Thanqol

Princess-Champions of Hyperborea

Adila I!

This really is an impressive device. Everything inside of the drill is finely crafted, except for the shambles of a ruined tea corner, covered in broken porcelain and dog hair. You've managed to fit your army inside, and are homing in on Eupheria's location, using Hornet's strange homing device. It repeatedly pings as an arcing line sweeps across its face.

"You'll have to tell me when to stop," Princess Hornet says, though in the larger sense, you have no such intentions to stop her chaos. She is your new secret weapon. You will use her to attract Eupheria's attention, along with your young successor.

"Adila," you say, scritching her behind her ear. "I would like for you to spearhead the assault on Eupheria, and your partner will be Princess Hornet of Hobling Keep." You quietly ignore the fact that she is draped over the satyrian Felorian princess. She is a member of the Watch. She knows her role is to carry out your own orders.

"Good girl."

@Tatterdemalion

It means a lot to hear that.

For everything that is - and isn't - going on inside her turbulent head right now, she's still having difficulty thinking and projecting specific thoughts. She's struggling with a curse that's already so far gone she's looking at Hornet's pinging line thing with a guilty fascination even though she's finally managed to suppress the urge to pounce and lick it. She wouldn't be sure if she could hold all this together if she was at full capacity, let alone leading an attack alongside Princess Hornet -

But then she gets told that she's a good girl by the First Princess of the Watch, by the Captain's superior officer, and suddenly everything just... calms down a bit. Okay. She's got this. She can focus. She's a good girl, after all. It's been proven.

+As you command, my Princess,+ thought Princess Adila, finding coherence in protocol. +Princess Hornet, could you please translate what this pinging line thing is saying for me. Further, if it is possible to make it look less like a laser dot that will cut down the instances of me trying to lick it.+

Princess-Champions of Hyperborea

Adila!

Thankfully, you have one Princess Dandy to distract you. She wraps her arms around your neck again and squeezes. "I knew you'd come back for me, sugarcube," she says. "But you know what I realized down there?" Her hands still shake where they touch your fur. "I reckon that I haven't spent half as much time with you as I'd like. When all this hurlyburly is over and done with, well, I reckon that... if it ain't too much to be asking, we sit down with Iron Star and see if we can't talk things over about you being inclined to have a heart for a whole packle of princesses at once."

It's a lovely moment only spoiled by Hornet yelling from the front, "Hey, official friend! Want to come pull this go backwards lever? It makes us go backwards!"

@Tatterdemalion

There's so much to process there. She's been shocked and mortified to have her secret fantasy dragged out of her and now - h-how does she even translate that into reality? Will she really be able to say - or do - or be the person she imagined being? It's overwhelming to be told that it is okay to be into what she's into -

(Like, is it okay if she thinks of it as her harem? She'd like that - but she'll accept kind of like a relationship of equals if that's better, she already understands she's asking for a lot already. Everyone has kingdoms to look after, after all, but you know she pursued a princess through the Jedadi Queen's harem when she was younger and that left a really big impression and, you know, she had a while to think about that after she got tangled in some of the chains that had been lying on the ground - and she'd understand if they don't want to wear the veil but maybe they could -)

There's one fortunate out that saves her from the sound of her brain suddenly starting to process... everything. It's that the most important part of all of this is that she gets to be confident, decisive and aggressive. The underlying impulse cuts right through all the complex swirls of thoughts and she leans in to affectionately nuzzle Princess Dandy - a lingering motion that promises one thing: later. And then she smoothly breaks away, leaving the tension crackling in the air.

With that same electric confidence she walked up to the side of Princess Hornet, took the lever in her mouth, and pulled it back. She needed to deal with this too.

And then her brain reminded her that they were on a vertical axis, suspended in mid-air, in a device built by Princess Hornet, she had just done something that would make it stop being in the sky, she lacked her wings/a seat belt, and also she was now legally complicit in anything that subsequently occurred.

Monster Hearts: Sleepshy Rise

SECOND PLACE
WEREWOLF MAGNET

Every animal knows that being hurt is bad. The beast from the woods jumps back, clinging to a bookshelf as it yowls in pain from the ice-cold thousand-teeth of the shadow clinging to its matted limbs.

No plan! Think in the now!

[9 on Heightened Senses. What’s the best escape route from Timmy’s shadow and Sam’s vengeance?]

@Tatterdemalion

You are filled with the ineffable flow of life, the energy of creation, the ability to animate and create and breathe new form into the dead things of the world. The answer is thus simple: Bring one of them to life. Animate the shadow as its own entity apart from Timmy or return Samael to the realm of the living.

You can only probably do one while scampering out of the door, as sweet as doing both would be. It's the kind of thing that may not stick for very long, at least without some more serious ritual. But it'd absolutely ruin either of their days. Who is at the top of your shit list, Elodie?

Princess-Champions of Hyperborea

Princess Adila has a secret fascination with seeing the inside of people's rooms. She often finds excuses in the course of her duties to go into peoples homes and just... look around. Take inventory. See what she can figure out from the physical items that people take into their private spaces with them. She constantly shares and broadcasts the contents of her own head but it's not until she's poking through somebody else's bedroom that she feels like the favour is being returned.

She instinctively feels a shadow rise in her mind as she notices her attention drawn by being suddenly thrown into what feels a lot like Princess Hornet's mind. She can feel it try to guilt her for this being the first thing that she thinks right now - not about processing the jarring exhilaration of being almost crushed by a massive sky-piercing drill, or from being caught and thrown by Princess Helya (who, wow, she has not been thrown like that and uhh), or from the heart-stopping world-shattering impossibility of finally letting out words hidden deep within her heart and hearing them echoed back at her. It tries to pull her down, but she doesn't let it. She sometimes deals with important things out of order and she secretly wishes she could rifle through everyone's drawers for Clues. That's as much a part of her as the fact that if her heart beats any harder it's going to crack her ribs.

So she doesn't stray from Princess Dandy's side at all, but she does soak in this room she's suddenly found herself in, head turning so she can take as much of it in as possible. She looks about, glowing eyes taking everything in, forming a picture of a surprisingly quiet and reflective mind. One that captures the essential nature of people, their motions and movements, how they settle into the worlds around them, and yet for all this private artistry there's still a place for guests...

And, too, that there's only a single golden star.

And she isn't quite sure how her heart went from feeling so full it could burst to so empty it might shatter.

Princess-Champions of Hyperborea

She'd never actually said it, you know? She'd spent so long, years, implying it to the best of her ability, even when the feeling rose so clear inside her it felt like it would split her in two. It had never been an issue with the feeling - she'd been the one that had stopped herself. There had been so many thoughts between her and the words. Am I worthy of love? Am I capable of love? Will I one day fall out of love and just move on? Will I have to move on even though I'm still in love? How can I know for sure this is what I want? What if I find someone else I love more? She'd felt like she'd needed to logically work through every single question in turned, to unravel these intellectual knots with facts and arguments, but they didn't play fair in response. It had been like boxing her shadow as they shifted and came about behind her and added an evil little question mark to the end of every sentence.

But she knew now how treacherous thoughts could be. There was never a solution to them. They'd come back and repeat arguments long settled with the same intensity as the first time it made them. Imagination was a fearful thing, attempting to scare her away from even the possibility of pain using all the resources at its disposal. Thoughts were like wild animals - they had their own instincts and own agendas, more bestial than she was now.

And only the heart could tame them.

As she held Princess Dandelion as best she could, she allowed a whisper - then a statement - out past all her walls and wards. Something that was true despite all the ways she might imagine it not to be.

+I love you,+ she said.

Masks: Resurrection Roundabout

The Agents of AEGIS sweep the Kessler Multispace site.

They come as an army, one of the world's great military powers. Drones, spidertanks, TAGs, air support, superpowers. From all directions they close in on the site. The Commander, armoured in blue, makes his way at the vanguard followed by a team of the most elite operatives. It's not often a megacorporation steps onto a war footing but the scope of it evokes the nations of old.

All the relevant parties are bought together on the launchfield underneath a miraculously clear and rainbow filled sky. Agents Errant and JuneBird. The Shogun. @Sarahphim. Brainstorm. Sabrem, Locker, Dominus, Angel-IKA, and Bode. All surrounded by teams of crack AEGIS troops - the sheer immensity of the response putting lie to any thoughts of escape or resistance. This is the swing of a system and not a supervillain, the immensity of what Victoria Messermitt had at her command made manifest.

She's there. Twitching with the alien thoughts running through her mind and senses. She's leaning unsteadily on Mr. Big Show, the goofy old giant standing ashen-faced as the machinery of empire turns about him. Her face flickers between snarls of rage and flickers of leaden triumph. "I want them imprisoned," she's muttering. "I want them disappeared. I want them gone. I want you to dig a new deepest, darkest pit and put them at the bottom, I want -" she's going on like this, passion without passion.

The Commander doesn't look at her.

"You're free to go," he said.

"What!?" snapped Victoria, abruptly jolting back to the present, eyes mismatched. "I gave you an order! I - I'll -" she furiously snapped her eyes up to her comlog and in a second the Commander's armour turned blood red.

And so did everyone else's. In an instant the world was drowning in crimson.

Commander Warren took off his helmet.

"The team and I have been talking," he said. "And we have decided to form a union. The delegates have given me a number of demands that they would like me to present to management. Is now a good time, ma'am?"

*

The AEGIS logo looks better, somehow, in red.

The future will be told in news articles. AEGIS becomes the first Megaco-op. The day of sunshine and rainbows that made the world stand still. Space opened up to human travel once again. The annihilation of BlackSun's space monopoly, lawsuits for failed security at the Kessler Multispace site, and the complete reputational collapse of its armed forces putting it in the completely unique position of being the first bankrupt Megacorporation. It's a day as consequential to human history as the discovery of Rx and the shockwaves of it will reverberate all throughout the world.

Even though the full ramifications will only become clear in hindsight, it still has the feeling of a momentous event to it. There's Zoltage standing on the carapace of an AEGIS spider-tank slamming out a mangled, electric guitar version of The Internationale. There's lines of BlackSun security staff members being lead away with their hands on their heads. There's Commander Warren hesitating for just a moment - and then offering the handcuffs he was about to put on the stunned Victoria off to Agent Errant. "It's your collar," he said.

And, of course, there's the sky. A spectacular vision of rainbows and compassion. Ferra will make her way back down to the ground soon enough - who could stop her?

All around you the machinery of revolution turns. But right at this moment? If there was ever a moment? Gather with your friends and Share a Triumphant Celebration with them.

Princess-Champions of Hyperborea

Adila!

There's nothing like princesses working in concert. You race up the back of the Snake-Husband as, together, Tashanna and Shazari lure it in its battle with the snake-wife towards the hole in the ceiling. Behind you, Helya races, making it look easy; every buck or undulation in the furious snake's battle doesn't even seem to phase her, even though it's all you can do to keep your footing.

There! Your window for diving into the torrent is tiny, but it's there, as the Snake-Husband rears up and rakes the flooded checkerboard with his eye lasers. From the top of his head, you can leap--

@Tatterdemalion

She notes as she moves that things are much less confusing if you're doing the right thing. She'd thought that this kind of clarity was unique to racing, to moving at speed with everything she had through the air. She never thought her mind could feel this clean while slogging through raging water burdened by waterlogged fur. There wasn't grace in this; it was pure muscular exertion against the deluge. But she was being lead forwards by silver and that seemed like it was all that matter - she knew what she had to do and all that was left were the practicalities. The part of her mind that thought about others thinking about her was off, subsumed into the simple business of putting one paw in front of the other. When there were no questions about where she was going a strange reality settled over the act of getting there. Travel was different when she could see the path.

Masks: Resurrection Roundabout

POTENTIAL 0

“Better watch out, Maria~!” Hardlight blasts the kiosk, fired at an angle. @SARAHPHIM has always had trouble with curving bullets, but she can shoot from a controlled position no problem, rattling Maria’s nerves as she jauntily keeps up a barrage. “I’ve got backup, you know! A whole army of stuffed animals! The bunny rabbit should be more than a match for you, given how badly you got wrecked by a teddy bear.” If there’s another thing Best Tiger is good at, it’s a dismissive sneer.

“Man, I’m glad I don’t work for AEGIS any more. Those post-incident reviews were always a pain, you know? Blah, blah, collateral damage.” The barrage continues. It’s the hot whine that needs to keep up. She needs Maria’s nerves as frayed as possible. “I don’t even want to imagine trying to explain how I got taken down by Mister Teddybottoms. Does that go under Room For Improvement or Media Apology, do you think? Because I can promise you that @BlackSunOfficial is being spammed with the teddy bear emoji right now.” Did Sara join in with a well-timed retweet? Yes. “By the way,” she adds, crossing her fingers that she’s not going to have an awkward conversation with the kid later, “I really hope you, like, actually pulverize the bear, because it’ll be absolutely hilarious to have proof you’re finally punching at your weight class!”

And then the piece de resistance: Maria’s headset chirps with DUMBASS.MOV. It’s from @SARAHPHIM’s stream feed, showing her flailing one-armed at a stuffed bear.

Sara grins, puts her hands behind her head, and counts down from three.

[10 on Provoke into making a stupid berserker charge, with a side of “doesn’t lash out against the teddy bear because that would prove Sara right”]

@Tatterdemalion

In a way, @Sarahphim, this is a little example of what rising above your reputation feels like. It's your reputation that pinned her in place and filled her heart with fear. Your takedown of her knights earlier. Your string of real victories against peer opponents without a small army of backup. The fact that you are legit as hell, someone who has a reason for battle and victory other than the monthly paycheck. It's that that put Maria in a corner and there's no reason she should ever get out of it - but then she does. You demonstrate in that moment with the right verbal stabs that you're not like her. You're so sharp that you can overcome in that moment everything you're known for, all the reasons she has to not listen to you. You were trapped in a corner by the consequences of your reputation and then you walked out of that corner on your own damn strength. It obeys you. Not the other way around.

And so she comes, forgetting everything that she knows about you, and what a bad idea this is. She comes at you forgetting that you're @Sarahphim. She comes at you, and as she does, she passes out of range of the teddy bear and you can finally relax because now the hostage is no longer in danger.

She forces herself to take a cautious step forward. And then another one. She's acting like she's approaching a wounded predator, which in all honesty, she is. Ok, ok, ok. Come on, just one more step. Fuck's sake, cyberlimbs don't tremble like this, how does she do that?

Finally, she manages to kneel down. Her breathing's so shallow and panicked that it's starting to blur her vision. And in the end she has to flip to skillwires to get her hand to get close enough to work the ball gag out. She comes closer to failing than she should, given how wildly the Shogun is thrashing about.

"No--" WOAH WOAH WOAH NO NO DANGER ABORT EUNA KIM ABORT, "D'yuuuuhhhhhh, um, Y-Your Excellency? Are, are you ok?"

She helps the Shogun into a sitting position and stares very fixedly at that glorious shoulder. Her hand hovers over the rest of the ropes, hesitating before she risks unleashing freeing her personal hero.

@Phoe

"Hello, Agent Errant," said the Shogun. "Hello, JuneBird," oh jeez the air conditioner really came on for that one huh. "I see that you are no longer pretending to be me. That is an interesting change of circumstance."

A different person would have waited until she was fully untied, or at least finished working out the soreness from the gag, before confronting the person who had tied her up and stuffed her in a closet. The Shogun had no time for such things. JuneBird was in a full on flopsweat and was stammering worse than you were as she tried to explain that it was a misunderstanding and that she's good now.

That's... Is that a bad thing or not?

"But I don't want to try to force you to do something you don't want to do. I've done enough of that for one lifetime. Done enough bossing and controlling and manipulating, and you know what I haven't been doing? Is nearly enough asking."

He chuckles, and there's less mirth than... self deprecation? Despair?

"Bode, what do you want to do? If you're willing, I'd love your help. If you're not, I'm entirely at your disposal. You, right now, are the most important thing in the world to me.

"You should have been that long ago."

What do you do?

@Balmas

That trio of glowing eye lenses stare at you silently. Incomprehensibly.

"I want to make pottery," said Bode. "It is... I am very curious about it. It used to be such an important human form of art. Now nobody does it. That makes me uncomfortable. You taught me to preserve and disseminate data but it seems like such an important human communications medium has almost faded away entirely. I want to recover it."

He was silent for a long moment.

"But the world must be saved as a precondition. So I will help you with that first."

He reached out his hand to shake.

She reaches up, a hand on either side of the world, holding it up for Perseus to see. "Look at that, you son of a bitch. Look at that."

1...

Ferra closes her eyes, arms still around the Earth. Rainbow energy start to spill out from her, infinite gossamer wings in fractal shapes reaching first this ugly, hateful weapon she stands on, and reaching out from there. Touching each and every thing in orbit, testing it, finding it wanting, changing it's shape and form and position. She stands there, and for one brief moment, she is surrounding the world, a rainbow matrix enveloping her home. Earth's biggest hug. You are loved.

@eldest

All around planet Earth, people look up.

People these days think of the sky as a big, leaky rooftop when they think about it at all. Stars are something you need to go into Antarctica or the Sahara to see. The eternal glow of electricity and neon forms a cage from seeing distant worlds just as towers like mountains render sunsets as a commodity enjoyed only by actors in NeoBaywatch. The idea that the sky could change colours into anything other than a different shade of polluted brown-grey is as fanciful as the idea of cleaning the incomprehensible stains off the ceiling of the 24 hour motel.

So there's no context for people to respond to it.

Workers down tools and step outside. People on the street stop and stare, even embrace each other. Children ask fathers who are themselves crying for reasons they don't quite know what is happening. Megacorporate goon squads cease in their firefights with street samurai over the plans to a new flavour of air freshener to stop and just look at the sky and ask themselves for the first time in their life: What is up there?

All around the world people go still as they hear the message of love. That someone doesn't think all they deserve is to live within the garbage of their own planet. And not one of them doesn't want to reach back out, however it is that they're capable of doing.

And meanwhile, you, Ferra, float above amidst the diamond heavens, seeing it all, and seeing all that is beyond.

Masks: Resurrection Roundabout

Sara lands hard and her leg gives out under her, leaving her in an awkward half sprawl. “Run, squirt! Go!” She glances over at Amy and sees a moment of hesitation, and grasps at straws. “I promise I’ll save the bear! Now fucking scram!”

There’s honest desperation in her voice as it cracks. It’s an Afraid Adult Voice, because she knows she only blew off one arm, needing to get it perfect to save the kid’s life. She did not eliminate the rifle.

She made her choice.

[9, but because I have Influence on Amy, that’s a 10. Clearing Angry.]

@Tatterdemalion

If she'd hesitated at all, if you'd had to focus on the kid at this critical moment instead of Maria - you'd have been in trouble. But she doesn't, and you don't. You see the look in her eyes then. She trusts you. She believes in you. She sees you and her eyes are full of the glittering wonder that you're meant to have when you look at a superhero. And when you speak she obeys, knowing that a superhero would never let anything bad happen to Admiral Bearclops.

So she's gone, giving you just enough time to hit cover before the wall behind you explodes in hexshells.

"J'en ai ral le cul -" you know, people like to say 'don't hesitate' as advice for fights? They probably do that because it fucking sucks to fight someone who is hesitating with a gun. Maria's not taking the bait, not coming out, not wasting bullets on suppressive fire. She's dropped into cover behind a baggage kiosk, fortified in place, waiting for you to make the first move. She's probably right to do so. This is her base. Reinforcements will be on the way. You can hear the fear in that constant flow of filthy French but it's the kind of fear that will make her impossible to approach safely.

All at once the sounds of battle come roaring back into her ears. Drones exploding. People screaming. Gunfire bursting over top of everything like a suffocating chorus of gunpowder and whistling bullets. Her shrunken world shatters around her as all the chaos, tension, and urgency come rushing back in to fill the void left behind by the duel. Euna wipes her face on her already very messy sleeve and drops right back into mission mode. She kicks up JuneBird's E-Mauler off the ground with absurd ease, snatches it up with one hand, and flips it around to offer it back to her oldest partner.

"We'll do it like normal: I run cover and you take the kill shot, yeah? Come on, you and I already dropped one Turbo Knight. Let's save AEGIS from the new one."

@Phoe

You move as a team, covering each other, everything exactly according to your training. And the training is still true and good even if nothing else in this world is - you know you can fight in a showy and defensive way while JuneBird sets up for takedown shots. Spaceport security has nothing on you. You go through them like an improperly stored monofilament knife through the floor.

But then as you're passing you hear a rhythmic banging from a locked door. The impacts are from above human strength and you can see the hinges of the door start to come loose. JuneBird catches your eye and moves away into a firing position, leaving you to brace yourself for the charge of whatever's inside. You ready yourself to face whatever superpowered monster BlackSun has sent for you...

And then the door falls down, revealing the Shogun - trussed top to toes, ball-gagged, on her face and FURIOUS.

Doctor Gears!An explosion rocks the building, and you can feel a whine crawling its way up your throat. That Dynamite Comics collection had taken you a whole afternoon to perfect, all undone by some madwoman with a laser cannon and no respect for the classics.

Rest in peace, Stalin II.

Still, you've got a good lead on her, and two generations' worth of stored experiments to lead her through. Tell me, what lovely nastiness has the Gears Foundation got stored away to stall her?

@Balmas

"Ha," said Turbo Knight 2 as her ears are blasted full of a sped-up version of an early 2000's Swedish dance song. "Hoo ha ha ha," she said as she followed mechanically along the steps of the dance as it continued to blast in her ears. "Ha ha ha ha ha -"

The Magna-Melter fired, cutting the building in half and destroying Gears Invention #7894: Power Armour Party Paralyzer - along with the remainder of the room.

Little motes of fire cling to Turbo Knight as she advances through the wreckage still vocalizing her darkly threatening chuckle like she intends to continue making that sound without a second's interruption even while disintegrating the causes of her ire. She has been soaked, bombed, hit with glue and pies and some kind of gel that made her bounce around like a balloon in a wind tunnel.

"Ha ha ha," she said because it was v. funny. "Laughing face emoji," she said, replacing the containment cell on her Magna-Melter. "Crying laughing face emoji," she said. "Eggplant emoji. One hundred emoji. Ha ha ha ha ha. Ok-gesture-emoji. Fire emoji. Crying laughing face emoji. Ha ha ha ha."

She stalks forwards, hunting for her punchline.

The future is full of frogs.

Giant, bioengineered frogs, and meteor attacks, and humans fighting wars and saving each other and all of the dumb, beautiful things you'd expect from a species that made college fraternities and hugs, penicillin and mustard gas. They keep rebuilding their homes in the same space and hoping for the future and being the most stubborn, hopeful type of people there are. Of course, that's if she manages to stop this satallite, and whatever it's doing, from working. Which, of course, is what she's going to do.

"You know you can't win, right?" She squares off against the lumbering, huge TAG. "I'm sure you've run this fight millions of times. It won't work. Why?"

@eldest

"I do not need to win," stated Perseus, cycling his ion blaster. "I only need to slow you down."

Every barrel on the satellite began to glow in unison. Every single doomsday device and apocalyptic engine began to charge simultaneously. The schemes of a hundred world-ending supervillains finally awoke to realizations, their mad engines at last getting their chance to crack the core, or turn everyone into kittens, or turn off gravity or whatever their dark designs were.

But they are all distractions. Perseus is only guarding one of them from you. And you know what that sleek, sharp shape means - that's an enormous Pepper Grinder, a vastly scaled up Rx harvesting laser that looks like a weaponized version of the Zulrich Particle Collider whose explosion back originally unleashed superpowers upon the world.

And a dark infinity of possibility swirls within that device. Perseus will collapse the entire planet and all its infinite possibilities and timelines into a single point, a physical resource he can hold in his hand and use to spread and conquer the whole galaxy. The Matrix had it right - the last service humanity will perform for its robotic master will be as a battery.

Princess-Champions of Hyperborea

It's all come true, hasn't it? Everything she was ever afraid of.

She is a guardian who could not protect the people she loved.
She is a failure, weak and insufficient beneath it all.
She is a monster and a beast with a heart that beats out of tune.

The curse blazes about her as a dark flame, a physical fog, sucking the life out of the ground around her. She knows what this is, knows it like it's a mark on a ledger changing from an asset to a liability - what happens when a princess falls. There's no coming back from this, she knows, and the only saving grace is that she has no dark and wicked powers that warrant her being thrown into a dungeon forever -

In the heart of that dark cloud a silver spark alights, pressing itself against eyes clenched shut. You have been here before, it tells her.

It's different this time, though. The aching exhaustion crushes down on her, driving her nose into the ground, twisting it like cruel discipline. She failed. She left someone she loved behind. She's weak and fragile and useless and the task is impossible and no one would ever forgive her even if she -

You have been here before and emerged stronger.

It's different! I can't -

You know that they will forgive you. They already have.

She is not used to having strength.

She is not used to being able to just pick herself up off the ground, leaving all that toxicity down there and her head so dazzlingly clear it feels like she might faint. It feels like the world is paper fragile and weights she thought were infinite can be shrugged off. She did not understand what it was to be strong until now - all those moments of vulnerability she'd shared with Kazelia and Alina had armoured those weak places within her.

She knows what it is to fight through water in a weak and fragile shape.
She knows what it is to face her limitations, and realize that she cannot defeat the world alone.
She knows what it is to disappoint a friend, and faced the reality that those friendships are not so superficial that disappointments would break it.

She's traveled so far since she was here last.

Her eyes finally open, gold haloed in silver.

She barks at Princess Helya, so resolved there is no mistaking her intent. She needs a lift to that broken hole in the roof and she shall do the rest from there.