Flashes Of Light

Past - Percie

Michaim Toutatis told us that day was the first we could go out on the town.

True, he also told us most of the messages we had to spread must wait. So far, we only had to stick by the rules and do the things he'd instructed us to do.

"Bring chaos everywhere," he said. "In the image of our Grenade, Sveta Metis. She will tell you what to do."

There was a fight, because Logar did not want to do what Sveta told him to. This was the night before we went out on the town.

"Screw it, let's go without him," Lix said. She had her rifle under her right arm, she was smoking a cigarette, and she was dressed like a punk.

"Yes, we can very well do without him," Sveta replied. She made an impression even without trying to. Her hair was beautiful, but wild. Her blue eyes looked at most people as if she either hated them or distrusted them, and her body was slim and athletic in the boyish suits The Anti had bought for her and Lix, and that Lix had ditched.

I was the only one who made an effort to look elegant, with clothes in grey silk, the cheapest silk you could find. My hair was kept short and often slicked back. I was often told I looked handsome. I didn't know if I played the part of a rebel well, but at least once Logar had told me that I really looked like a Diplomat.

Which was a compliment. Sort of.

In that moment, the door opened, but it wasn't Michaim.

It was Logar and, holy shit, I could not believe what he just did. I didn't like him that much, but I couldn't help it. I started clapping my hands, and Sveta started laughing. We both recognized the amazing idea for what it was.

You see, we always teased Logar during the first days for his 'yellow' hair, and so he'd gone and dyed it yellow for real! And it was hideous, gloriously hideous. He'd used those cheap Japanese hair dyes, Shiawasena Kami, that looked like off-brand Manic Panic. The colour was about the same as Manic Panic's sunshine, but somehow even more terrible, in a punch-in-the-gut sort of way.

"Oh my god," Sveta finally said. "Your hair is yellow!"

"Really?" Logar asked. "I haven't noticed."

We were all very warm about the change, and we decided that he would have made a long-lasting impression on the people of the town, with his black clothes, his black umbrella and his banana yellow hair. I know things only went south because we encouraged him, but back then it was impossible not to. Say what you will, the guy was a genius.

Our first stop was walking the streets of the centre while the wealthy were eating at the restaurants. I think that, a few decades ago, it would have been televised, or we would have made a live stream on a social network such as Tik Tok. What really made us stand out was Michaim insisting we didn't use social media, and we did things the natural way. Actually, he and Logar did agree on a couple of things, one of those being the choice of not using socials.

Logar used to say that doing things the natural, primitive way brought out real, genuine emotions in people who expected that things, nowadays, were just for show, and couldn't wrap their minds around why you'd dress and act like that in real life.

Not that there was anything similar to us on Tik Tok either way. We had a sniper, we were supposed to bring Sveta's impoverished and abused past into the faces of every wealthy person out there, and we had a Messiah who was really a Visionary who was paid to have seizures and yellow hair. I often felt like the odd one out, but my job was perhaps the most peculiar. Being the barrier between them and the world. Deciding what stayed and what went.