The bottle is warm in her hand. Not the welcome sort of warm that suggests a hot thermos of coffee waiting to push her on after a long day of freezing her hands fixing coolant lines. And not the tingling sort of warm of the nape of a certain neck that she could touch all she wanted while she lost herself in braiding luxurious golden strands of hair. It's just warm. It's warm because it's been sitting forgotten in a desk drawer for who the fuck knows how long, and tastes just strongly enough to suggest that it'd go down better if it was chilled. 

She squeezes it. Twists it around with her wrist to watch the liquid inside slosh lazily about. The material is smooth, and feels hard against her fingers. It disgusts her. She's taken with a sudden urge to hurl it into a wall, or simply shatter it against her claw tips, but the gnawing emptiness inside her won't go away. It's been so long; she is so very hungry. She takes another slow and careful swig, instead, and watches Thist through her hollow golden eye.

"...Empress Nero IV Acontecimento [i]Azurius[/i] has reigned for two hundred and fifty years."

XIII pauses to brush her fingers against her throat. Her voice sounds funny in her ears. Tight. Clipped. Straining. She lingers on the space where even now her skin is paler from the years it spent hiding under a collar. She drowns a cough in another shot of her drink, before it can unmake her all over again.

"In her wisdom she declared the reaches of space were dangerous," her face twists into a scowl. What's the matter with her? Did she spend all those years memorizing the lines from the museum just to recite them like a broken gramophone now? "...That the storms and distance had made enemies and strangers of what should have been family. She, she constructed the... throne world Tellus to be her seat of power. She has. Ruled there ever since. Humanity has been safe ever since."

Her cheeks burn with pink, which only makes her frown deepen. She chugs the rest of the industrial fluids without breathing. What the fuck is wrong with her? Her blood is becoming iron chains inside her body, squeezing every joint and organ until the act of sitting here and watching Thist not react hurts near as much as a whipping. Her vision swims. She stubbornly keeps her lid shut tight over the Auspex. Her fingers massage her scalp again, harder and more desperately. The unseen hand the keeps correcting her posture and teasing new words from her lungs now grabs her wrist and squeezes before she can claw the veins that are crushing her to death open. Which god? Which god keeps tormenting her like this?

She barks with laughter. Broken, pitted, fake and ugly for how obviously forced it is. 

"The value of civilization is measured by its distance from Tellus, cretin. D-don't blame me that you were stupid enough to crawl around on our scraps and call it conquest when we couldn't be bothered to swat you back off of it! And yes, there [i]is[/i] a Princess!" here at last she puffs out her chest, finding the pride she'd been chasing this whole useless fucking conversation, "She's the daughter of Empress Nero and no less than Zeus herself! And she's... a fucking moron. She's a drooling, useless jock [i]bitch[/i] who's sitting on the power of a monster who could crush everything in your empire to bits."

Her red eye forces itself open. XIII sits on the couch with her spine locked painfully straight all the way down to the tip of her tail. Her breath is thin and forced through her nostrils in such shallow bursts that anyone would have to be inches from her face to see that she was breathing at all. The Auspex burns cold inside her socket as it watches Thist's coins, whether she wills it to or not. XIII sneers with the dismissive and absolute triumph of a person who has at last puzzled out the weak point of her opponent. 

"I don't know what kind've bullshit your philosophers and textbooks have been feeding you," she preens, "But you're even dumber than those old novels made you look if you really think you're the superior species to Humans. They're perfect, down to the least one of them. And you've built an entire civilization around the same table scraps a reject servitor like me uses for worship? That's pathetic."

She opens her mouth to laugh, but the sound doesn't come. She watches Thist with caution where she should want triumph, and doesn't even notice the tear running down her cheek.