Solarel relaxes beneath a synthwave sky. The world is alight with Spirits. They love it here; shattering into scattered crystals against the grass and then re-forming into music glyphs. Ancestors float against the sky, jagged-cloaked silhouettes, holes in time. Geists swarm her feet, grabbing her feet and trying to pull her into dance. One of them wraps around her head and sings in its electric voice all the notes of the spirit glyphs. It's a world for convertibles and summer, a world for racing rather than fighting. She can feel the breeze on her face and knows how much sweeter it must be up there in the sky. The geist that sits before her eyes in the form of wrap around shades flicks filters that fuzz the sky, flare the lenses, and makes the world move with the beat of its secret music. Violence is happening here but it is wrong to do so, so she doesn't engage with it. In each overhead blow she sees the digital echo of her death at Mirror's sword - she blinks, adjusts her feet. Like this...? In each open palmed nerve strike she sees the sting of the trident - if it hits me like that, what's the natural follow up? In the course and rhythm of the fight she is not present in the slightest, still living out the echo of her last battle. Just like before. Mirror is a technician, a scientist. She waged war in the laboratory and the engineering deck. This, then, is Solarel's laboratory. She lets herself get hit so that she can experience how to roll into it; she stands unflinching into a kick so she can process how the shock fills one of her power cells, and she blast-spends the accumulated energy to pitch herself backwards. Ah, if she does it like that then her foot will be misaligned... let's try that again. Secret techniques. Mirror put huge stock in them. Each reveal of the Whip's capabilities [i]hurt [/i]her. Solarel tries to understand the why, even if she doesn't feel it. Secrets come naturally to her, she invents and discards them constantly, but they're spice and not a true path to victory. She can't just dismiss Mirror's feelings as illegible, this was important. It has to do with weakness - no, not weakness, hurt. Those secrets aren't weapons, they're bandages, like her dress. An attempt to make something broken whole. To make her limitations beautiful. But then why does the reveal hurt her? Because the scars frighten her? Because they show a symmetry of thought, like the symmetry of her patterns? Because she genuinely believes that all that she has going for her is the shock value? Because she craves a victory so much she clutches onto every edge she has, even if she arguably doesn't need them all? Some of these are parts of truth, some of these are her own reflection shown back to her by her Mirror. She needs to work out which is which. She needs to become less like herself if she is ever to have any hope of doing so. Her own mind contains an insidious trap, trying to phrase everything in terms of herself. How does this relate to me? What is this saying to me? Who is she to me? No, she needs to overcome that thinking... somehow. It cost her once. She needs to understand Mirror on her own terms. The battle went on around her. The who, the why, the what? As ethereal as the spirits at play upon the digital plain. There is no victory to be had here, not with arms that still ache from their neuro-feedback where Mirror took them away, not in this tiny world of meat and ghosts. There is nothing here to want other than the motion of the place. What if she tried to move like that grass? What if she tried to move like that music? Maybe new techniques await her there? Maybe something worthy? she signed to the tall warrior in the back amidst her swaying dodges, speech slurred by bound hands. [Wicked Past: I know this stranger, somehow. What does she love most? She gains a string on me, and I advance and move to Heart +1]