At any other moment of her journey, Bella would have called this place a twisted nightmare shitheap. It would be easy to look at a primitive and abandoned scrapyard like this and see exactly what she just tried to frame it as. 

But instead, her hand presses up against the window. Her face follows soon after. Her eyes dance to follow every pipe to the end of its chaotic pathway and guess where it might pop out from a tangle of the other ones. Her ears twitch with delight when she thinks about the design of this place, this incredibly ancient monument to forgotten dreams and how it might have accidentally lent itself just so to welcoming her ship here today and the idea of it makes her want to double over with laughter.

"This!" she cries out to Dyssia as if to answer her, "This is what I saw on the Tunguska! These are the toils of people who painted their movies in flowing crystals! The same hands that built this gate must have danced across their festival halls in search of shark effigies to please the gods! Oh, Dyssia! Wonders like you've never known! I didn't think I'd see them here on the other side! I can't believe how... beautiful everything they made was!"

She has to pry herself away from the view. It is surely one of Artemis' impossible labors for her that she must focus her attention now on this diagram of the Plousios and a conversation about Empires. She stretches out her gauntleted hand and watches the claws curl like daggers from her fingertips. 

"You know I... spent a lot of my life thinking I was meant to be a slave. Though I didn't use that word. It was always 'pet'. Imperial Pet. I was [i]proud[/i] of that, until Redana left when I couldn't bring myself to follow. I didn't know whose orders to obey. And then I got kicked out anyway and learned about all sorts of shit that made the idea of being that thing I was disgusting.

"Do you know what it's like? To not know who you are? I thought I was following instincts hard coded into me like everyone else, but then my situation shifted just a little and I had to accept the fact that I wasn't following shit."

She smiles, and sticks her talons into the couch. The sound of tearing fabric is soothing in the same way that all the wounds she used to inflict on her own hands had been. She flexes her fingers, in and out, in and out, and watches small chunks of cushion fall away.

"So then I poured over my memories for a while, and I thought about some conversations I'd had with the Empress. I didn't realize we were talking at the time, but with all this new knowledge I had suddenly it clicked that she'd been looking right at me the whole time. That Her Majesty Nero had hopes for [i]me![/i] And after that I thought I was meant to be in charge. Destined for a crown. Tch. Gods damned moron."

Bella lifts her hand up and turns her gaze away to watch Pluto some more. The expression in her eyes softens once again, and she turns those pools of liquid gold onto the woman caught in permanent existential crisis in front of her. Hello there, kindred spirit.

"Every time I reach a new point in my life, I look back over what I've done. What I've been. What I've said and thought. And those are exactly the words that come to mind. Gods damned moron, shit for brains, fucking [i]idiot[/i]. I'll tell you this Dyssia, if you go on to try and found a new civilization after the collapse of the one we've got, I'm not going to be a part of running it. Because I..."

She lifts her head and looks around. Looks at the depths of space outside, at the thing the Plousios has become, and then back down at the memory of what it had been before a flock of birds had come along and delivered orders that clearly knew better. She sighs.

"I've been thinking about it. This isn't an answer or anything, but I've been wondering if it's necessary to build anything at all. Do you know what I mean? Just look at this ship. We could put it back the way it was, or we could make it better, or we could... not. Eventually, all of the stuff in here that annoys people is gonna get pulled apart and put back together in some way they like better. Does that scale? Fuck no! But who gives a shit? What do any of us need with more than one planet?"

She steps away to press her face against the window again. She wants to watch. Wants to see. Wants to wonder. It's so peaceful, it's a promise like nothing she's ever felt.

"I want to see Gaia. I want to see what got left behind, even more than I want to be done with all of this. I know that something horrible is waiting for me there. Maybe it's what finally kills me. But even so, I want the answer. If hands like mine are meant to build things. And if there's something more to life that could make me look at the person talking to you here and think, 'oh you fucking idiot'. I think I can live with any new world. If I can just have that."