Okay, first off. She does not sulk. Alexa has never sulked, will never sulk, cannot sulk. Sulking is not graceful, beautiful, brave, or strong. She does not sulk.

Now, with that said, there may or may not have been a period where she wandered the surface of Barassidar. And yes, there may have been a certain sulky quality to them. But that's not sulking! She fell from orbit! She was [i]recovering.[/i] There's a difference.

Honestly, Alexa doesn't remember much of that day. (She suspects it's probably for the best. She's been to the museum of victories, and it all seems strange, far off, like it happened to another person.  Which is weird, because there are other things about the exhibit that have always stuck out as being blatantly wrong and incorrect, like how the exhibit Molech's beard isn't rigidly regimented into carefully groomed plaits.) 

She remembers the viewscreen. She remembers the way the expanding cloud of glass framed Nero in a ring of kaleidoscopic reflections. She remembers the fall, the reentry. Remembers watching her hand glow as red as her eyes, remembers wondering whether she'd hit the ground as molten slag.

She doesn't remember the impact.  Again, it's probably for the best.

Most of the rest of the subsequent weeks was trying to get back to the palace. Trying to find landmarks that hadn't been destroyed, navigating through a land that was no longer home.  There wasn't any point, really--even from here, she could see the moment the [i]Spear[/i] went critical. Molech was dead, the war was over. 

But the alternative was just lying back to die.

She should have known better, really. Nero couldn't let the palace stand. In the end, the only way she got there was by following the smoke plumes.

Alexa doesn't know whether Nero thought to raid the records storage facilities when she sent the shuttle crews to destroy the palace. And she wasn't going to go off-base looking. But if she's here…

Well. Molech kept obsessive records, right? Citizen papers, citizen transfers, enslavement contracts, every detail in the empire had its paper trail. Nero wouldn't burn that, right? There's gotta be a record in there of where Minerva got sent.

It's not going to be useful. It's been over two centuries. She could be dead, or moved on. But… She has to at least try, right?

"I'm pretty sure the Pallas Rex is dead," she says softly. "And the galaxy is a better place for it."