[b][I]Raven Rivers[/i][/b]

Ten lashes should not have cleared his head.

If he had been Andrew, he'd have bounced back and forth between blaming literally everyone but himself, then blaming himself and mentaly [i]self[/i]-flagellating. But he wasn't his son; he was not a haugthy, over-ambitious child who had not learned contentment with what he had.

So as he recuperated from the ten lashes in his new quarters, Raven seriously began to rethink and reflect upon his behavior so far, and found it wanting. He hated to admit it, but he was out-of-character; loony and incompetent. Well, except on the battlefield; despite him breaking opsec and a number of communications offenses, he still [i]scored[/i] a number of hits against the Crimson Fists - That cannot be taken away from him.

Pain had eliminated his emotional distractions; it should not have taken that extreme to do so, but it did, anyway. Now that his mind was clear, Raven did not focus on his damaged ties with the other members of his Lance and his Captain, nor the fact that his family was in the hands of the enemy like everyone else's. No, what he focused on was [i]winning[/i].

They had turned the tide, humiliated the Crimson Fists and their paymasters, the NRPDE. The FPA should be considering flocking to them, because there was no other way for their resistance to win, no other way for them to achieve their dreams. So all they had to do was wait for cooler heads who had not been taken in by the NRPDE/Crimson Fists' deceptions to prevail and they can [i]do this[/i]. At the end of the day, in this universe, the real monsters got what was coming to them, one way or another.

But to do that, he had to give up on rebuilding bridges with the rest of the group - Not because he had stopped liking them, but because those bridges [i]would rebuild themselves[/i] if he just focused on the job. Victory allowed many grievances to be forgiven. And victory will allow his family to be rescued [i]or avenged[/i] much sooner than if he spent his time moping about them, too.

So Raven focused on winning. On planning to make the best use of his Shadow Hawk and its suite of weaponry that he knew like the back of his own two hands. He loved its missiles, its autocannon, though even to this day he couldn't quite grasp how optimally to use his machine's lasers. So he had to double down on his missiles and other comfortable physical weaponry... Or actually [i]learn[/i] the best usage of energy weapons...