… Ah. You know, somehow she feels like she should have known that her story was always gonna be a tragedy, right? What else could it be with such a flawed protagonist? Already, she can see it in her mind. [i]DYSSIA,[/i] picked out on the posters in an aggressive serif font, playing now at your local theater, with orchestra scored for organ and tympani. Please, please, please get someone hot to play her. Not Merilt. Fuck Merilt. And she's not having [i]THE DISTRACTED[/i] tacked on, either. You try to write that sign and she'll come back from the grave to break your wrist, see if she doesn't. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but cross her and you won't have hands left to hold them. What kind of tragedy, though? Morality tale? One of those hubris things where the lesson is "don't fight the gods, don't fight prophecy, especially don't try to avert the prophecy?" Because seriously, it [i]never works.[/i] Maybe she's weird, but if some soothsayer told her that one day she'd be stabbed by someone born in june, she would not immediately jump to "murder all the kiddies born in june," right? S'like, sure, you start with one purge, but once you start murdering you have to keep murdering, and while you [i]might[/i] get lucky and manage to nail the one bastard kiddo who's gonna stab you eventually, you've [i]also[/i] guaranteed that half the country has a daughter or brother or parent who's been affected by your binge of purging, and suddenly there's a lot more knives aimed at your back, right? Seems like a whole lot of effort to go to when you could just make sure your will is updated, your successor well-trained, and the bucket list complete by the day of. Would the stars of a tragedy do anything differently if they [i]knew[/i] they were in a tragedy? Because she [i]could,[/i] though. You know? Here's all the Pix, raring for a fight that they probably won't survive. A glorious battle! 50,000 Pix--37500 Ceronians--in a fight to the extinction against a million--no, against [i]multiple millions[/i]--of foes! And if anyone could survive a battle of that sort, yeah, it would be them. But it would be slow, and it would be grindy, and it would be legendary, and the perfect distraction to let her grab her servitors, grab Brightberry, and leg it to the nearest spaceport. Dyssia, the planetary hero who led the Pix to destruction and made it home alive. Stick that in your pipe and choke on it, Merilt. But… It's like, she can look at that plan, and it's a good plan, and it's a smart plan, and it gets her home with the minimum of fuss, and any Pix that survive this battle--[i]if[/i] they survive this battle, "if" is good--will not have the strength to come back to eradicate her planet. But she keeps hearing the praise, and the adulation, and the captain claps her on the back with a full name and "brought us to war" and it's [i]wrong.[/i] She didn't plan this! Didn't realize there was a planet here full of battle crabs or whatever else exists in millions! This wasn't a brilliant move by a leader, or a cunning strategy to save her planet, or whatever. They're so happy to be exterminated. Legendary battle! Warrior nerves rising! A story for the ages, of the last Pix Captain's glorious last stand! It's not like she wants them to die, either! She looks at the crowd, and she can pick out the friends she's made, cheering just as loud as the people besides them. They were built for this, and she has no idea how to fix it. They're excited to die. She could have saved herself some time and let the drones have their way. Is it her job to fix this? She didn't make them like this, the humans did. She can stand tall on the moral high ground, secure in the knowledge that she doesn't have to look at what the high ground's made out of. And she doesn't even know how to fix it! Would they want her to fix it? They [i]want[/i] this! Would actively punish her for robbing them of their glorious defeat if she tried! Would never be happy knowing they aren't fulfilling their purpose! But they're going to die, other me! You have to admit that you don't want that! No, but [i]they[/i] do! But that's fucked up! Yes, we agree! But what do we [i]do?![/i] And the problem, see, the [i]real[/i] problem with being the star of a tragedy is that they [i]would[/i] make the same choices, even knowing who they are, knowing what will happen, knowing what kind of show they're in, because that's who they [i]are.[/i] If Dyssia didn't care, she wouldn't be in this mess. She wouldn't have poured herself into trying to stop their--what was the word? Some biomancer word to euphemize, to soften the hardness of fuckin' [i]genocide[/i] into something palatable--retirement. Rehab. Something with a D. Decommissioning, that's the word. Decommission. S'like if a weasel were given shapes on a page--slinky, dirty, probably about to go for someone's throat. But if she didn't care, she could have gone about her day. Waited for the inevitable. Gone home. Wouldn't have snuck around, wouldn't have poured herself into a plan, wouldn't have spent so many godsforsaken days watching Yaji, wouldn't have declared war on Aphrodite for a puppet she didn't use, wouldn't have crashed the ship--which, by the way, is still kind of buffering mentally, it takes time to fit that kind of thought in your brain-- In short, if she didn't care, she could escape now. She could let them have their legendary battle. She could cut and run and never feel an ounce of guilt over letting her kidnappers die. But if she didn't care, she wouldn't be [i]her.[/i] So it's her who steps to her servitors, and pleads with them that if they care about her, they will run. They've done their job, now's the time to get while the getting's good. It's her, pleading with Brightberry to forgive her. And it's her, walking up to the Captain, and asking for some binoculars and a score of jetpack'd Pix, and offering her service and rail to perform some aerial reconnaissance. And if the Pix must die to be happy? If she must perish in this tragedy? if the crowd has to boo and say "I would simply not do that, she's an idiot?" Well, then at least she'll have the satisfaction of knowing she died as herself. [Look Closely: 4,6, +2. [b]12.[/b]] - Tell me about Brightberry. What are they doing? What will they do next? - What is going on here? What do my senses tell me? - Is something out of place or hidden? If so, what's sus?