[b]Nova![/b]

Green and Pink face off. Yellow lurks on the sidelines, adjusting the flower behind her ear, wearing the beatific smile that means she has Seen the end of this already.

Pink stands calmly in her stance, sword held two-handed in front of her. Green drops to a crouch, leg arcing wide across the floor. 

She lunges. They clash. 

Green goes down.

They re-assume positions, reset. This time Green tosses her blade up and halfsword, lunging in hard while alternating hilt and blade strikes along with heavy punches from her free hand that lead into renewed grips. Pink stands calmly in her stance, sword held two-handed in front of her.

Green goes down.

Extended observation suggests that it's not that Green is overtly committed to finishers. It's not even that there's not potential here - everything she does is overflowing with potential. But rather than refining any of these techniques she paradigm shifts into something entirely new with each new attempt. It's clear she's a genius, the speed at which she learns and the way she never loses the same way twice. Each new solution is a perfect counter to specifically how she went down the time before. But then the next step or a forgotten followup gets her and sends her back to the mat. Her genius, then, seems incompatible with the long, slow work of mastering a skill. 

"That's an inevitable part of her," said Yellow. "If she liked something enough to commit to it she'd break it off into a new colour to work on it full time. She's a mile wide and inch deep - and not just here, but she melted down recently because that came out in an intimate context. She doesn't have a centre she can return to, and that leaves her adrift. I don't think she likes it. I don't know what fixed looks like."

She looks up from her phone. "Blue says thank you for the sword promise, by the way," she said. "She's extremely excited. Make sure you make her swear a paladin oath of some kind when she gets it, that'll send her to the stars."

It was rare to see Yellow this... backstage. Normally conversations with her were like earlier this evening, the culmination of preparedness and confidence. But it felt now like, in the wake of her defeat, she'd deliberately lowered her guard. Instead of the mask of raw charisma she wore when she was 'on', instead she seemed be the part of November that had a little bit of perspective. She watched herself, judged herself, and could speak quite frankly about the parts of herself that were and weren't 'working' - according to her standards at least.