"You just don't get it, do you?"

And her dom game is weak as shit, d'you see that? Rattled. Frustrated. No use of the harness to physically impose presence, responding to the barbs. Any basic brat could see what buttons to push to play her like a piano.

Honestly, a little frustrating? Like, you never meet a person, but you hear stories about them, build up this mental image, and then they turn out to be just some asshole. No style at all.

"The Skies are [i]over.[/i] We [i]lost.[/i] We were glorious and powerful and vain and so, so proud that we could not see the gods abandoning us until it was too late.

"We live in a desiccated corpse, surrounded by the evidence of what we were, and tell ourselves that this is just a temporary setback. We can recover from this--build back up, reclaim the galaxy, end the Ceronian threat, make the Azura Skies great again."

Also frustrating? Hands being tied means no gesticulation means half the message isn't being sent. How do you expect her to talk without her hands? She's doing her best with voice alone, right? Letting scorn and--oh, this'll piss her off no end--pity drip from every syllable.

"Happiness is cheap, Tilly." And oh, the flash of annoyance at the nickname is too sweet. "So's dopamine. I wanted that, I coulda had them without leaving home."

Or, you know, more accurately: coulda let them decommission the Pix and come home. Or could have turned back at any point before this. Kind of getting past the point of no return, frankly, and also kind of past the point where some Publica members would back her? But that's… probably okay, she thinks.

"Don't you get it? The gods abandoned us because we kept servitors as [i]slaves.[/i] We fell because we made thinking, breathing people--people that the gods recognize as equals to us!--and robbed them of the choice of what makes them happy. Act as if us telling them, making them, molding them to be happy in a specific way, making them happy when they're useful to use, somehow makes them less our slaves for that.

"Happiness? [i]Happiness?[/i] The fuck is [i]happiness[/i] worth when your entire race can be wiped out of existence for being inconvenient? What does happiness even [i]mean[/i] when it's programmed in at bone level? We can make them as happy as clams, set them adrift on a planet somewhere to be deliriously happy, and we'll still have robbed them of that choice as thoroughly as if we'd stuck to whips and collars."

Note to self: no matter her taste in rope, never try to find out what kind of whips Tilly keeps in the nightstand. Barbed, probably.

"You idiots look at an empire shattered by the gods for keeping slaves, an empire defeated at its prime, and say, 'well what we really need, see, is to be better at the cruelty and slavery. That'll fix things.' Fucking ridiculous."