mental link | day: 006

[shri]

[ Her options are at this point, are brood up how much she wants to kill Damon and Elena, or get on with work. She didn't do so well at brooding, though her mind is still so new, so sharp and edged and not kept inside of herself. But in this case, a fire trying to find new kindling to keep itself going. Her own impatience and frustration are evident. But when isn't she anyway - ]

( I was informed when I arrived that we need to be ... ascertaining particular pieces of information.

Have we begun such? If not, should we not begin planning to reconnoitre? )

[ She has already plans, but even so, if it's already been done - well, she's happy to be told if it means she doesn't have to go chasing her own tail. ]

( And does anyone know how to use these - light books - that has the time to show me? It keeps flashing at me and I cannot make it stop. I think it wants something. )

[ The data pad, she means the data pad, she's grouchy at it for not! giving her! the things! she wants! Being a grandma in space is a trial. ]

Comments

[shri]

[ She stays in the same spot, and if not for how she was - that flat open expression of absolute attention to what he says - the force of her own mind turned up on his. That, too, consumes. But only to fuel herself, her cause, her understanding. She might seem no more a woman at rest, paying attention leisurely. A practised pose of recline where she slow blinks, her mouth fixed to a line. But there could be no mistaking, even with her muddle perception she is taking stock fully of what he was saying to her. ]

I will never accept that. I belong to my people.

[ She is filled with many voices - long before this creature took up home in her soul. It would know its place if it wanted her compliance. ] I believe I spoke with... them, too.

[ A strange feeling, to speak to and too many - but she is a little familiar with it in the metaphorical sense, if never so literal before. ]

[ryohji]

[ acceptance. he thinks, if only it were so simple, if only instrumentality was to be accepted or refused, if choice had direct bearing on the direction of their lives, if mind over matter could protect them from the worst of it. in the conventional sense, anyway.

he is quiet for a moment, appraising the level of attention she contributes, her reply. ]

If you put a frog in boiling water, it'll jump out before you can kill it. But a frog that's placed in lukewarm water will fail to notice as he's slowly brought to a boil. That's what they call, 'creeping normality.'

[ he makes it all sound so inevitable, doesn't he? this is heavy stuff, coming so quickly that his point risks dismissal or underestimation. that's what clarke did with it, anyway. ] Distance between humans is healthy, after all. That's what I've decided, to keep from using the symbiote unless necessary. That's why I came here, to tell you in person.

[shri]

[ It's... nothing she understands in this form, not exactly. But as he speaks, she realises she knows just what he means.

It was no more than a snatched traveller off the road, first. Then a gopi girl herding her cattle at the edges of the field. A child that wandered too far off from the other of his class. A brahmin that had gone to pray at the river bank and it came in closer and closer from field to village to city, until it almost felt like it had always been this way. That people could be consumed and their flesh rendered and it just be the price of occupation until she had been worn down into such a place she could not escape that boiling water that had seared away the layers of skin -

- the heat then, is sudden, not of a cooking fire, or the light of oil lamps - this is the burning pyre, this is the Goddess Sita that puts herself to the flames. This is the woman of her home knowing what happens to all women who have to endure the fall of a city, throwing themselves into the flames as the heat grows and grows and grows. This is the screaming, the blood, the fear, that paints her. Padmavati would never let another have her body.

And she had done nothing less than burn herself alive before ever allowing it. In her hands she had sunk herself into an empire rather than give herself over and by those hands begun to rip.

There was only ever two choices, there would only ever be two choices. ]

No. [ The empty cavern of her mouth as it forms the word. Without true shape and yet the meaning entire meaning comes without mistake. ] That will never come to be, now that you have told me what is in that water.

[ She will wage war, even if it is in her own body, and if she cannot win, she will do what all good Queens do: she will never let herself be taken. ]