[I]Observation. Analysis. Action.

This is the ideal flow of energies across all of life. It is how conversation is meant to work. It is how a room is swept clean of dust. It is how breakfast is prepared. It is how every mystery in the universe can be unraveled and exposed.

The first act flows smoothly into the second. The second act is occasionally jagged, and often necessitates looping back around to the beginning again. Observation. Analysis. Observation. Analysis. Action. This is the most likely mutation of the proper pattern, but once analysis finally turns to pure crystal, acting on it is as simple as anyone could dare to hope for. A bumbling oaf with a stick and a dream could unmake the most deeply laid plans of queens and fallen stars alike, if they only watched and thought properly beforehand.

Though sometimes, at the end of all the thought and the thinking (which are different), when the world is at last drunk through a glass the way it needs to be, what Eclair is left with is not the ease that the proper path is supposed to grant, but stupid and childish petulance. This? This is the shape of victory? Truly?

How distasteful.

She has always preferred to take victory while accepting whatever conditions and restrictions her opponents place upon her. If Timtam wanted to duel with distractions and games, then that should be the arena through which she should claim victory. Any other path felt like losing. Because it did in a very literal sense mean admitting that she was worse than someone else at something, and that was not a thought she enjoyed expressing, once she'd seen fit to challenge them. 

Is she really Timtam's lesser? The idea by itself is enough to make her want to simply sit here and listen to the rain until the dream finally unravels. Better that than do what needs to be done. And yet... this must indeed be a dream. Where else would she be able to process that idea so smoothly? And where else would she be able to admit the unlikeliness that she could find herself in this scenario to begin with? To be poised to take an action that definitively surprises the vagrant maid-knight, to be allowed to take a turn at shuffling the shells herself? 

Observation. Analysis.

In the end, that's all this is. That crucial final step is still to happen elsewhere. In another mind, one that operates differently and can more properly translate the effort into success. Isn't it? Isn't that... how this should go? Why is she wearing the cape of a great hero? Why? Why? Why? What could that mean?

...In the end, she must acknowledge the chains. She must cast them aside. She must, this dreaming self, trust that she is the realization of some detail that Eclair noticed but did not recognize in her fractured state. That this will not all dissolve into useless nothing, and that life when she wakes to it will remain worth living. 

Watch her hand, Timtam. She is not moving it at all.

"For once in your life, I wish you would be honest with me."

Her foot kicks up from underneath the table. She knocks it smoothly to one side, and in that way of both dreams and maids the motion kicks all of the pieces into the air, only for them to land perfectly as they were on the board again. But in the meantime she has leapt out of her chair and grasped Timtam's wrists together with the hand she'd been keeping on her lap. 

And with the one that had been watched, she seizes Timtam around the throat.

"Tell me. Show me. What have you been hiding?"[/I]