[b]Redana![/b]

The walls are coming down. Dionysus is behind them all.

Things of safety and security are no longer so. Things of danger and peril shake under your shadow. The panels of the ship open like flower petals chasing a solar bulb around the room and behind them all is painted masks and whirring machinery. You have come through revelation into madness and the ground you walk on is unstable.

Your shadow spreads out from you like a wildfire. It steps around behind you and breaks and burns when you aren't looking. It hangs immanent in the world and like never before you have yourself to fear. The Laughing God smiles at you with a frowning mask and fills your pockets with matches.

Above all, this feeling demands action. If you do not act you will crash. If you do not swim you will cease. If you do not fix yourself you shall break the world as is your right as Empress.

[b]Alexa![/b]

"Got it," said Ramses without a second's hesitation. "Have you settled on a new name yet, or is the journey still ongoing? Or would you prefer to move on from the topic for now?"

There's a practiced, almost ritual cant to those words. The Coherent of the Order regard remaking the self as a holy ideal and there's a practiced gentleness and lack of push to Ramses' speech here. It occurs that if anybody in the whole galaxy who would hear you out it would be they.

[b]Vasilia![/b]

"Who else would make my coleslaw?" said Iskarot, sounding genuinely baffled as his head came up from over the fridge's torn out insides. Then, without switching a beat, he went on about the fridge: "Behold. See the improvisational nature to the periweave lattice? This model was manufactured two hundred and fifty years ago following the removal of the human population to Tellus. These components were manufactured by craftservitors who were overcome with passionate emotions; despair, confusion, so forth. Exactly the wrong energy to maintain something that is required to be as steadfast and immobile as a refrigerator."

He leaves the thought there as he continues to work, seemingly heedless of the awkward silence left in his wake. Magos Iskarot is not, it seems, particularly talented at small talk.

[b]Dolce![/b]

Your plan starts falling apart almost as soon as it had begun. The next day you missed up the timing and arrived at the day care after everyone had left on a field trip and suddenly you found yourself without fuzzy defenses. You're accustomed to Hestia quietly shielding you with a cloak of mundanity but you've taken a hesitant footstep into some entirely different world. Zeus lives here and you can feel the crackle of her momentum, her impatience, her excitement. 

You have had some time to think and plan but you will have no more. The gods are hungry.

[b]Bella![/b]

"Of course I'll help you!" said Thist with a wink. "I'm your attorney!" 

You feel a strange kind of safety with that. You know that look on Thist's face: that's contentment. You're not quite sure what it's like to feel that emotion but you know people who are experiencing it aren't threats. All their desires are satisfied and there's nothing more they can think to ask. It's the emotion that comes right before you're about to be dismissed, the emotion that means you did something right. But Thist isn't a superior and her contentment doesn't come with a dismissal - instead her posture and mannerisms become servile and obedient. 

It's an alien transition, as alien as the Azura herself. Normally there is a master and a servant, and when someone is confused about which one they are things End Badly. But here Thist played a threatening role right up until she got what she wanted and now she's genuinely demurring and looking to do what [i]you[/i] want without resistance. Like it's the most natural thing in the world and not a weird bargain you came up with just now.

"Not a lot of call for wine these days, since the humans went," said Thist, slithering out of her chair and moving fluidly over to the door. "There's plenty just lying around in the old buildings though. Aldin! Go find some human wine for my client, that's a good girl, and pick me up some strawberry bread while you're at it." She closed the door and sidled onto an ottoman where she could stretch out across from you. "Who are you looking for, and where do you want to go?"