[b]Redana and Bella![/b] Beautiful has her hands over her ears. There has been a [i]lot[/i] of screaming in the past few minutes and she honestly isn't up to speed on any of it. She glances back and forth with her wide violet eyes before experimentally lifting her hands off her ears. As she does the cthonian fist in the heavens above shifts like a serpent. "Oh, huh, uh, I'm not involved in whatever this is," said the girl with the mind and power of a god. "I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd totally go for it in different circumstances, but I'm not in a position where I can really do a committed relationship. Unless..." and her violet eyes go wide as she looks up at the stars. "[i]Unless[/i] I can make you an Olympian too. It's a tricky problem, but not unachievable with the materials on hand. After all, you've already got Hermes' eye." She tilted her head as she looked at Redana's Auspex. "Both of them actually. Wow, those are gorgeous." She flexed her hand and her enormous cosmic fist transformed into a vast and multifaceted map, and with flicks of her fingers Beautiful sent waves of cosmic information blurring through the sky like swarms of starlings. "Look, I'm aware I'm going a bit off mission," she said, "but what is the mission, really? Is it to capture Redana? Or is it to make Bella happy? Pretty straightforwards when I put it like that! Ascend Bella to godhood and that'll neatly resolve most issues going on here!! She'll be able to date who she likes, not have to worry about power imbalances, have time to come to grips with her trauma!!! Do gods get heartbroken? No time to test. Resonance amplification possible, but I'll need both of the eyes. Hell yeah!!!!! I [i]knew[/i] there would be an answer that would make everyone happy!!!!!!" She snaps her fingers a few time absently, each click causing a sonic boom in the atmosphere, until a trembling Beljani approaches her. "Hey, Jan, need your help on this, we're pretty short on time. Get your girls to grab them both and cut out their eyes." [b]Alexa![/b] In the Engine Room there are two stars. One is the Engine itself, mighty and bleeding. The containment has been disengaged and the semi-molten engine core has been withdrawn from its shielding. Imagine a long metal rod the length of of a semitrailer and many times as dense, glowing hot, as a star burns within its increasingly thin shell of fuel. It has emerged from the vast structure of the Engine that contains and regulates this process and sits, sizzling metal, upon the floor. It would require heavy machinery to push it back into the Engine, even though it is only a few meters away - heavy machinery or an act of heroism for the ages. If you were to push it you may lose every one of your arms from the cosmic heat. But that is not the only peril here. Drawn here, like blood to the drain, is the final battle of Lorventi and Epistia. Each movement brings rack and ruin. It accumulates slowly, because even the gods find Engines stubborn things to break, but it accumulates nevertheless as Ares splits in two and boils hotter than the released sun. But even through the chaos, something is clear. Epistia is winning. Lorventi is a run of cuts and missing extremities. Epistia has barely been hurt and she is burning even brighter than when she started. It has been a long time since you have seen a champion of Ceron about her work, but this girl is now as they were then: a breaker of Empires. An ender of ages. The genetic alchemy of violence in its most pure form finally engaging in its true purpose, and oh, there is instinctual, neurologically programmed [i]joy[/i] in her now. You've seen that look in the eyes of Ceron warriors in ages past. You wonder now as you did then how Nero ever put creatures of such profound bloodlust back in their box. [b]Vasilia![/b] The Furnace Knight sat in a silence you eventually come to realize was troubled. He looks at his own hands, at his rows of weapons, at the endless azure seas. "You were..." he said slowly. "... wise to realize that you had a choice in that moment. Courageous to seize it." The wind blows from the west, and Hades flicks a cigarette butt into the ocean below. "However the story ends," said the ancient warrior, "it was not a failure. Know this from someone who lacked your virtues." [b]Dolce![/b] "I want a world where nobody has to be afraid," said Jil the mouse, quietly looking out into the dark. She takes a deep breath. The fear is plain to see in every twitch of her whiskers. She adores Bella because Bella was both powerful and kind. She used her power to protect those beneath her. That is a kindness that Jil can understand, that is comprehensible. A kind ruler is easier to imagine than the end of reality as she knows it - the end of a world where power can flow in the other direction. But, just for today, impossibility is on the table. She hefted her shotgun. "But in the short term, I'll take a world where villains are afraid of me."