I'm the lunatic!
There's a secret, about Mira; a scary thing the Samaarians really don't want you to know. It's not as important as the connection from Ganglion to human, nor as star-shattering as the true identity of NLA's great entrepreneur L. It really doesn't matter, in the face of a Nopon and Ma-non invasion jointed to Zaruboggan and Orphean oddity.
But it strikes Seren, all the same. It almost strikes them hard enough to slap the sparkles off their face - and that, of all things, would be a truly sad sight.
A surprising amount of the Wrothians are just nuts. Seren might not get along with Ga Buidhe the best of all, but even she shares with them something silly, every while in a once.
(In fact, it's the women more than the men who are proud and buttoned-up and unbudging.)
It started with the Mediator work, post-treaty, which Seren was and is always happy to do but does find a mite draining. All these individuals saying mere variants of the same things, running them around in circles to solve this feud, salvage that effect, school that affect, supervise this duel.
Seren even took a gamble and asked Hope about it, heel of hand laid to forehead as their halo slumped over the picnic table between benches. "Is it just a lot all at once, or are they really not saying anything interesting? Like, I feel awful. The Orphe are mega samey too. The Zaruboggans especially! Maybe the names are easier to keep track of? Not with the Orphe though, obviously, but they're sorta like a hivemind to begin with."
Hope had made a massive wince at all of this, entirely unsure how to contend with Seren's guilt when she'd been having enough trouble with her pseudo-religious own. But, she had made her best effort to correct and support, by reminding Seren that as long as they weren't being callous, what was most important was for the work to get done, and they could reinvest at a later date, as necessary.
Surprisingly pragmatic. Seren had sighed and resigned themself to it with a smile, thanking Hope and steeling themselves for yet another flight back to probe site 315 and the eternal Wrothian hallway.
And these names! Seren really honestly genuinely legitimately swears that they're not being xenophobic when they think about it. Bazinga...Joe Rogan...Da Vinci... Chances are far from slim that there's a Wrothian somewhere out there named Mi Yelv. Seriously.
So Gi Zang, the principal duelist, didn't really amuse Seren all that much. Well, sure, he sort of amused, when he bith his thongue and spat at the ground, but it didn't outweigh the boredom of stationing themself at a range of vantage points in Noctilum, Sylvalum, and Oblivia, just waiting to show him the business end of a raygun and get it over with.
Maybe Seren's not religious, nor beholden to a certain human morality, but the biggest sin, to them, is being boring.
It just takes a while for them to realize how flawlessly the Wrothians deliver on a promise they'd never given.
Their true turnabout comes when they finally relent to hitting Headwater Summit, having just dealt with De Ezich and the mood whiplash of fighting his parents for him but then wanting him to at least acknowledge what he'd done (they gave up and sent him off to the diner with high hopes and full congratulations), and peer over the edge of the cliff by the waterfall to see who lurks beneath. It's been a while since Seren's been perturbed by cliffside tricks, courtesy of Schneider, but they do stop to wonder what would have happened if they'd just flung over and hit the basin, unawares.
(Nothing would have happened. They'd just have been uncharacteristically self-annoyed.)
Look for a lunatic, they said. Someone's making a disturbance, they said. Would be likely to appear as Definian camouflage, right?
But it's just Gi Zang, and Gi Zang admits without very much resistance nor recalcitrance to being just that: a lunatic.
It's been long enough since the last of their duels that Seren actually smiles at their histrionic acquaintance, and just as always, makes no bones toward refusing the battle.
Oh, here it is, his final technique. They keep waiting for him to falter, flub it up, but he doesn't. He calls out the whole chant, bows and poses, pulls out all the stops.
Gi Zang's definitely forgotten one crucial, highly influential fact, though: Seren, the equivalent non-human nut, is absolutely delighted to have to face not one of him, but three.
And they all say it, don't they? Much more endearing to hear it from xenoforms than from fellow un-naturalized BLADEs, but they all want to be like Seren. They all want to meet them, face them, become them. They all want to be so stellar sure.
Yeah, he's a nutcase. But actually, I'm the lunatic. He wants to be more like me.
god bless i persevered (as usual) to find it (this is a lie i required assistance and requested help) (i thought it was a tweet and eventually considered tumblr but the reddit sidebar this whole time was staring me in the face) (seer)