"Tail one response time below acceptable parameters. Designated unfit for battle operations. Three and Six showing twelve percent list from sight aiming. Target systems unreliable. Energy Transfer Conduits, confirmed damaged. Lowering output by twenty one point three percent to compensate. Tail Five..."

She's still broadcasting. Every word of her assessment is being sent directly to Solarel. She should stop. No, fuck it. Pointless, she'll intuit just as much from the lack of comms. She should lie. No, fuck it. Pointless, accurate information flow is the entire point of intonation to begin with. Pointless. Pointless, pointless, pointless!

"Continues holding overcharge. Remains suitable finisher option, cost of use unknown. Nine Drive System assessment: forty two percent total operational capacity. Further battle not rec-- AAAAAH!"

Mirror's fingers dart across her console. Even with the Gods-Smiting Whip in idle posture her fingers are constantly in motion with stupefying speeds. In the air it resulted in continuous vector adjustments, making her sneakily hard to hit with precision weaponry. But on the ground like this those inputs had to go into smaller things. Tiny weight shifts and maneuvering her trident between offensive postures without committing her to an opening. Her functional tails shift back and forth like a small cluster of fish avoiding a predator, while the damaged ones pivot between targets from her shoulders, never resting on any one spot long enough to provoke a reaction. All to keep her busy during moments of quiet. Because reflex reactions were actually thought reads, and her mecha's response time was necessarily slower than a traditional pilot's. Well, in actual fact it was faster, but the complexity of the control scheme sacrificed macro level movements for micro ones, so moving at an actionable level required her to keep ahead of the fight nine times out of ten. Better to waste motions then to keep muscle memory engaged. It was too risky to respond from neutral.

Until the sniper round cracks across her cockpit. Mirror's eyes widen with shock, surprise, and fury. She may well be crying; even she isn't sure. She commits the cardinal sin. She takes her hands off the joysticks, and away from her buttons. She clutches at her head as if she'd taken neural feedback. She pulls at her hair as if she wants to pull it out by the sheet. When she can't take the pain anymore she reaches behind her head and squeezes the top of her chair until it feels like her fingers are about to break.

The rhythm of her breathing has become irregular and heaving. She is definitely crying; you can tell by the sniffling. And even then, her legs work at the foot pedals to shift Nine-Tails away from the angle of attack she'd just taken.

"What would I do? What would I do!?"

No more typing. No more consideration. She needs her hands for too many other things, the thoughts spin too violently to spare the shift from routine. Crack, crack, crack, crack. The sound of the shot echoes across her plans, her words, her sudden attempts at spinning up consideration for the question she'd been posed. Because she, crack, crack, hadn't, crack, thought about it at all. She seethes, and her hands tremble. She has to keep resetting the position of her hands to keep moving. A tear spatters on her console. In the video feed, it looks like her eye is leaking.

"Why did I ever try to explain myself to you?! You never listen! No matter how much effort I put in, you don't respond! You just say whatever's already on your mind, like a, like a..!"

She falters in the middle of her fury. The only words that come to mind are slurs. [Crossed Stripes], [Color Whore], [Wander Eye]. Terrible names. Her fur darkens with anger that she even thought of them. She clucks her tongue that she couldn't think of any that hadn't been used on her. Her ear twitches toward the sound of a bullet hitting her mecha again, and she cannot tell if it's a memory or a new hit.

"One?" 

Her breath hitches. Her eyes flicker across a full dozen screens dumping information every which way, and the thought fizzles. Unsure, unsure. No data. Sense memory. Damn it. What was she? She needs two breaths to pick up the original discarded thought again.

"What would I do?" she asks again with the same intensity as if she'd never vocalized the question in the first place, "Why even ask me? Might as well ask what I'd want to wear if I wasn't disfigured! Ask me how I'd think if my brain worked! Ask me... I'd lose, you idiot! Obviously I'd lose! What potential? Fucking what potential! Fuck your talent. Fuck your riddle. Fuck you. You clearly already see the shape of everything. That's why you're mocking me, right? Because your eyes are clear, and I can't even see past..."

Past her. Past Solarel. That movement. That shot. That... How could? But she? Then... what had, what had, what had (crack, crack), what had been the fucking point of it all? Everything she'd given up every disadvantage of her system was meant to create a thing that only she could hold. She was trying to climb a mountain nobody else could even see. And Solarel was vaulting it blindly, on nothing but her absurd talent. She, she worked, she, but then, what was, what, there was no, no, no no no no...

There was no point to any of it. None at all.  Mirror was not a genius. Not even a creative. It hadn't occurred to her to imagine a role reversal in the first place. It hadn't. And now that she was trying, all she could see was failure. Solarel would master the Gods-Smiting Whip before she figured out how to read the information screens. Mirror would still be struggling with the fear of feedback and the sluggishness of her own suddenly huge and freshly mutilated body. What would she do? What would she do, with her volley defeated and her arm cut off? Lose. Lose, lose, lose, lose, lose. 

No growth. Stunted. Thinking she was clever, thinking she was unique, that had crushed her completely. Now she was like a child still trying to master basics. No, worse than that. Much worse. A child still had a lifetime to develop mastery, and few preconceptions to overcome. This was like being a machine that had been built wrong from the start. Now she was obsolete before she'd even overcome her limitations. Worth less together than she'd be as scrap. Defeated. Utterly defeated. The light leaves her eyes entirely.

But her hands keep moving. A pair of tails flip in midair and rain gargantuan laser blasts down on the severed arm of the Bezorel until it blows up into a scattered pile of superheated scrap. One weapon off the list. She couldn't understand why she was bothering. But even more than that, she couldn't stop herself. The laser arrays next. The...

A hand more clever than it realizes twists a joystick down. It takes thirty seven button presses inside the duration of the tilt to pull the maneuver off. The Gods-Smiting Whip lunges forward and thrusts its trident directly at the Bezorel's open cockpit. The plasma tips stop just short of skewering it through. It gets so close that the barrel of that sniper rifle grows warm. She follows through with another step and wrenches her weapon backwards in the same motion. Step, pivot, whip crash! She sweeps for the Bezorel's heavy legs and forces it to dodge in whatever awkward way it's capable of. 

Show her. Show her. Show her! If you're going to win, then do it while you're taking this seriously!

"Stop. Exposing. Not clever. Even. Idiot. Even myself... Countermeasures. Not as. Clever. As you think it is."

[marking Hopeless]