the way Lisa raises her voice a bit, she's cognizant of something transpiring. She posits another question and presents the microphone to Larry for his answer, which he begins to provide. Except that a bead of blood pours out of his left nostril and his speech suddenly slurs. Then he twitches twice, his own eyes roll up, and he collapses to the ground quite suddenly. The live feed is cut quite suddenly, and Lisa drops her microphone to kneel down at the side of the collapsed Assemblyman. "Doctor! We need a doctor! Someone call 911!"
The crowd has started to grow more animated, since not one but two people have no collapsed. Maybe it's catching. Lots and lots of people start to move away, while lookie-loos move closer. The Mark Twos reach Kayla and her charge as two more turn towards Larry's collapse and begin heading on over.
While all of this is happening, the unmarked pulls away from the curb and starts heading back into traffic.
Unheard and unseen, Fox snarls as a Mind effect makes its way past her attempts at Counterspelling. She's still right by Larry, so it's nothing to her to lay a hand on him and turn on her active Life sight. She glances toward the car as it pulls away, but the hidden Thyrsus has a Mission.
Before the robots come to her, Kay runs through the crowd and away from the group, at the very least intending to try and catch a glimpse of the car leaving, but not without throwing a look back toward the collapsing Larry.
Her left hand sweeps through the air, all unseen, and the Brontium on her ring glistens, if only for her. It's not like Fox to pull her punches, but in a crowd like this, she must. Not entirely healed, but enough to make sure that Larry doesn't die. That'll do it. "Fucking bastards," she mutters under her breath as her Life magic takes hold. "Lick my salty asshole while I fart."
The two Mark Twos that reach the collapsed III%er kneel down and begin to render aid, speaking in their same unhurried, emotionless timbre in an effort to rouse the man. He does come to amid their diagnostics, and he seems confused and disoriented. Which sort of makes sense. They keep him on the ground for now as they continue to look him over. Two more have yet to close with Larry and Lisa, though they're growing nearer. "Please step aside. There is a citizen in distress. Please step aside. There is a citizen in distress." They're not above politely moving the gawkers out of their way when their repeated requests are not heeded, though the level of force they employ in this is easily termed 'least necessary'.
Kay flicks her hand toward the fallen man and head toward the car once that's done successfully.
Remarkably, impossibly, Larry's prone body spasms once, then twice, and then he coughs out about a cup and a half of thick red blood that spatters the ground and flecks his face, oozing down his cheek in gobbets of coagulating gore. His eyes flutter open, and his lips move, trying to form words. It's very, very gross. But he's alive. For now.
Alexis flicks her pen, drawing a net between herself and Kay to enable them to communicate at range. 'What do you need me to do, Diamond?' the Sphinx asks as she moves to get a clear line of sight to everything
Fox stays nearby, a spot in the crowd that people just maneuver around, watching Larry closely. Crouched, all her senses on alert, she checks him over carefully -- looking, most specifically, for brain damage. Once she doesn't find that? She just... stays still. "Motherfuckers with your bullshit red herrings. You motherfucking wet rags. Goddamned umbrellas made of seaweed. Squat too low and freeze your balls to the ground and then get scared by a firecracker."
The PAPUs heading towards Larry reach his side about the time that a pair of scrub wearing nurses from Jefferson Health and an off-duty doctor in a polo shirt arrive at his side. They begin doing their work while the PAPUs defer to the medical response on scene and instead resort to creating space for them to work and pushing back the crowds with a mixture of calmly worded requests backed up by a ton and a half of perfected metal chassis creeping forward inexorably.
Hetty hadn't really noticed Larry go down, and she didn't particularly care either. Politicians weren't her favorite people in general. Watching the bots work though, now that was more interesting...
Kay tries a powerful magic and it...fails, she stomps her feet "I got the plate, but he got away, couldn't stop him." (In Alexis' head) She then proceeds to remain rather off the premises, trying to stay in the conversation from inside of Alex's head.
In short order the car goes from 'distant' to 'beneath the notice of all and sundry'. In fact, it becomes awful hard-- at least in the here and now --to recall that car having ever been here, or why Kay ran off in the first place. There are other, more pressing things to concern their minds. They can kill him later, no doubt.
The proximity to the nearby hospital means the ambulance arrives in near record time-- or maybe there was a unit parked nearby due to the festival, who knows --in any case, the off-duty nurses and doctor are joined by a paramedic team. The handoff of care is made, the necessary updates of the situation tendered, and then the doctor is offering to ride along with the paramedics to the hospital, an offer that they accept. Apparently the guy had the good fortune of having a stroke near an off-duty neurosurgeon. What luck! Maybe the guy will be okay, after all.
By the time he's being lifted into the back of the Ambulance, he's offering the crowd a wave to no small amount of applause. Once he's in and secure, the ambulance pulls away with lights spinning but no sirens at first, not until they're out onto Race street and headed home.
'Going to kill that motherfucker.' Alexis' thoughts howl with the churning grind of Pandemonium as she reaches out to grab the sympathetic links between the Seer and his attempted murder of Larry but her anger makes the spell fizzle, the links slipping across her metaphysical fingers like smoke drifting through a chain link fence
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