The Coo Coos

You who labour and toil, who put your shoulders to the wheel, upon whose work the system rests:

Workers of the worlds, unite!

Is it your bosses in Emporium who venture out into the warehouses, risking life and wing to retrieve goods for customers?

Does your manager at Orbital – earning three times your pay, three times the perks – work even one third as hard as you do?

If your work is safe, your overseers humble, your job secure – how are you going to keep it that way when a consultant comes along and decides to start cutting corners?

Remember who it is who holds the power. You know how to make everything, how to do anything, how to create abundance, and the necessary conditions for happiness for us all. But to put that knowledge to work – to defend your dignity and standard of living – requires organisation and cooperation. To get this – and keep us safe - requires organization as a class – the One Big Trans-Planar Union.

Whether you are our brothers in Orbital Offices, working comfortable but increasingly lengthy days wrangling company databases; whether you are a sister bandaging yourself up after a trip into the Deep Stacks; whether you’re a sibling who’s just worked a difficult till a whole season, making Emporium a hundred soulcoins in profits for a measly soulcoin’s wage – stand together! Stand with us! Alone you’re weak, but united, we’re strong!

This is a world you built – let’s claim it together.

Join the Coo-coos.

- Pamphlet, found in the Emporium breakroom.

… so, I don’t know what it was that did it, but something’s snapped. Something about this cohort of customers and employees has destabilised things, catalysed some pretty major changes. Obviously a lot of this is due to long-standing movements like the Coo-coos, but something about the current ferment has had some pretty major ripples going outwards. Here are the latest things I’ve observed from my ‘perch’ in here.

• Foundouq-LVII is one of the Orbital Conglomerate’s shipping, freight, and haulage agencies. Emporium mostly uses its own in-house couriers, but most of everything else goes through the various Foundouq subsidiaries. They’re mostly asking for increased security and hazard pay when they’re transporting goods to dangerous locations; something along the lines of ‘if Orbital has all these heavies on its payroll, how come we don’t get the same level of protection when we’re visiting the Seventeen Hells of Ghraz’th’klax’. I don’t know if he’s directly involved, but they’re using a lot of lines that Ron has used here in Emporium.

• The Propriocept Security Agency is in an uproar at what Paramountcy did. A lot of the junior staff are deeply unhappy that their name got dragged through the dirt by a rogue agent, and have started very publicly cleaning house top to bottom. Asserting more democratic control and accountability, that sort of thing. The fact that Survei - one of the senior partners - has joined them, and Orbital’s management have tacitly approved this, makes it less of an outright coup, but it’s still striking. Also, peep the references to the ‘Sunset clause’ in a lot of their demands – I didn’t know what to make of it at first, but there’s a lot of lower-level employees who seem to be opting for a more rehabilitationist/abolitionist approach to their security work, following the Voidbound Indigo example.

• The Worshipful Guild of Weavers, which is a non-Orbital group with a lot of Entities with similar citizenship status to the Coo-coos, has gone into full revolt - it’s early days yet, but sources suggest that there’s been a full-scale workers’ takeover against the old Guildmasters. From everything that I’ve gathered, rumours of Liberty (Ashen or no) turning up were completely false, but that wasn’t necessary, it seems. Just the idea seems to have set people off. Everyone’s holding their breath to see whether or not they succeed, and, if they do, it looks like a lot of their contractors are going to recognise them as a rightful successor corporation.

• Phthalo-Rapporteur, one of the major interplanar news and investigative organisations, have declared that next Autumn (as measured by Emporium standards), they’re going to be running a special issue that’s focused around the status and living standards of Entities who lose their homes, or a significant part of their identity. Everyone from orphans like Ezbihotz and the Coo-coos, to people who’ve been lost significantly trying to use services like Emporium to put their planes back together, like Seeps and Eraiki. P-R isn’t the most progressive group, and who knows what their editorial line is going to be going forward, but they’re interested in talking to some of us. And to you, if you want to take them up on the interview (no pressure if not).

• I am aware of at least eight self-described ‘Coo-coo Affiliates’ in other worlds, who have, emboldened by the news of Paramountcy’s demise, stood up and started organising and politically becoming active. There’s people training themselves on ‘Ragnar-inspired martial arts’ as a kind of community-based self-defence method. Queen help us all.

Anyway – so, that’s the view from Emporium, and what a little bird has told me. Things continue to get more tense but also more exciting here, so …

- Extract from a letter. Kerral to [REDACTED].

Ciel is bored. Kicking her feet back and forth, it’s the Spring after one of the most eventful years of her life, and so little seems to be happening! The relief and piece and quiet lasted, oh, about two weeks – it was good not to have to have the Store disintegrating around her quite so much, and to have fewer existence-shattering brawls going on down the hall in the Atrium – but it the calm is getting to her now, and she’s procrastinating from writing the new edition of the Ciel Worlds Factbook. This is all so BO-RING.

Right on cue, an automated alert chimes. One of the perimeter sensors she’s rigged up around Emporium (and tweaked to be incredibly sensitive, in case they picked any interesting distractions up – guess that paid off) has just been tripped, and she rushes over to the monitor to have a look.

That … was not what she expected.

Detaching itself from the parking lot of Emporium is a space ship. No – not quite. It just looks like a space ship because it’s against a field of stars. But on closer inspection – much of it appears to be … wicker. Basketwork. Insulated against the void of the inter-universal gulf, but unmistakeably woven basketwork, with stencilled Emporium logos visible on some of the modules. Pressurised hallways – that look suspiciously like they’ve been adapted from tents – join them, as does a myriad of other repurposed gear and materiel. Scrap metal from the Edge of Emporium. Shipping containers from the Warehouses. Hydroponics ‘liberated’ from the Grow Zone. Intricate, difficult-to-identify gossamer things from Conceptual, and machines from Hardware. It’s fractal – the closer she looks, the more complex and well-engineered it gets. Not ramshackle, but redundant, lovingly crafted, and sturdy. At the rear of this basket-monstrosity, the whole thing seems to be powered by a mirrored silver lozenge, an honest-to-goodness flying saucer – at the prow, there is a battered old basket, complete with a painted sign over the nosecone. Zoom in. What does it say?

‘The … Freedom … Bus?’

Somehow, the pilot senses the attention, and looks right into the telescope. She’s an unfamiliar Chimera – wearing the insignia of the Justice Caucus (weren’t they disbanded?) and a Kerbie perched on her shoulder. She gives a wave, before looking back to her controls. Next to her, a short, grey-skinned, black-eyed cryptid – one of the Lost Comms brigade? – scrambles up on the controls, grinning wildly.

They can’t see her – only the lens of the telescope, tracking them as they leave. Even so – Ciel waves back, heart glad.

The Coo-coos – free, unbound, looking for a new place to call their home, and to spread their message of freedom and liberation – sail out into an uncertain multiverse. Good luck, Ciel thinks. You'll need it.