"But at any rate, it is possible?"

Mirror repeats the question in the sign language she picked up from Solarel. She is all at once much too fast and much too slow: her hands move with the absurd speed and precision necessary to pilot the Gods-Smiting Whip with the skill that she does, but she lingers on each word for too long and 'rewrites' several of them multiple times before moving onto the next, even though they wind up exactly the same each time she does it. But even accounting for her peculiarities, the act of moving the question to a different language changes the meaning of what she's trying to say.

<You agree, then, that many things are possible.>

The riddle of the Mirror is, is this a mistake? Has she fallen victim to bad dialectic decisions, or is she making a deliberately dense inquiry? Or is she even asking a question in the first place? Maybe she's hiding something, instead.

In any event, she frowns as she sits. Her hands briefly fold on top of her knee as she crosses her legs, but when she immediately uncrosses and flips them she switches to stretching her arms behind her head as she leans into the seat. Her stub-clawed fingers play idly with her cascading snowy hair as her whiskers twitch in thought. 

"...What would it take for me to adopt your assistant?" she asks, "I have honestly felt minimal desire to ever have a kitten, but she feels like she would make excellent practice. My Slate would have a field day with her."

Liquid eyes flick over to catch the reaction. Or maybe reactions? Matty's expressions are a rapid and many-tiered thing, which is a delicious and welcome tension break in an otherwise very cluttered day. Mirror licks her lips, and allows herself a moment to hope that Matty is imagining it. She would like to know what it looks like when that face combusts.

"Not trying to poach her, to be clear. Despicable behavior. My interest in her is strictly that she is adorable. Though I suppose, since you must already know that, you might consider that a form of poaching anyway?"

Mirror's hands continue to worry at the back of her hair, and across her neck. She rolls her shoulders, straightens and curls her spine, and lets her tail flop back and forth between the armrests of the chair. She makes no effort, in short, to hide her own discomfort with the direction of the conversation. 

The directness of the consultation, and the speed with which it closed. The burden shifted back onto her with the mystery left entirely intact. The implication that she had Masters who could be charged in her stead. Which was of course a moment of cultural expectation, but the thought digs into her brain like an icicle fallen from a roof. To wonder why she would have said it in the first place, and to feel ashamed for spending any amount of time not getting it. To feel angry with herself that there was still so much that needed learning in spite of all her advantages and her life, and to feel resentment that she should be the one who needs to feel inadequate. 

In short, to feel defeated by Solarel all over again. Mirror sits up in her chair, and leans forward to rest her elbows on her knees, her chin on her freshly folded hands. Eyes cast down toward the floor. 

"I'm uninterested in armor. I have no use for it right now. I had armor, and it was pried open as simply as a shellfish. My ugliness is bared, and I will not cover it again. Do you not know who I am, even looking at me this close?"

She sighs.

"Naturally, you don't. She is the famous one; I am a name on a list of conquests. I am Mirror, the whispered promise. The One-Day Defender. I fought Solarel in her Aeteline for a full solar cycle. And then I lost, and disappeared from history for the duration of the war. My story is someone who sits and watches. Little difference if it happened staring at the stars from the port of a research station or tied up inside a war tent. The fish tastes nearly the same in both places."

Mirror plucks her tablet up and lets her fingers dance across the screen, for a moment treating it like she would the Nine-Tails. She rapidly closes her mail, calls up several data files only to close them all again, reopening and rearranging until the information is laid out in a way that would be impossible to misunderstand. 

When she flips it around, what she's showing are the schematics to the Gods-Smiting Whip. Not its public specs, but its true self. Its beating heart, with only the cockpit data excepted. Even that is a kind of sharing, isn't it? There are detailed glyphs explaining the nature of her crystal fire drive and the conduits she designed herself and built with only help and resources procured by her own close-knit engineering team. 

The Nine Drive System: an energy transfer device that operates on the principle of alternating current, pushing power from one output device to the next and even drawing latent, leaked energy signals into itself from competing systems in the atmosphere itself. In short, a beast that devours its prey and becomes stronger with every passing battle. In short, a family of smaller figures working in concert to take down the largest foes imaginable. In short, a weapon. One that only she, only Mirror, could operate. The system is stupendously complex and fiendishly intricate, the sort of thing it would take hours of intense study to really understand. Certainly more than the handful of seconds Mirror lets it be seen.

But for someone like Trosta, it surely says enough. Ancient concepts, expressed in novel ways. Uniquely Hybrasilian ideas, blending ideology from the Hunter and the Fisher lodges, bound together in response to her exposure to the Gods of Zaldar, both the tiny and the huge. Here, she would see, was an effort by the ugly stray to transform her body into something godlike and glorious, to rise up and over the bar she'd fallen short of. 

And now she was seeking to alter it again.

"I will say it again. Armor has no interest for me. For protection, I have plenty. What I lack, what was revealed to me... is [i]restriction[/i]. I need a system that will bind and baffle my hands, and occupy my mind. I need a system that will reduce my sum capacity so that I can overcome it and develop new techniques. Like She did. I need a system that will reward me for testing myself against it even as it seals away my old tricks.

In short, Miss Trosta, and her darling little helper... I am interested in chains."