also! i know you’ve mentioned quite a few times before in posts/fics about how party and kobra really only met right before they left the city? and i’m not entirely sure if i’ve just missed it but i would LOVE for elaboration specifically on that. i just!! am super interested to know about them and their lives in the city...and how everything shakes out regarding that 👀

!!!! okay thats def one of the more obscure bits of my canon? bc in universe party and kobra dont rlly like talking about it and on a meta level city life isnt rlly something i wanna devote too much energy to writing but i HAVE thought abt it!

i covered it a little bit in this fic but some details have shifted a bit just irt kobras job/timeline bc its over (i think?) a year old and its short so. not super elaborate

so when i say that they hadnt really met before leaving the city its like. they knew each other and lived with each other but they weren't really themselves. party bc of like. reeducation and kobra bc he was really fucked up with a combination of dysphoria and city drugs both prescribed and not (which i *think* ive mentioned arent a given in the city? most people dont get medicated the same way kobra did and not all the city meds are bad)

i will say that they were pretty close before party got reeducated. as close as u can be when ur thirteen and eight at least. but ofc he got taken and came back Completely different and kobra was a smart kid and kinda realized that directly confronting him abt the change would end really badly for both of them. party was rlly susceptible to the reeducation and its not their fault in any way but they definitely would have reported kobra if he'd tried to make a move.

so then once kobra snapped and cut his hair and party snapped out of the reeducation (combination of time since getting bleached and like. still being a caring and loving person under it all and knowing that he should care abt kobra) they escaped obviously and had to do a little crash course in 'how to be siblings' bc until then they were more just. people that lived in the same house and had nothing in common to talk about so they jsut didnt. i hope that makes sense? they knew each other but they didnt Really Know each other

as for what life in the city looked like for them!

i feel like its kinda important to know that their parents were low-level workers so they grew up in the slums on the edge of the city. not the worst part of the city (the lobby) but not downtown or even a suburban area.

party (post reeducation) became a total model student and ended up in a mid/high-level admin position in hq as soon as he graduated, set to get a promotion when he turned 20 and was in the process of trying to move out to a place of his own actually. kept getting their applications rejected bc they didnt have an "approved reason" to not live w their parents (no long-term partner and not a high enough level to qualify for one of the downtown studios). wasn't necessarily getting frustrated with the company but was getting frustrated with not being able to "start his own life" in his own apartment yknow? also a bit of a superiority complex/classism thing bc of having a higher-level job than their parents, wanting to live in a nicer part of the city like the rest of their colleagues. he had a Few friends, mostly from work, but it was nothing like the crew and friends hed had pre-reeducation bc. you know. obviously. it was just a little group of polite, well trained late-teens bli drones who got up to just the right amounts of bli-approved trouble (android girls and mood synthesizers but only on saturdays type deal). um. probably the least bli-approved thing they did was give spare carbons to broken-down droids in street corners and pretend to listen to the ones preaching the graffiti bible. This is all actually a huge reason Why party is so wanted by bli, like apart from the obvious of being a killjoy and fucking up a lot of shit for the company, he was also So close to being a perfect citizen that rebelling and escaping is a real lemon-juice-in-the-papercut for bli

kobra, on the other hand, was about one and a half Minor infractions away from getting reeducated himself. bli mostly saves reeducation and bleaching for people with confirmed rebellious biases or actions, people they dont think would be trusted enough to take their pills basically. theyd get fed up after enough violations though. kobra was on watch as a nuisance, but not a rebel, so he got away with attempts at medication and therapy that were... kinda effective? but he was Really pushing it especially once he got his job in the lobby and started running with lobby kids. really just imagine an absolute menace shithead of a fourteen year old breaking every law he could get his well-manicured but grubby little hands on. i think at some point ive mentioned that half the reason kobra was so good with tech and wiring was bc he picked it up from fucking with scarecrow cars and reprogramming shit about them? yeah. im not gonna say kobra's friends were like. a bad crowd. they were just chafing against city culture in a very specific way. lots of sex, violence, vandalism, underage mood synthesizer use (and by underage i mean even below the technically-underage-but-bli-looks-the-other-way-bc-they-know-people-need-to-feel-rebellious-sometimes age that like. party and his friends started trying them at). this is when he learned how to knife fight too which definitely saved both his and party's life the first night in the zones. on top of this all is the whole trans thing which isnt something thats necessarily frowned upon in the city, but when kobra finally realized what was up he went about it in a non-city-approved way (hacking his hair off with a set of nail clippers rather than like. submitting a transition application) and that absolutely would have been the last straw for him for the city if party had reported him rather than stuffed him in their car and left.

i dont know how to tldr this one but like. they both led really different lives in the city, kobra being rebellious and breaking laws but not in a killjoy way and party being So close to being a perfect citizen as a result of getting reeducated when he was thirteen, so they weren't honest with each other until party's bleaching broke and they left the city and THATS why i say they hadnt really met until they escaped.