Scene #8494: Society for Two

Owner	Pose
Dimokratia	Lilian Rook had wanted to meet and talk with Dimo of the Silver, and neither had expected to do so over the radio. It would be ghastly, as even passively existing had become, because of the very words in the air. Accusations, finely-sliced questions, and a name. The inquisition, ultimately, wouldn't ever find purpose to their motions. It was up to the Paladins organizationally, and the name on the air was poison to that as well. For now, hands were washed and washed and washed and washed and washed until they are raw, washed until they are scoured to the bare base metal, and are no more clean. There is no cleaning agent for this, only a change in state. INTEL SATELLITE CORPUS JURIS Intelligence Conference Room 3 There isn't an Intelligence Conference Room 1 or 2 any more, but 3 remains, one level beneath the pit and bulkheading where all the rest of the things in the Corpus Juris that once were was spared. The plans for this room have it as the last conference area, besides the break/rest room for the staff on the station. 1 and 2 were on the next floor down: and thus in the decomissioned zone. 3, next to the break room, was contractually set back exactly the way it was before, and so with a flair for the retro-intellegence era of three inch thick brown leather chairs with four buttons like a couch cushion sat upright around a team table in Matte Black Brought To You By The Letter I (pyramid and ocular implied but not included). The head of the table is untaken, the chair of Executive second-cushioned highback with its back to the door simply pulled out. At the presenter's central position is Dimo, sitting calmly cross-legged and seatback reclined. Her eyes, which would be obvious across the room if otherwise, are meditatively closed. The lights in the room, above, are set to their dimmest setting, leaving little rectangular glowboxes scattered at regular intervals about the room. Before Dimo, a little white plastic lamp emits a soft halo of white light. The room is warm, dryer and more palpably heated the closer one gets to the Champion of the Silver.
Lilian Rook	A meeting room is the last place Lilian wants to be for a talk like this. The words alone bring to mind impressions of bustling corridors of important people, watchful eyes around polished tables, charged quiet and focused gazes, of hours straight-backed endurance and projection and oration. Studied, analyzed, and listened to, for weakness as much as merit. The world of the meeting room is familiar to her, and the world of ugly, messy talks is becoming familiar enough that Lilian knows to think 'anywhere but here' at the idea. But ultimately, the choice proves poetically appropriate. An icon of the Paladins that has been all but fully forgotten. A dim room where nobody would think to look, in heroic green. Once again, a room that nobody monitors, to interact in a way that no one understands, where two women that nobody will look at and nobody will really forgive, speak about things no one can know and are deemed both beyond understanding and beneath notice. Lilian has the decency to slip inside in intensely normal fashion, closing the door softly, hanging her bag over the arm of her chair, and resisting the urge to clasp her hands and lean up to the table partway through the gesture. She taks a moment to exhale, push a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and close her eyes in contemplative silence. Coincidentally or not, it lasts precisely ten seconds. Laudibly precise, in fact. "If we're going to talk about anything, then first I need to do what nobody else is going to." Lilian says. Slowly opening her eyes, she looks at Dimo in a way that is only just barely luminous, like one quarter of the reflective glow of a night predator. "I know that you must have seen what it was like in there. I know you have . . . some, idea, of what happened to Petra. How things went, after Ishirou died, and then came back, and everyone was even worse. Even if you're very strange and different by their measure, I know you know that none of that was normal. And still, you chose to . . ." Lilian presses her palm to her cheek, as if the issue were in the joint of her jaw and not in her faltering courage. "Even if it technically didn't involve the Paladins, and all the little legalities fell neatly within my private business and non-Commonwealth jurisdiction, there was ample opportunity to doubt me. To be rid of me, even. And you didn't, obviously. You chose to overlook it, and scrub it off, and try to make things better in your own way, so--" Lilian breathes deeply, in and out. "Thank you." "Why?"
Dimokratia	A meeting room, ultimately, in a forgotten area of a forgotten place only operated by weird people who really, truly, had to know. Dimo sits, unresponsive and eyes closed, considering or simply idle. She doesn't have to breathe, and the hum from her, the hot hum, maintains a harmonious tone. The room is pleasant, but the topic... ... is as it is. Lilian's eyes fall on Dimo beholdingly, and in turn she feels a palpable motion through the hot synapse-fizz that surrounds Dimo, directed as she takes a waking-breath and unlids her blue optics. Her eyes are lit intentionally, though the cool blue of her gaze comes with the warm fizz of her lapping-wave break of attention. "I think you misunderstand me." Dimo begins, the fond tones of a preacher who has folded the page of scripture over in their hands until it yellowed, a personal fondness, a resolute directness. "And I forgive you. You are correct, and please consider it warmly - that I did try to make things better in my own way. For you, Lilian Rook." The champion's carbon-black lips pull into a broad smile. "And because she asked. I believe a small part of her, a true part of her, exists within the disease. She asked for simple things, that anyone would want. Love, and form, and power. You, as well, wished for love, and form, and power. And I can grant love, and form, and power, and..." The warm tones fall to a performative sigh. Dimo's carbon black wrapped fingers lift and spread out, the exaggerated shrug simply being correct for her proportions. "She required medicine. I applied it. She should have been greatly healed in mind as well, and the beauty of her soul revealed for polish, and she would have been our perfect, instant rehabilitation. There would have been no need for... Any of it. Distasteful. If she was not so bitterly, uniquely resistant to accepting what she asked for, I would have smoothed that whole place and aligned it for you." "Because I wished to continue our prior conversation, of course."
Lilian Rook	Lilian exhales strangely at the warm fizz she feels, both on her nerves, as most do, and crackle-popping on something else less easy to articulate. It'd put her off a little before, but the funny thing about the recent Silvering is that now the sensation reminds her of the champagne bubble fizz of touching Petra's skin. Conversely, for all that's happened, Lilian's space feels strangely calm. Dark and stormy, true, but in that hushed way of terrible storm clouds starting to turn 'round one another at great, silent, entrancing distance. Night cold and heavy static, ozone and phantom rain, prickling electricity and frigid light. The mind of someone far from kind and calm, yet strangely at peace with it all; the atmosphere of watching the long shadows and ominous flashes from a cozy place behind an open window. 'And I forgive you.' "You probably shouldn't." says Lilian. "Though, out of all people, I suppose you're the one I have the least confidence in saying that you wouldn't forgive me so easily if you actually saw it." she sighs. "I can't remember doing anything in particular for you that you'd need to pay me beck for, so perhaps I should be glad you've decided to find me so interesting that you'd do anything 'for me', never mind of that magnitude." The uncomfortable pause that follows is mercifully brief. "People tend to struggle with doing anything 'to make it better' for me. Struggle with starting, struggle with wanting to, struggle with even thinking of doing so." 'You, as well, wished for love, and form, and power' Lilian tenses, but within tolerances. "Unfortunately, no one was there to offer it, and no one would have given it if they had been. Either because of that, or completely unrelated to it, perhaps due to some preexisting nature, I'm not the sort of person to see people in terms 'what they can give me' and to only remember them when I want something they have." Her fingers curl. "I don't pick up wants from seeing them. I picked them up from the mirror. And I've come far enough by taking what I wish for that I don't know how to receive it anymore. "Petra, I think, only knows how to have it forced on her. To hope for the right people to force the right thing." 'Any of it. Distasteful. If she was not so bitterly, uniquely resistant to accepting what she asked for' "I didn't understand it either." says Lilian. "Not until the right prompt and the right words at the right time--" with the right wine "--made it all click. She isn't so simple as that. She's not the same as Ishirou, asking Persephone to give him his actualization, or Estevez, demanding I give him my respect. It's not about taking or asking or breaking or receiving. Thinking of her in those terms is . . . such a normal mistake to make, honestly." "Petra doesn't hate being Petra; she hates what Petra is. She doesn't want to be some better version of herself, cured and happy and powerful and loved. Hurling herself into the crusher is the entire point. All the softness, all the give and slack she's been awarded; that's suffocated her so badly that all she can think of is to find something hard to shatter herself into pieces on, and hope a more flawed, more unique, somehow beautiful, person can be put back together from it." "If you want to examine how she turned out this way, you need only look at those wounds, I think. She hadn't shattered the shell that was asphyxiating her yet. Before then, patching it up with silver is just sealing the gouges and cracks, not repairing her. It's such a bizarre way of becoming . . . 'greater and more complex and specialized'. So much that I didn't recognize it at first. Only in retrospect is it obvious that you can't make something more complex without more pieces." Briefly, dimly, Lilian considers the fact that she's going on at length about Petra in the way she doesn't know Petra goes on about her at length with all of her friends. And enemies.
Lilian Rook	'Because I wished to continue our prior conversation, of course.' "And which one might that be?"
Dimokratia	"If I am to be forgiven at misunderstanding Petra, then you may be forgiven for misunderstanding me." Dimo offers from recline, sitting forward with a creak of leather at the shift in weight. Her heels click into the green floor, and with a dull thunk her elbow finds the table. "And why indeed, then?" She agrees warm-amused to the topic. Why would she go to such lengths? She explained, but did she really? No, not particularly. Instead, Lilian speaks at length about Petra, and for the length of it - through the motions both emotional and microphysical, Dimo gently leans her cheek into the curl of her leaned fingers and smiles just ever so gently. All the way until the end. "You are quite fond of her. You should tell me more about her later, you seem a far better interpreter." Dimo decides with a quick gusto, wishing quickly to move onto the next topic, slightly excited. "You have... examined her, yes? The medicine, the physical transmutation is quite perfect even if the connections failed to touch and hold and peel away the illness from her. Despite. So - what do you think? I had thought to offer to your sister first, but Petra seems now far more of a useful showpiece. Despite her... cosmetic adaptations." The scarring.
Lilian Rook	'If I am to be forgiven at misunderstanding Petra, then you may be forgiven for misunderstanding me.' "'Forgiving' you sounds a bit high-handed doesn't it?" says Lilian, cooly. "I feel as if the thing I should be deciding to forgive is entirely different. Not the matter I felt the need to come hat in hand and thank you for." Her lips twitch in a moment of consternation, perhaps not quite getting what 'misunderstand' is supposed to mean here. 'You are quite fond of her. You should tell me more about her later, you seem a far better interpreter.' "I don't know about that." Lilian rushes slightly, suddenly smoothly defensive. "I've learned a lot. It's a natural human reflex to repeat the lessons, and try to teach them too; it cements the knowledge. I suppose I may as well not object to fond, but . . ." Her eyes briefly flick away and back. "It's hard not to feel grateful, when someone dredges up all the feelings you wouldn't want to admit to having, holds them in their hands, and tells you that you're not insane." 'You have... examined her, yes?' Lilian coughs. 'So - what do you think?' "Beg pardon? Katrina?" is the best Lilian can think to say first. "Why? Have you been speaking with her? Did I say something especially relevant?" She definitely can't think of anything. "Showpiece-- What are you even trying to sell me? If it's just that your work, your style, is especially clean and beautiful, I think I'm already a believer." Lilian stops to actually consider the question from angles that beg an answer. "The way her heart hums and screeches, how her blood flows soft and bristles sharp and hard, those sorts of things are . . . I wouldn't expect it from something 'machine'. That sort of animism is never quite there in flesh. Nobody's skin fizzes when they're comfortable and nobody's viscera comes away clean and pure with reunification in already in mind. I know of plenty of ways to obtain strength and longevity and projection of force; even healing and beauty, to some lesser degree. None that . . . enshrine the self into the body, like that, though." The way she hesitates all-too-well conveys in silence, the unspoken 'that anyone else could know'. "But she's not wrong to call it a violation as well. Maybe not of her body, because she didn't choose or sculpt it at all, but at least her autonomy, because she didn't volunteer to have her soul transposed on her skin where everyone can see it now."
Dimokratia	A gentle roll of something that is like laughter emits from Dimo, from her core. A depth of golden fry, a honey-sweet buzz, positivity escaping in little puffs. "I misunderstood Petra. What she... desired, the method, the pursuit. I was moved by her great, terrible illness and injury. I acted to save her life, and not for a moment, but for as long as she wished to live." Dimo's gentle lean lifts from her curled fingers and she stands slowly, rocking the chair back with a smooth motion to standing, moving into the dim lights as her glowing optics track to Lilian. Beneath the failing lights the bare details of her body's intricasies lay essentially unwrapped. The carbon-black wrapping about her fingers, palms, wrists, and forearms ends like synthmuscle braids at a metal cap. She moves and the lights highlight the tiniest expressive crevasses, the way miniscule pistons and bars interlock and motion out to hinge the motion of her fluid-at-scale torso dark structure wrapped in a perfectly ordered wing of cabling the implication of a floating joint, rotating about as-- Dimo sits on the table, under the executive seat's specific light, shown in her grand complexity. At the center of her chest, beneath the contour of a billion uncontoured parts, is a leaking glow, a heat that turns the thin motion of molten silver into a hot flow of liquid gold, right at the eye-strobing, don't-stare-at-it core of a-- "It is hard to not feel grateful." Dimo agrees, gently, and nods. "We spoke, some time ago, about a way for you and your sister to become closer. A demo, of sorts, of things that I claimed." The heat close to the Champion, so revealed and 'naked', is palpably balmy. A hot summertime day in the dark. "You have just a taste of knowing it, and so you can see more clearly - the life past the rings of the disease. It is the disease that speaks to you the falsehood, that it is right and natural for senescence and death. This disease, choking and wicked, would have you accept and surrender to the 'inevitability' of biological cessation. That your soul should simply run out of time and rot for forever. It is apalling. Worse than the little inefficencies of the bodies you are created into, but the dogma. You must understand, Lilian." She practically begs, entreats, wishes dearly upon the Immune. "It is curable. And I have that medicine." The medicine that Petra Soroka received. "She-" Petra. "-could be any expressive thing, but she chooses the bleeding. I did not. She could be pristine. She could be her first impression of a beautiful new being that was unlimited from her old rotting shell, and chose to remain exactly as hurt as when I found her." Gently, Dimo extends a hand to touch Lilian on the bicep on the shoulder, gingerly with her fingers, testingly with the barest brush of her black-wrapped palm. "It is... difficult, for me, Lilian, to accept your thanks, when my people's inheritance still shows your pain to the world. Will you help me? Will you help her?" Petra? Lilian? Dimo is not clear.
Lilian Rook	It's clear that Lilian finds the exposed artwork, math in motion, of Dimo's frame fascinating on the border of enthralling, but something about her stare feels different from simple human interest in many small and moving parts. It's difficult to say what exactly it is, but honestly that something about her gaze intensely, inexplicably homesick. Her eyes widen at the change of hue. Her hand drops away from her cheek. But Lilian knows better than to seek kinship or understanding in that glow. She could never manage the black of fine and orderly carbon and that pure and brilliant gold. Hers is cold iron and polished lodestone, gold dust and void lacquer in the seams. Still, however. It is beautiful. 'That your soul should simply run out of time and rot for forever.' "Never. Not me. I don't know what's wrong or right about that, and I don't care. I know for absolute certain, if nothing else, I have all the time in the world." Lilian suddenly raises her voice. Her fingertips fing the table edge, and her nails curl into its varnish. It is, of course, the first time Dimo has heard her speak that way. A type of voice she'd only managed to find since she'd been able to breath the air of a home without her father for the first time. Since the worst girl in the world had said 'you deserve better'. The faint and everpresent tension in every word; the metal fatigue of endless forebearance and weary groaning of the architecture of guarded politeness and isolation, are utterly absence. The silent stormclouds and cold cherenkov glow of her presence rise and flash their long shadows to meet that hot, rough, haze-choked, and direly, nakedly sincere edge in her voice, and in her eyes. "I said it to Petra, and I've said it to Rita, and I'll say it to anyone I have to. No matter how evil it is, no matter how sick I get, I can't change that one rule. No matter everything else, I get to exist. It's my fucking turn, and it ends when I'm done." The lightning bolt vanishes, and the dull thunder rolls in seconds later. Lilian breathes out, and settles back into her chair, straightening out an invisible disorder in her hair for no reason but face and mien. "I'm sorry. I know what you meant. But I've worked too hard for this to be okay with losing it for any reason. I don't care if it's fair; if someone gets jealous then they should have thought of it, should have tried, too. Saying I plan on living forever isn't a joke, or a reassurance, even if I phrase it like one. It's a prayer, and an oath. A hundred years isn't enough to make up for everything, and when I've broken even, I'll be too important to too many people to say 'fair enough'." "One upon a time, I wished for steel too, you know." Lilian murmurs. "I wished for the fairy tale that ends with 'happily ever after' and no further. I love potential, more than anything; what could be. And even if I love when a chapter closes, I hate finality. I got this far by not accepting anyone's word about anything being over." 'She could be her first impression of a beautiful new being that was unlimited from her old rotting shell, and chose to remain exactly as hurt as when I found her.' Lilian falls silent for such an egregiously unnecessary count of ten that it cannot be taken as time for contemplation alone. She has far more of that than she could possibly need, and has no use for leaving people waiting so that she can think. The visibility of difficult thought is the point. She could never say something like this so easily, even on the surface.
Lilian Rook	"It's frightening to be given things that you don't think you deserve. Further, it feels miserable, for some, to go from hollow and aimless to unlimited all at once. But I suppose, most of all, it isn't about what you did, but the fact it was you." Lilian breathes, holds, closes, and opens her eyes again. "Some of those hurts, she wanted to keep, and was too afraid to risk losing them if she let go of everything else. And the reason she wanted to keep the ones that show, is for no other reason than that I was the one who put them there." "I think she fell in love with my cure. The one I administered to myself, a long time ago. A hackjob, to be certain, all cut and bloody and jagged, smelted down and hammered back together, with all the cracks and joins filled in." "At some point, I really think that she started craving for me to inject the same into her veins. In that sense, the cure you offered her was so kind, so gentle and radiant and perfect, it was inevitable she'd reject it. After a life of gentle kindness, she had eyes only for my cruel, painful sort of fix. Even now, she's obsessed with the unformed space between where I am and where you are, and what else I'll build in it to get there." 'It is... difficult, for me, Lilian, to accept your thanks, when my people's inheritance still shows your pain to the world.' "Yes. Well. The entie world has never been interested in anything but my pain. I'm certain they'll find my 'environmental storytelling' properly fascinating." Lilian spits, bitterly. "They'll have plenty of shitty analyses about it, too." She hunches slightly forwards to rub her eyes with the heels of her palms, suddenly appearing very tired. "But . . . I don't want to leave them there forever either. It doesn't make me happy to think of that girl, still bleeding her mercury from the places I put that knife, a year from now, or for her to still be wandering the nothing that's replaced her dreams. I want to leave something with her that's better than damage, you know? I wish she'd be proud of her resilence, and not what she survived." Lilian doesn't remove to stop Dimo from such a light touch. The self-consciousness of allowing someone to feel her arm is a dim ember. She's gotten used to the feeling of warm muscle and slow heartbeats. "Whether or not she wants to stay Silver, I don't know what I think about that-- I'm certain I'll figure it out when I come to it. I just know I want her to move on from being-- from needing to be proud of how hurt and miserable she is. She still hasn't figured out that you don't have to show your bloody receipts for a beautiful thing earned." Lilian looks to Dimo, then looks down to her own arm. "It's really something, to grasp the purer form of what you always wanted, without the trappings of how you got there." Her fingers curl, her wrist clenches, and the cosmic dust of another void, black as fey night, spirals in beautiful orbits and collects into mirror-reflective steel in a wave all the way up the length of her arm, dusty motes of dim stellar gold flashing and smouldering beneath the surface, only visible as little glints in the seams where she moves. Halted so selectively, partway in transition, Dimo can see up close where the smooth, patterned inner layer, isn't 'skintight' so much as 'skin, also'. The bands and plates of contoured, glossy metal, feel warm to the touch. She can dimly feel Lilian's heartbeat in it. "I remember that talk, by the way. And a different one. About the warrior and the forest."
Dimokratia	Stroking, gently now, touching as the blind do to learn the shape with only the hand, the warm palm and searching touch of the champion of the Silver lightly kneads. "You understand." To the heated words. "Your soul understands. The insult of what chemistry and bacteria and water-starved living combustion shackles you to. The people aghast at the kind Silver who would bring them to a forever for them, a family for them, however far that they wish to take it. The people with all of their 'wisdoms' on how to appease the council of bacteria that can topple them and cripple their lives forever if they disobey. The inefficencies of adaptation. The chemicals and red living screams to them to stay alive as it engineers their death. It is..." Dimo's touch remains affirming, taking the slightest care to ensure that Lilian was comfortable with such an intimate interfacing, and then again to test her tolerances for touch, but when both are done, the Champion has a calculated firmness to her grip manipulated with the smallest motions of her fingers. She touches Lilian as she is, not the presentation of flesh, not the presumption of humanity, but the felt-out truth of her reality. Tactile affirmations of her own density. As it becomes rapidly clear that she is touching a warm metal, the champion is plain in her delight, remaining restrained even as her 'nakedness' shows a clear surge towards something that is restrained, an expressive wave all the way down her arm and into the muscle-wrap to die at the wrist. 'a hundred years isn't enough to make up for everything,' "A hundred years. That is just over what is given to the human naturally. And it would not even be acceptable to learn a single task fully, much less a field. Who has decided that you live for so long? Who has decided that? The disease. The negative energy. The enemy. They deny you even the tools and medicine to help yourself." And then Lilian speaks of her own cure and Dimo falls quiet. Her blue optics, with the room so warm, and her gold-flowing core that cools to silver through her deepest recesses, bear the honey-buzz of softness, of fixing a gaze on someone seeing and being seen. She calls the Silver kind, and for a moment that keeps extending her optics aren't cool in their blue at all. She does not have to blink, but the shuttering, after ten whole seconds, transitions her eyes away, to the door behind Lilian, lit at the corner of the room. "Speak to her and tell her that injury isn't the garb of one close to you, but a confident power, perhaps. But more, speak to her. For me?" A desire. "She will listen to you. And that space between us, when she is so remodeled by my medicine, my process, is..." Thoughtful-warm, a hanging note. "Something you would correct, then? That is more than acceptable. And if she wishes it gone, then there are many... tall women and thick-waisted men to call upon and remove it. The seat of her soul is within the engine, so it would need to be rehoused." A simple matter, if the Multiverse had a say, but everything had a complication. Dimo focuses on none of them, and instead on the words about the forest. "You have walked the forest for so long, Lilian. Perhaps as long as you can remember, but have walked towards something. You know what it is, and to get there, you must shed the forest to return to society. And there is value in the hunt, value in pursuit, value in travel, value in all of it, for you bring back this experience, and you bring back this victory, and you bring back this self, this Lilian, to society, and society holds you, and gives to the warrior structure, and love, and purpose, and every resource to improve their skill, themselves, their craft. To society, the most valuable part of the warrior is the warrior."
Lilian Rook	"Yeah. I understand." says Lilian. "Not enough to-- No, too much, to lay it out cleanly and attractively. More than the philosophy, the sheer, sickening unfairness of it all. It makes me want to take everyone who everyone apologized for, glorified, this kind of existing and--" Lilian lets out a short, sharp breath, and the rest of her smoking thunder with it. "I don't know. I don't think . . . I can't say if wires and pistons and all those things are . . . I see the value. I see the rational, important ways in which they improve on things. The sort of important things that people don't really deserve to argue about unless they have something else immediately at hand. The people screaming about autonomy don't know how to treat their bodies at all." "Perhaps I'm just not quite the demographic who sees everything I want to be in the machine, though." Lilian gently flexes her fingers. The sound is nothing like the rattle-clack of plate, but like the soft ticking of a watch. A weak smile quirks the corners of her lips, at Dimo's delighted expression. "But maybe I'm just to the side of it. I can't stand to be made of 'parts', divisible. But I've seen what I look like without the 'screaming red' and the falling-apart things demanding to be cared for, and it's undeniable that I wished for steel and light and pieces joined by being and not will." 'The negative energy. The enemy. They deny you even the tools and medicine to help yourself.' "I'll live longer than that." Lilian says, cautiously. "But I certainly was denied the fucking tools and medicine to help myself. To even stop the bleeding." She halts with a throat-clearing buffer. "So I can't casually rebuff it on grounds of longevity alone. It's about more than that. I couldn't be so intellectually lazy if I tried." Lilian sighs. "I don't know. When I'll stop being angry. At all of it. We'll see, I suppose. But I don't have to know the entire future to know what's best for now. I think people saying 'perfect is the enemy of good' are so full of shit; they can barely even bother to try for 'good', and they're made of nothing but regrets for all the time they didn't do anything." 'But more, speak to her. For me? She will listen to you.' "She will." says Lilian. "Though, only if I make nothing up, and bend no truths beyond their elasticity. She has a way of knowing when I do." Lilian laughs, though only briefly. "I don't know if I'd use 'correct'. I couldn't ever claim to be so skilled, never mind anywhere close to so compassionate as you. My process is doubtlessly worse. But if it's the difference between mussing it with knife and brush, or seeing her reject it all, I'll take a destructive type of creativity over actual destruction, right? Even if she's so much smaller than someone like Persephone or I, just barely beginning to bud, I want her to keep advancing in our direction, not slide back along theirs." Lilian says. "It's not . . . it isn't quick or clean. I know more than most about welding wounds and lacquering them smooth and purposeful. But you're patient, aren't you?"
Lilian Rook	'...To society, the most valuable part of the warrior is the warrior.' "I don't know how to feel about society." says Lilian. "I had my chance to wander so deep into the forest I'd never return. And I wanted to, on purpose, deep, deep in my heart. But I didn't, and I chose not to, for whatever reason, and now I have to live with the consequences of that choice." She sighs, sinking into her chair, overcome with a sudden wave of lassitude. "I grasp your meaning, about returning to society with what I've found. Bringing back knowledge, showing them wants and ways to be . . . enriching it, I suppose, with nuance and complexity and new ways and new thoughts." "Even if I have to force it down their ravenous little maws until they get it or they fucking choke. That's the problem, though. That society doesn't fucking want me. What am I supposed to return to? Who's going to see what I caught and brought home and thank me? Nobody's grateful for my hunt. They're all sickened by the uncivilized thing they see on the edges of the forest, hoping it doesn't come back. All they want is for me to catch and bring back the same old fucking things they want, but can't and won't get themselves, and give it to them; not even trade it; for necessities, for care, like a real trapper; just a drip feed of next to nothing for exactly the exotic staples they're all craving. I fucking hate them. I want to hunt them and carry them off into the forest, not the other way around. I'm sick, so sick and tired, of trying to return to them. They don't deserve me. Society hasn't earned me yet." Lilian stops, clutching her face, and sinks deeper into her seat. The armour crawls partially past her elbow. "Sorry. This-- Apologies, this isn't the time." Lilian lowers her hands to just her mouth. "I've said my thanks. And asked my questions. I'll speak to Petra. And I'll try . . . smoothing things over, just a little. It wasn't free for you; I understand that. Even if I wouldn't have willed it to happen, I'm not in the business of denying the very few times someone thinks of me while they act."