[Indigo]

Things were unusually quiet in Terrace Park. A great number of the little shops and cafes and things arranged around its edges had closed, and nobody seemed to have come to seek solace from the troubles of the day, perhaps because much of the park's charm was eliminated by its current colorless state and the general sort of...spooky shadowiness...of the atmosphere. While unsettling, it was also a decent time to get some work done in peace, sitting at a wrought-iron table under a nice big tree. The table and chairs belonged to one of the closed cafes, but hell, they weren't using it right now, and none of the other ones had outdoor seating.

The peace part was proving more theoretical than he would have preferred.

"—seems like something that should have happened more gradually," the sleepyheart sitting across from him was saying. She wore a trenchcoat that was much too big for her, and she had rolled up the sleeves so she could gesture expansively. "I mean, I'm not a magician or whatever you call them, or anything, but this whole sudden change while everyone was sleeping, and actually now that I think of it why was everyone—"

Lucius tapped furiously at the escape key on his laptop, futilely struggling against the incoherent glitchiness that accompanied the world's absence of color, and took an angry swig of his iced tea. This was not how he'd pictured spending the afternoon. "Who are you again?"

[Indigo]

"Detective Montmort," the sleepyheart said shortly. "You weren't even listening, were you?"

"No. I'm busy."

"I'd think someone like you would be interested in the causes of this kind of thing," she said. "Tech wizard."

"I am not a wizard," Lucius snapped. "I am a witch, and I am only interested in the cause to the extent that I can fix it, and your rambling is in no way helping me to do that. You still haven't explained what you want or how you know who I am." He supposed he was fairly recognizable in his way, although the blue glow of his eyes and the circuitry inscribed in his skin was invisible in the current circumstances; but some of his metallic accoutrements were visible even while dressed. On the other hand, he'd never seen this detective before in his life. Or any other detective, as far as he knew. Montmort had just sat down at his table, introduced herself, and asked if he'd been having computer trouble. And then kept talking.

"Lots of people know who you are, Mr. Lovelace. You're a witch living in a major city and your magic is your livelihood. I didn't get the impression you were making an effort to hide. I also didn't really expect to find you here, but I was hoping to talk to you anyway, so it's a nice coincidence that you should be in the park," she said. "But I'll get to the point."

"I wish you would."

[Indigo]

Montmort sighed heavily, as though they'd been arguing about this for much longer than was actually the case. "There is a mass effort on right now to figure out what the hell's going on." She removed her fedora and turned it upside down in her lap, picking at the lining as she talked. "My hope is that you can help me get to the bottom of it before I have to resort to picking up one of those machines."

"If you have a problem working with sentient technology, I don't think I'm the person to help you, detective."

"No, of course not. The whole thing just seems so inefficient to me, dragging around these magical sniffer dogs—"

"I think you may have misunderstood the broadcast."

This made her pause for a second, hand hovering above her hat, and then resume her picking. "It's possible. Everything's been glitching out lately. It's enough to make you wish TV had never switched over to digital."

[Indigo]

"This," Lucius said, "does not strike me as you getting to the point." He gave the recalcitrant keyboard one last irritable tap and, finding no success, let his fingers come to rest sprawled over the keys. On arriving here he'd tried to get started on some research into the current circumstances—you could hardly address a problem without knowing anything about it, even if doing research the traditional way was unpleasantly time-consuming, and he wasn't about to go wandering around in the wilderness looking for patches of errant color, either. He was a delicate instrument and not entirely waterproof, just for starters.

His attempts to find information had been stymied almost immediately by an unnatural static that filled his screen more and more with everything he tried to dismiss it. Unnatural would likely seem like a strange word, to anyone else, since after all this was a computer, but it was different from the type of computer behavior he was used to. They did not typically harbor static, anyway, and even a layman should know that.

There were also the whispers. But witches were used to seeing and hearing things most people didn't, and Lucius especially, though usually it was just a radio station he was picking up.

[Indigo]

"You can get inside computers to fix them, right?" the detective said. "In a more...direct way than your average IT guy, I mean. And you told me your computer is acting up. I don't know why you didn't do this before I got here, but I want you to go in there and fix that thing, and tell me what you learn."

"No."

Montmort rolled her eyes. "Is this a witch thing? Fine, don't tell me what you learn, just do it, it'll help you too."

"You misunderstand me," he said. "I'm not going in there because this mysterious spooky glitchiness is everywhere, and I don't want it getting into my head. Do you know how much of me is electronics?"

"You don't have the right kind of voice for words like 'spooky'."

"Now who's not listening?"

[Indigo]

"I'm sympathetic to your issue," she said, "but it's already in people's heads even without your...enhancements, or whatever you want to call them. I assume they're enhancements. I don't actually know. I looked you up on LinkedIn, I didn't go through your medical records. Surely you've heard about the whispering and visions and whatnot even if it doesn't affect you."

He had not. He said, with sudden urgency, "What do you mean? Other people are hearing it too?"

"This was also in the broadcast, you know."

"This is bad," he said quietly. "This is very, very bad." He took another long drink of iced tea, trying to calm his now-frantic thoughts, but it didn't help.

[Indigo]

"So you know what it is?" In her excitement Montmort stood up in her chair, leaning eagerly across the table, her wings stretching under her oversized coat so it billowed out around her like a cape. In any other circumstances and if she were any other person, it might almost have been cute.

"Of course I don't know what it is," Lucius snapped. "But these whispers, visions—unless I'm entirely off the mark, and I rarely am but who even knows at this point, these are the result of magical spillover. The only people who normally pick up on those things are trained to do so, or innately magical in some other way, or maybe just...unusually sensitive. But that's rare. For it to be as widespread as you've indicated...I don't know what it is, but it's much worse than I thought."

[Indigo]

"Interesting," Montmort said, which didn't seem at all like the appropriate response. "But it doesn't tell me much of anything, you see, because I already assumed it was very bad. I mean, we are sitting in a world drained of color, except for these mysterious patches—one in each region? That seems very strange to me. It's all too...I don't know. Manufactured."

"Of course. Something like this? It was too sudden to be a natural magical disturbance, too complete. Someone is doing it. I can't fathom who, but—"

"And it's already affecting you, because you can hear the voices same as anyone else, right?"

"I don't know how much worse it might get," he said, and he was right and he knew he was right, but he was beginning to think it didn't matter so much, because he didn't have any innate defenses against whatever this was and it was probably going to get to him sooner or later, and at least this way he had a chance of fighting back.

"Fine," he said. "Fine. I'll open it up and see."

[Indigo]

The detective was watching him with unrestrained fascination, still leaning across the table, but he ignored her. Normally he could do this sort of thing without thinking, but it seemed wise to concentrate a little more on this occasion. He gripped his laptop in both hands in case it tried to do anything weird and closed his eyes.

Hard to describe what he saw when he did this, because it wasn't really seeing, it was a perception divorced from the traditional senses and then being retranslated through him so his brain could understand. Or something like that, he didn't fully understand the science behind it and everyone described this sort of thing a little differently.

What he saw, between what he couldn't help but think of as the nerves of the computer, were...things. Shadowy gray and black things, blurry things, things with piercing eyes, eyes that bore the only color he'd seen all day. Blue, and red, and both overlayed on top of each other. Some of them scampered in the framework like animals, while others simply blurred and were suddenly in another place.

As one, they met his gaze.

[Indigo]

He opened his eyes with a start, and Montmort was looking at him, her brow wrinkled in a frown. She said, "Are you okay? You've been sitting perfectly still for almost ten minutes, and you look kind of pale."

"I always look like that," he said slowly. His fingers felt strangely frozen, and it took considerable effort to pry them off the sides of the computer.

"I meant relative to how you looked when I got here." She seemed much more hesitant to prod him now, which did not improve his mood; he didn't want pity, he wanted to be left alone. She said, "Did you see anything?"

"I saw...some things. I don't know what they are." He took a long drink of the iced tea, and stood up, snapping his laptop shut. "Excuse me. I think I need to speak to a friend about this."

[Color Harvested]