Nobody notices her standing up. That in itself is a master-level skill. The first time she'd awoken after being annihilated by searing holy light she'd screamed and thrashed and carried on in such disarray that she'd barely had time to process what was happening before she was destroyed a second time. She'd developed the stagecraft of shrugging off her own utter obliteration, to the point where she could go from apocalyptic final battle with Heron in one moment, to stepping down out of a ritual circle and smoothly issuing commands to cultists without missing a beat. She'd been dimly proud of how cool she'd come across in that moment.

Her startracker spell informs her that the year hasn't changed. The moontracker lets her know that it is still in fact the present day. The infocyte she maintains for this eventuality warps into being and starts informing her of the political situation, technological innovations, current presumed status of the Hero - she shoos it away by blowing distractedly at it. She needs to fix her hair. Civelia keeps hers done up in extremely elaborate braids and whenever she stops paying attention her own starts knotting itself into comparable intricacy. It's a constant war to keep it loose hanging, but as with most things she still does, she does it because she refuses to give Civelia the satisfaction. 

She's vaguely aware that at some point in the past this scene would have infuriated her. The way that broken things insisted on pulling themselves back together into new shapes, gaining scars and complexity each time. She would want to ram an unreality spike through the disruption and chaos, tear open the gaps until they were insurmountable, scatter this bubble of reality across the Outside in the hopes that the individual fragments would dissolve into nothing. Hoping that the web of light would not stitch them back together, and tie her wrists in the process. Maybe that was what drove her for so long. Hope. Hope that things wouldn't be as they were. It seemed like all she hoped for these days was for control of her own hair.

No, that wasn't true. She didn't hope for that. She knew that battle was as futile as the one to end reality. Her hair would never belong to her. What she was hoping for was to irritate Civelia by showing everyone what she looked like with her hair down - and that [i]was [/i]an achievable goal. A faint smile flicks across her face, just for a moment. 

She makes eye contact with Civelia, just as she shakes her hair loose. Time seems to slow as it cascades free down her back and shoulders, and she leans into the pose just a little. See? This is what you'd look like if you were freed from your duty. She gently runs her finger along her own chin, in a seductive mirror of Civelia's own pose. See? This is the impact you'd have if you let yourself relax a little. You, obsessed little goddess, wrapped up in your dignity - this is what you'd look like if you let yourself be a woman. How far do you have to go to avoid thinking about that?

[Entice: 10]