(Thinking is always welcome! :D I'm always glad to toss around ideas and plug up plotholes and characterization squooginess. And is probably also evident, I can babble about braintics for a long time.)
One of the things I'm having a lot of fun with is Neal's reaction to his wardrobe; Peter pretty much drives Neal to June's to get him situated, and says he can pic up actual clothes for him, and June says oh, no, he looks like he might fit into some of Byron's old things, and if those don't work, she can have one of her people go fetch things, and Peter should go and not be horribly late for dinner with Elizabeth. You know, just normally late.
So Neal gets the run of Byron's suits, which puts him in a complicated position. On the one hand, they're fantastic social camouflage – they're clearly clothes that put him into a certain assumed class and would get him all the attendant respect of that. Among people who don't know he's a Conditional Citizen. Among people who do, well, let's just say that there are certain social expectations about things which conds should and should not be enjoying as they serve out their sentence, and wandering around in bespoke suits (even if they are hand-me-down bespoke suits) and silk ties is apt to generate a lot of hostility if people can identify him as a cond.
...that quandary is sharpened a little by the fact that obscure governmental regulations mean that when Neal gets his lease seized by the FBI, the responsibility for tracking him moves from the Department of Corrections to the US Marshals, so the usual tracker (which is a big, ugly grey kludge which necessarily fits under most pant legs, because otherwise how would you dress, but does tend to leave noticeable bulges) gets replaced by a next-generation model with a more accurate GPS which looks more or less like the tracker from the series, S2 and on. So it actually can slip under a trouser leg unobtrusively, and might not be something which people would immediately connect to the public image of a CCCR shackle. So he gets to obliterate a lot of the friction he deals with in everyday interactions... in exchange for setting himself a lot more friction to overcome at work, and anytime he meets someone in a professional capacity where they know he's in the system.
In the beginning the choice is more or less made for him, because that's what he's provided, but as he does get the opportunity to get different clothes if he feels the need to, he eventually decides that he can work with that tradeoff. In large part because Peter has enough weight in the department that people who have a problem with Neal are going to have that sentiment mediated through Peter. And Peter seems to regard this with a kind of Well, this is what happens when you leave someone alone with June resignation, and doesn't have so much of his pilot-episode snippiness about how things are earned in the real world. (He still finds it ridiculous, but it's a different kind of ridiculous.) (It is really fun, playing with Peter and June being friends before Neal meets either one of them.)
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One of the things I'm having a lot of fun with is Neal's reaction to his wardrobe; Peter pretty much drives Neal to June's to get him situated, and says he can pic up actual clothes for him, and June says oh, no, he looks like he might fit into some of Byron's old things, and if those don't work, she can have one of her people go fetch things, and Peter should go and not be horribly late for dinner with Elizabeth. You know, just normally late.
So Neal gets the run of Byron's suits, which puts him in a complicated position. On the one hand, they're fantastic social camouflage – they're clearly clothes that put him into a certain assumed class and would get him all the attendant respect of that. Among people who don't know he's a Conditional Citizen. Among people who do, well, let's just say that there are certain social expectations about things which conds should and should not be enjoying as they serve out their sentence, and wandering around in bespoke suits (even if they are hand-me-down bespoke suits) and silk ties is apt to generate a lot of hostility if people can identify him as a cond.
...that quandary is sharpened a little by the fact that obscure governmental regulations mean that when Neal gets his lease seized by the FBI, the responsibility for tracking him moves from the Department of Corrections to the US Marshals, so the usual tracker (which is a big, ugly grey kludge which necessarily fits under most pant legs, because otherwise how would you dress, but does tend to leave noticeable bulges) gets replaced by a next-generation model with a more accurate GPS which looks more or less like the tracker from the series, S2 and on. So it actually can slip under a trouser leg unobtrusively, and might not be something which people would immediately connect to the public image of a CCCR shackle. So he gets to obliterate a lot of the friction he deals with in everyday interactions... in exchange for setting himself a lot more friction to overcome at work, and anytime he meets someone in a professional capacity where they know he's in the system.
In the beginning the choice is more or less made for him, because that's what he's provided, but as he does get the opportunity to get different clothes if he feels the need to, he eventually decides that he can work with that tradeoff. In large part because Peter has enough weight in the department that people who have a problem with Neal are going to have that sentiment mediated through Peter. And Peter seems to regard this with a kind of Well, this is what happens when you leave someone alone with June resignation, and doesn't have so much of his pilot-episode snippiness about how things are earned in the real world. (He still finds it ridiculous, but it's a different kind of ridiculous.) (It is really fun, playing with Peter and June being friends before Neal meets either one of them.)