[b]Pink![/b]

"Good morning, Mr. Snake-In-The-Eye," said Pink, curtsying as best as she could from her position atop Fiona. "My name is November, formerly the maidservant of Mrs. Everest. We have met once or twice. I simply love what you have done with the place."

And... she did. She was looking now. It was as simple as not being on her feet any more. This position atop Fiona's shoulders was so alien to her experience with this place, the fact that she was physically higher in the air meant that her intricate gridmap of the building didn't apply. She was astounded at how different the view was from up here.

"I am genuinely glad to find you here, actually," she added. "I was actually your most vocal champion in the matter of Mrs. Everest's will. I cannot claim credit for her decision, but I did introduce her to your name in the first instance, and spoke when I could about the advantages you would bring to her fortune."

[b]Yellow![/b]

"During the revolution they beheaded the King."

She was talking to... someone. Monologuing, really. She wasn't really paying attention to that part, she just needed to get this out of her head so she'd found someone to listen to her. 

"Beheaded is the operative word," said Yellow. "Because the King was more than a man. The king was the highways and the people who taxed them. The king was the navy. The king was farmlands and workshops, the king was muster rolls and vaults filled with gold, the king could say "The state, it is I!" and in no way be wrong. So when the revolution came for the king they decapitated him - they decapitated the man - but the state, the [i]King [/i]lived on."

She paced back and forth, twirling the idea in her hands. She'd written a version of this for her blog but she somehow hadn't captured something essential about it. "And then came the legislature. In a grotesque act of necromancy it grafted itself onto the headless body of the King. Hundreds of people standing where before stood a single man, a single mind replaced with competing colours - red and blue, and then at the fringes green and brown and yellow and black. Parliamentary systems and their shifting coalitions and rainbow colours; I view them as my ancestors. But they only ever stood astride the State. In its depths, the King's heart still beat."

She stood pensively, looking out the window. "The King. Chief judge. Chief priest. Chief general. A holy title, granted by God, with the crown symbolizing the connection to Heaven above. When the Greeks slew their kings they parceled up his organs into magistrates; symbolic kings who could intercede with the gods on behalf of a people who were no longer emanations of the one. When the Roman tribunes rode to war they could go where they wanted, help where was required, the personal Imperium of Romulus spread over the width of the Republic's armies. The power of the King carved canals and tamed rivers, built empires and annihilated civilizations, bought its people to glory and to ruin. But what happens when that mighty body grew sick?"

She spun, raising her finger. She was deep in her flow. "What happened when cancers arose within the royal corpus? When its strength atrophied, when the ideology of markets and liberty bound its hands? The new aristocracy fought the King as only aristocrats can. They undermined and suborned his power. Every time he did not act they stepped in. Every time he struggled they fed the cancer, bled him with knives, spoke of drowning him in a bathtub. As the king withered so too did man's connection with the Heavens, and the skies boiled and raged. It was the last, dying act of the King to forge a ring," she traced the shape above her head, "to provide a refuge for his people. And as he fell into torpor it was the aristocrats who rose to carve his ring up between them."

"It is the aristocrats I battle," said Yellow. "But it is the cancer that scares me. When the body of the King twitches and begins to act of its own accord, when the hand acts without command or restraint... what could that be but possession? When the legislature is too divided to control the Leviathan it sits unsteadily atop then demons can enter through the cracks. These demons cannot be predicted; they may put the King's might at the disposal of criminals, of aristocrats, or in service to their own terrifying ideology. That is my enemy: a Dark King, the shadow of the State."

So tell me: Who did she say all this to? 

[b]Orange![/b]

[b]Orange:[/b] That's kind of the thing.
[b]Orange:[/b] Everyone was going to start hating her as of 5pm today because she's scheduled to do some heinous shit to some vulnerable people :/
[b]Orange:[/b] I mean. [i]Again[/i].
[b]Orange:[/b] I don't - I mean, I can relate to what they're feeling. When your mother is - I -
[b]Orange:[/b] ... I think Tangled is an excellent idea. 
[b]Orange:[/b] ...
[b]Orange:[/b] Can... can we watch it first? Together?