find me the root of ether squared and i'll show you a worldbutcher

i continue to remain deathly afraid of starsoarer but it is what it is

"I have these absolutely horrific dreams. Every night. Bands of charismatic shapeshifters acting as intergalactic ecoterrorists, brainwashing schoolchildren, hijacking aircraft with thousands of passengers, and time keeps repeating itself, as you shoot yourself in the head, in front of me, over and over and over--"

Na'el cuts herself off before she can mention the part where Minoth makes a benediction to her as he's cocking the gun, entrusting to her the future and the willpower she needs to maintain discipline distance from these forces which have nearly consumed him, without so much as a thought. That's why he has to kill himself: so that they can't control him, so that he can't spiral down the same way as his Driver did.

So that his body, already once changed and abused, can't be taken now and used.

No one she's met so far has family, and yet they're not quite orphaned either. They're just...oddly, brazenly independent. Wanderers.

They don't need caretaking. They hardly ever take any care, either.

But then, Alrest doesn't appear to be the same purposeless wasteland as Aionios. Culture is created and preserved across broader swathes of people, versus the virtually-nonexistent culture(s) of the individual colonies which only know war and verve toward an unseen Queen, against an unfounded foe.

(That is to say, they have a wartime culture, rituals and rations and routines, but the arts, the sciences, the very concept of interior identity...it lacks, and heavily. Not so much as a knot of macramé.)

The only reason Na'el doesn't know what she's fighting, here and now, is that the criminals are slippery, cold-cocked, and spurious to their true intentions. She may be hiding from the truth of her actions then spoken against the "old life" of Aionios, but a place like this brings much more to bear in terms of intricate inertia; the world itself doesn't so much fight as resist, neutrally, change.

And Minoth, the postmaster mercenary general, should know about that, shouldn't he?

Even as shifty and sardonic as Minoth is, he seems to exhibit a tremendous personal desire to protect and persevere Alrest's bright-minded, well-intentioned people. He's refreshingly cool, calm and collected; measured, with his dispense. Meanwhile, Na'el had lost sight of everything but her wrath, when she'd been wronged and then again led wrong.

She looks up at him, willing her ears to unflatten that they might have a serious dialogue, of some sort, one not based on scraps of tetchy, tattered fear.

Minoth is, as expected, studying her, drumming up one of those famous deliberate opinions of his.

"This is new, for you? A dream this vivid?"

So Minoth thinks her, in her consummate and innate talent as observed by Mikhas and Perceval, quite colorful, no stranger to swimming between realities and carving up the very air of the world with a flick of ether-circleted wrist, quite literally in her sleep. Obviously she's been disturbed by it, enough that she's forgetten any common courtesy about not stepping aside and telling someone that you just saw them die, violently, in an afterimage flash before - rather, behind - your eyes.

Na'el rubs those very same wrists, agitated. "I've been...haunted, yes. Nightmares aren't new to me. But this was so bizarre, because it felt so real. Even once I'd come to the point in the dream where I knew I had to wake up, because I couldn't possibly continue if it was true, all this carnage, I was still tied down."

And isn't that just like Aionios? Soldiers, flesh-and-mote recycled, being born again only to kill again, to shoot at scars that've yet to blossom, to make their reincarnation into a terrible purpose and asset - to make the step of death itself strategic.

Ha. If only Rurik had known about all that.

"But it wasn't coming from you," Minoth prods. If Na'el would stop for a moment to process, she'd receive his meaning as intended: that the violence erupting from her wakeless imagination does not issue from her own self, and does not make a silent indictment of her own soul. But that's not what she gets - instead, she takes it as that very same expression of culpability, that she wasn't doing anything to stop all the chaos swirling around her.

"If I could have stopped it, I would have," Na'el replies bitterly. "If I could have found Matthew by now, I would have, and been out of your hair. But I'm not. I'm here. And--"

Well. She's too self-possessed to say anything so discollected as that all she does is cause problems. It certainly does feel that way, sometimes.

Perhaps Alpha would even have finished what she'd started, if she hadn't been the one to fumble it in her misguided zeal. That is, not misguided, but...

But there has to be a reason for all of this, and if all Na'el can do right now is strike at the root of the problems she sees facing her, in this world that could be so pure and so noble if not for those wretched traffickers, then that's what she will do.

Remain as you are, Alpha had said. Na'el has always been recalcitrant when faced with the unjust and the ill-considered. She might not be scrappy in the same way as Matthew, but she holds her own.

Alpha's world. Her world. And the world that, for the moment, she's sharing with Minoth.

She hasn't yet decided where he fits, in her picture of piecemeal post-Aionios life. If he wanders on, then so he does. She supposes she can count on him not to make any trouble for her, seeing as how he's pretty much respected her decisions thus far, and let her alone with her forceful whims.

As long as that dream doesn't come true...

Minoth's stare is forlorn, as if he forgot to guard it - or maybe, not only that.

But Na'el won't be swayed. No pity. No patter. Her vision will be her own, devoid of pale, childish ideals.