[b]Alexa and Skotos![/b]

The difficulty with assessing a situation like this is that you have no idea what is relevant. The Azura overwhelm you with information that you lack context for. 

Consider the ancient and withered Azura woman with a cybernetic lower jaw, dripping with cables, holding aloft an elaborately woven tapestry banner that would be the prize of any royal court; it depicts who you presume to be the woman herself stabbing a dagger into the heart of a star. How do you strike up a conversation with her? Consider the Azura with her tail coiled around a floating sphere as it carries her down the street, torso held up straight in a meditative posture, surrounded by flashing fireballs and comets that ignite flammable objects nearby. Is that person going to create more problems than they solve? Perhaps you want to try your luck for assistance with the Azura philosopher who is screaming existential questions at the top of her lungs at passing birds, and when they do not answer her she reverses gravity, launches herself seventy five feet into the air, and snaps them out of the sky with her jaws.

There are less strange Azura too, to be certain, this isn't a society of madsnakes. But some of them wear enormous hats, some of them are those eerie Party members with their divergent red-toned-black sashes, some of them look too young and beautiful to drag into this. They're distracting. They're opulent and proud and laden with meaning and each alien deed leaves you more and more uncertain. You can't tell what is normal and what is scandalous, you can't tell what the signs for danger and for safety are. And while you're busy staring, Alexa, you turn to notice that Skotos has been caught.

They hadn't snuck up on her across an empty square - the distances are too wide and the space is too open for that kind of stealth. Instead they've rolled marble-sized grav-spheres across the ground. Following some strange manipulation those spheres have rolled up her ankles and locked into place like a ring of pearls. Having done that, when now they move they drag Skotos' legs along with them, frog-marching her towards one of the abundant empty buildings. This, however, is not gracefully done - the Azura criminals don't have too much experience puppeteering bipeds and so Skotos is carried at a too rapid clip, limbs swinging wildly off balance.

[b]Vasilia and Dolce![/b]

The problem, as your advisors explain to you, is that you are [i]irrelevant[/i]. The Azura are absorbed in their own politics, the intensity of which has done nothing but grow over the course of recent years. You represent a single starship, and [i]perhaps[/i] an empire they considered buried over two hundred years ago. You have not bought them wondrous gifts, you have not bought destabilizing military force, you have not bought them anything they did not have or know already. Frankly speaking, you have nothing the Azura want. Even Redana's claim as an Imperial Princess falls on deaf ears here - to think you were worried they would seek to detain her for that reason! Instead you are but mayflies, primitives, barbarians washed up on the shores of true civilization without understanding a single matter of true importance. And so your fate turns on the only person of political importance who gives any sort of damn at all, a middlingly ranked Senator who can put all the bored contempt that the grandees of this place have for you into words.

This is a [i]perilous[/i] state to be in. The entire machinery of the Skies threatens to turn on you for the convenience of it. What you need, what you [i]desperately[/i] need, is some local political ally. Someone who can give a damn on your behalf.

The options for that, given your current state, are limited. You don't know who these people are or what they want. But you do have some clues. Thist's oration is, as you noted, light on specifics - this isn't a criminal trial that hinges on reasonable doubt. This means that she's seeking to gain status through eloquent speech and the content of the speech matters less than the delivery. In fact, right now she's in the process of tearfully accusing a hypothetical member of the audience of doubting her courage and sincerity and - oh, oh [i]my[/i], she's just ripped off her toga to the waist and she's got nothing underneath. And now she's pointing at each of her many scars and explaining at length how she received them in service to the Shah and Skies. And now there are noble tears of patriotic pride glistening on her cheeks. That's a [i]flex[/i] of a rhetorical flourish. You'll have to give some real showmanship if you're going to compete with that.

That, or figure out something that you have that makes you more important than Senator Thist's political career. Or figure out a sufficiently brazen lie. 

[b]XIII![/b]

The opening of the Ikarani tomb is a religious ritual of sufficient intensity to make anyone watching wonder, at least a little, if a mistake is being made.

All the ship's navigation charts - masterpieces of calligraphy and hand-copied illuminated diagrams of the galaxy - are piled up and set ablaze. When the fire is burned low everyone in attendance files past and puts a handful of ashes into their mouth. Then as a group you all mumble-cough-chant a prayer to Artemis as the Master of Assassins reads out the full, unambigious text of what she desires from the Goddess. For Vasilia, death. For Alexa, death. For Dolce, death. For Iskarot, death. For the Order of Hermes, death or ruin. For the crew of the Plousios, death or ruin. For Redana, imprisonment and subjugation. Her golden teeth glisten with a smile unblackened by the ashes, and her voice is no more papery or less kindly as she pronounces dark judgement on Redana's ill-fated expedition. 

Death. Death. Death. Just like that. Despite everything that Nero - but the Master of Assassins has that right. When Nero took away the punishment of death from her Empire, that was no doubt because she had chosen to invest that power with her Master of Assassins alone. This was the only legitimate exercise of lethal force in the galaxy.

And then the Master steps aside and with the hiss and clank of pressurization ceasing, the doors open.

Violet eyes amidst the haze.

You are to keep chanting, but it's different now - now you're reading off a script provided to you by the Master of Assassins. Everyone here has a different one. Mathematical formulae. Names and dates. Descriptions of people. Information. Five hundred voices babbling random facts and details in a flowing and fearful river, a discordant crash of noise.

Not one drop is wasted. Those violet eyes watch with steady calm as the information pours in. Every word a hammerstrike against the marble, each chip revealing a little more of the transcendent killing machine underneath.

She's beautiful. Beautiful in the way Redana almost might be. Objectively, it's really only the blonde hair she has in common with the Princess - she's too curvy, too tall, too intense. But then those eyes flick towards you and she [i]winks[/i], and somehow the terrible mysticism of the moment feels entirely off balance and undermined.