“…and they had to be connected to the ship with cables,” Redana says, cheerfully. Around her, her clothes ripple with more than wind, accommodating for chill with the power of temperature-sensitive materials. Her silken sash ripples in the breeze, a trail for Chen’s sword. “Without that harnessed sun, they would be powerless. So half the trick was just getting behind someone to [i]get[/i] them, you know?”

Dawn is turning the far horizon all the pastels that a Princess-of-Tellus-not-the-Earth-kind could imagine: pinks, purples, delicate blues. Rosy-fingered, they call her. But there’s just something more to it here, especially with how these colors fail to paint the elevators at all.

“So to have anything like this, we’d have to attach a separate cable [i]onto[/i] the sword! Can you imagine anything like that?” She laughs, and the wind snatches it away. Her ears are low against her skull. But her tail can’t stop wagging as she clings to layers of the sorts of dresses that stayed in her closets forever, no matter how often Nero had them sent as presents.

Now there’s a thought. What if, working together, Gaia and Tellus could figure out how to make reprogrammable clothing? You’d need some way to interact with it, but instead of closets and closets and closets full of outfits to maintain, most of which were never even worn, Bella could have just maintained a library of outfits to navigate around and decide on. Like her spacer outfits, but even more radically capable of changing!

Why stop at the clothes? What if she could do the same with herself? No, down that road lies the nightmares about being lost inside Bella’s heart again. But would it be so bad for her to be able to decide, every now and again, to be the size of Bella? But then again, she wouldn’t get to bury herself in Bella anymore. A quandary.

Maybe that sort of back-and-forth fretting was really what blocked qi. Except, no, Bella hardly ever frets like this, and she can’t— well, no, she still does worry. She does fret. That’s a thought worth sinking her perfect princess teeth into.

“I used to be— I’m good at that. Plovers. I enjoyed the feeling of freedom. The body all around me, metal and fire. And always keeping my enemy away from my cable.”

A cable of sorts stretches from her finger, right now, to Yue’s sword. It’s just that it’s both invisible and red at the same time.