[b]Redana![/b]

"Hmmph! Hrmph!" Iskarot grumble-hisses when hugged, with an irritability only shown as false by the lack of claws. "Redana. Do you wonder why I never gave you a saffron robe? Why I'm not wearing mine now?" he gestured self-consciously at his face; the fur worn and tattered, the scars visible beneath. "Because the robe isn't a sign of [i]rank[/i]. It's [i]fashion[/i], girl. Well, fashion and an attempt to make it more difficult for assassins to target us."

Even crippled, even missing his legs and sat down like a plush toy, there was a quiet dignity in his perpetual seething rage. His face made it clear of the presence of a biologically coded aggression, and his stillness made it clear that this war had been won a long time ago. "We're not united by uniforms, Redana. Not by rank or by blood. It is not knowledge that binds us together across a trillion kilometers of space. It is ideology. It is the journey. It is curiosity to see what is over each new horizon."

He looks at you, small and so very fierce. 

"Were Hermes herself to take mortal form and command us to do differently, we would not. We know this because she did just that."

[b]Alexa![/b]

"We awaited this battle for two hundred and fifty years," Lacedo said. "Trained for it. Drilled for it. Wove it into our myths." She raised up one talon to a distant star through the window. "And we succeeded. We took the sky back. Before the eyes of Athena, before a galactic empress, we cast our ancestral foe down and redeemed our species. Our names will live forever."

She looks at you, an impossible emotion in her eyes and in her heart. "Do you think they will make more of us?"

[b]Dolce![/b]

"Gotta be a quadruped," said Ramses briskly. "A bipedal sheep would look like a cute boy in a wooly jumper on camera, not an intimidating war leader. A ram, though? That is fearsome! That puts the focus on your horns, makes it known you are a warlord to kill a king and maim a god! It makes your craving for E N D L E S S  B A T T L E known through your visual design! That's just basic cinematography."

The script has you swearing a lot more than you remember ever doing, incidentally, and in more languages.

[b]Bella![/b]

Crabs proceed without fear. They attend you, Bella, in a trail of clicking pincers. Some of them carry single strawberries. Others little bowls of ice cream. Still more jewels or shiny buttons or fragments of tinfoil or other, prettier crabs. Around your feet they skitter just out from underfoot, holding up their tiny offerings. Poseidon's realm is a place of treasures, and the crabs offer them as though to distract from the dark, the warm, the wet. The infestation runs deep.

Then a larger one approaches, signal flags held in its pincers. It sweeps and gestures and all the smaller crabs back away to a meter's remove.

Another crab, painted gold and blue, approaches beneath the cover of the signal flag. It has a letter in its pincers which it offers, clattering. [i]"Mighty Praetor of Tellus, the Assistant Secretary of Fear and Doubt understands that you are presently unemployed. It would like to offer you position as Consul, with all salaries and privileges associated therein."[/i]