[b]Portugal![/b]

It's like being in a world made out of cardboard.

Everything here is fragile. The buildings are made out of barely treated stone. The people are made out of calcium and water. The trees are uncondensed carbon. The streets are heavy with the discarded paper-mache pages of newspapers, cheap ink smudging and fading in the sunlight. The music that plays from hidden speakers is tinny and tuneless, the images that flash on archaic plastic screens would pale in comparison even to the museum of the Tunguska. It would be very nice to be able to romanticize an alien civilization - it is all very impressive when you consider they built all this themselves after starting out as water slime - but it's hard to appreciate it. It makes the amenities of even a backwater like Beri stand out.

As an example, it might be tempting to compare them to ants. But the ants on Beri were a useful aspect of the ecosystem - they would swarm over cliff faces, carving away edges that had been blunted by ocean wind erosion, creating impressively sharp angles and deepening shadows. The waste rock was then used to create aesthetically placed islets, which would then be tended to by birds genetically engineered with gardening instincts. The birds would fly to the ends of the earth to collect rare and aesthetically pleasing seeds and deposit them in elegant configurations. Swim to any of them and there would be honey and peaches waiting ripe on the vine, each one a unique delight designed to resist boredom. That was [i]normal[/i]. Here - you've seen the same restaurant five times on the walk here. They just built the same structure, with the same colours, staff and menu five identical times. It's not even a beautiful building; it's just a grey stone box and the people inside have attitudes of resignation. Even your disguises regularly turn heads in the streets given the universality of drab, muted, clashing and mass-produced clothing on display.

They're trying their best, bless them. But this would be a hard sell even with just Beri as a point of comparison, let alone memories of the Imperial Palace. You have been on the inside of a civilization dedicated to universal beauty for so long that the jarring contrast of this moment makes the arrogant reaction of the Endless Azure Skies to outsiders at least comprehensible. 

[b]Dolce![/b]

Oh, he's [i]real [/i]dumb.

You can see it in the way the eyes of the Summerkind glitter when he confidently explains things to them. This is a man who surrounds himself with kids who don't know anything so that they'll think he's cool. You can see it in the eyes of the aged veterans on the fringe of the room, how they're just barely starting to wonder if none of this adds up. He's optimized the species to die at about the instant they become disillusioned with his bullshit and the turnaround for that is measured in weeks.

He doesn't see it that way of course. This is a guy who was born so correct he never needed to check anything. Speaking of, he tells the story about how he was so strong when he was newly born that he broke the doctor's finger - and how that was his inspiration for making the Summerkind hatch combat ready. He explains how he had to invent new martial arts because none of the existing ones could keep up with him and that's why he made the Summerkind so adaptable, so they could do the same thing. He spends like forty five unprompted minutes talking about ways he'd improve Doctor Ceron's genecode - not that he would, dead end design - and then suggesting that all the problems were caused by her 'emotions' which was 'typical'. Unlike him. Only Facts and Logic for Liquid Bronze, which is why he only drinks these protein shakes he invented.

And the cigars. Deep breaths of those, Aphrodite draped over the back of his chair, running his fingers through Liquid Bronze's hair as he turns to smirk at himself in the mirror-shine reflection of his bodyguard's breastplates. It's a good smirk. He practiced it for a long time.

"All that to say - who knows?" finished Liquid Bronze. "But that's the problem. My time is valuable because there are so many problems only I can solve. So, let's hear it! What do you need my help with this time?"