She wishes she'd made notes.

That was the whole problem, wasn't it, was that the birds had been [i]relentless.[/i] Their ideas, their beauty, their standards, fuck you for thinking your pitiful little ship could compare to a perfect shade of blue.

But on the other hand, it'd been--

She couldn't even tell, right? Could be years, could be decades, spent in a frozen instant aboard two ships. She knew its corners with the familiarity of someone who'd slept-walked through it, the ease of someone born and raised in it--how it should purr, where it rumbled, whence its veins and how to take its pulse.

She'd pulled it from her head and doodled it on the cushions of the couch, every line precise and accompanied with the proper measurements. [i]Her[/i] couch was gone, you see.

"But who gets to decide what it [i]should[/i] look like? And how is that decided?

"This is the ship as it was, yes. It's the ship I remember. But it's your ship too, and Dolce's, and Redana's, and so on and so forth for everyone on board this ship. Different rooms mean different things to different people, and different areas are important for different reasons.

"And if we [i]did[/i] decide to restore it to this, then why not make some improvements? And what are the best? And who decides that?

"If we succeed, the Azure Skies will fall. Disintegrate, fall to pieces, find that all the pieces that keep its many plates spinning will be absent. Servitors, everywhere, absent their masters and the threat of species-wide genocide."

She glares at the diagram as if daring it to answer.

"I have a preference, of course. And I could trumpet it to the sky, insist that my version is superior--speak to leaders and cults and priests, exhort the masses that here is a superior vision, abandon the old and in with the new, and anyone who takes up arms against it must therefore need perish.

"… but I don't want to [i]do[/i] that."

She sags back, careful not to let her tail disturb the paint.

"I don't want to be the new king. Don't want to wage war, and coerce, and enforce, and politick. I don't want to raise a similar empire with a different flag.

"But at the same time, what else is there? To simply retire, and let whatever I build for my friends be demolished by the next Johnny-come-lately without my morals about death and destruction?"

She buries her face in her coils, and when she emerges she's both staring at the diagram and seeing none of it.

"I just want to build a world where violence not only isn't the default, but isn't even [i]viable.[/i] Where 'do what I say or I will employ a man to hit you with a stick' isn't the underlying threat of every civilization. Where people can choose what to do, what to be, without biomancy or the gods or administrator species deciding for them. 

"But there has to be a way to achieve that in a way that isn't just accepting its downfall in advance or becoming a bloody warlord myself, right?"