Brightberry has coached her on this.

It's bad to not listen to your conversation partner--to skim through the sounds, listening for keywords while spending most of your brain cycles on planning a response, or--hold on, hold on, you asked a question, I have an answer, come on, stop talking and let me answer, and--

But on the other hand, it's unsettling to receive her full attention--to suck words and sound and meaning from the air and absorb it like a sponge, all while unblinkingly staring at your conversational partner.
The trick, see, is to find something else to look at while [i]not[/i] also getting distracted by the thing you're looking at.

It feels so lonely here. Hopeful, too. This is where the map used to read Here There Be Dragons, and then humanity built, and spread, and stepped out into the skies. She can almost envision the ships, flitting between the fueling pipes, plovers dancing and welding.

She's silent, too, after Bella stops talking. Not thinking about the conversation means absorbing it and trying to understand it and [i]then[/i] assemble the flotilla of words.

"I don't want to build an empire."

And that's a true statement, she decides, turning it over from each angle and inspecting the words for faulty rivets.

"I'd be happier with just the one planet, just my planet, just [i]our[/i] planet."

She takes a deep breath as if about to jump into a pool of water where, knocking around the edges, she can see the floes of ice.

"And when I first met you, a knight had rocked up to your one planet and was in the process of strip-mining it, just because it was the most convenient source. When first I left my home, it was because the Pix showed up and threatened to glass the planet if they didn't get a sacrificial maiden. When we went to the Portuguese, we were coming to their just our planet, along with two other factions. Thank the gods that Nemesis is gone, because that was an entire megastructure designed entirely to import and fuck up any random someone's just our planet.

"And none of those people were even doing it because they particularly hated us! They barely knew we existed until we ruined their plans, and then we had to hide inside a star to avoid them until the heat died down!"

She stares out at the wreckage of pipes.

"It almost makes me want to change my wish--that, instead of the fall of the empire, instead of disassembling the whole assembly and letting the pieces fall where they may, I should wish for.. You know, a way for people to remain hidden. To have just one planet, outside the reach of anyone else. To remain outside the sight of even the gods. A casque of invisibility the size of a planet, where those tired of their designated places can find the themselves that can look back on the idiots they were without worrying about needing to constantly be on the run."

She pauses, reviews the sentence, and decides, "The wording will need some work, obviously."