— If a DDOS were launched on this website right now — if the feds came crashing down and an emote of a DPRK soldier took the entire server with it — this woman would hurl herself in death’s way to post for you. You are sure of this —but why?
— Hold on, who is she to me?
— She is your half-sister.
-1 MORALE
[Impossible: Failure] — You are submerged deep within the milieu of news cycles and chauvinism, and you are drowning. Air. You need air. It burns at the corners of your eyes and claws at your throat. Everything hurts. If this is the way it’s going to be, you don’t know if you can keep going.
— How could you, when everything is so terrible?
[Challenging: Success] — A world away, further than any place you’ll ever go, a young boy sits outside a crumbling, concrete apartment block. Sea spray and smoke swirl through the air together, salty and acrid, coating the world in a shade grayer than usual. He sits and stares up at the sky, at the planes carrying missiles overhead, and he listens for the sounds of catching powders and marching footsteps. He sits with two million siblings. None of them may make it to tomorrow. The sufficiently old and sufficiently able take to the streets. The shelters and tunnels curling beneath them like veins tremble against the tension.
— Have they given up?
— No. They haven’t. And that means neither can you.
— Ooh, yeah, baby! This right here is gonna make the last three days worth it. A fat syringe full of clear, medical-grade, Federally-backed estrogen. Aqueous estradiol valerate, to be precise.
— What happens when I inject myself with estrogen?
— Oh, no. No, no, no. Don’t tell me you forgot what estrogen does. Estrogen. Remember? Uh…anticistamines? Feminephrine?
[Hard: Success] — You haven’t forgotten. Generally speaking, patients undergoing hormone replacement treatments will experience a variety of physiological and mental changes. Drier skin, growth of breast tissue, weight redistribution, decrease of body hair growth, shifts in facial fat and musculature. Emotional changes vary wildly between individuals, but are often reported to be “intense”.
— Bzzt. Wrong. Estrogen is like junk, baby. A calm, soothing, smooth-like-butter body high. A referral letter from two medical professionals and a couple of shed tears in a therapist’s chair are the only things keeping every sucker on the street from turning into an E-junkie. Getting it is hard; stopping after you’ve had your first sweet shot is even harder. This is serious shit. And now it’s all yours. Shoot it up!