How many miracles was one person allowed to ask for?

She'd gotten plucked out of an impossible situation and watched what should have been the moment she lost everything into her own wedding. She saw the light return to Redana's eyes after she'd already said goodbye. She'd come home to her ship and for eleven minutes everything felt like it was going to be perfect.

But time marches on. Spitefully, it turns out. The scorching light pouring into every corridor isn't turned so directly on her as Apollo's displeasure had been in that nightmare world, but it was every bit as dangerous. Bella watches the moonlight. She can feel it watching her back. Just waiting for the moment she screwed up enough that it had permission to burn her to ashes. 

Meanwhile, her ship was tearing itself to pieces. One thing about this piece of shit was that she didn't need to be around a problem to know it was happening. The [i]Anemoi[/i] swallowed all senses, but that had turned out to be a blessing now that she can only stand here and remember it in passing. The silent darkness of that ship meant that it flew with precision and trust or not at all. By comparison the [i]Plousios[/i] held no secrets, so there was no hiding the paranoia, the scheming, or the misery onboard. 

The bulkheads rattle and quake with the sounds of physical conflict. With a little bit of practice it's possible (even simple) to pick out the loud bursts of poping echoes that indicate a skirmish between more militarily minded people from the duller more rhythmic drumming that meant a former Bitemark citizen was fending off a crab incursion. Or the even worse single-instance tremors that told her that her people had managed to toss over one of their own crafting stands or a critical ship component as part of an argument with each other. 

If she pressed her ear to a wall Bella could even hear what the voices were shouting about: her. Mosaic, so odd and so distant lately. Everything was falling apart worse and worse on a daily basis, and far from keeping her promises about holding the Silver Divers in check she'd let even more military Servitors on board the ship and the bullying was worse than it had ever been under the lazy eye of the Regional Governor and the distantly disinterested Crystal Knight. The great hero of Beri was ruining their lives, if it was really even her and not some monster wearing her flesh as a mask. How could you say that about her!? And then the blow that meant the drunken shouting match had turned violent again. 

The air did not smell of tension. That was not a condition that had a real smell, since every individual became aggressive, nervous, or frightened in different situations and all had slightly different chemical reactions to these things that turned any stressful situation in a crowd into a bizarre soup of sour, spicy, and bitter notes. And absent any direct presence with the people giving off those smells what happened instead was that the air started picking up sparks that dried it out and made breathing feel heavy or dangerous. The smell she [i]did[/i] get was worse: brine and sea rot. There were multiple crisis level events happening all over the ship and somehow they weren't even related.

"Dany shut the fuck up I'm trying to think. I can't sit still ok, I need to-- there's nothing to clean. If I can't put my hands on something I, please. Don't open that door yet, we're not ready. Just let me pace. Let me figure this out."

Bella shrugs and returns to her silent, bestial stalking. She brushes the tips of her claws against her palms and stares at them in disbelief. Life was so much easier before they'd grown back. She barks with sudden, dark laughter. Life was a lot easier when she was dead, too. She can't hold it together. Cackling, she falls into Redana's arms and clings to the smaller girl until she's laughed tears into her eyes. Easier when she was dead, gods! It takes three attempts to calm down. When she's got her own feet again it's all she can do not to kill herself blushing at the concerned/enigmatic looks she's getting from her company. 

"...This is so fucked," she observes, "Just completely fucking fucked. We've only got one thing going for us on this entire stupid ship, and that's the problem we're here to fix. Don't get me wrong, she's going to get us all killed. But the goals-- Vesper's..."

Yeah, the goals. Vesper's attention would be pulling the same direction Bella's was at the moment, this clusterfuck of a power struggle. It's why her mind kept turning back to it, even though her sister was a higher threat priority. Frankly the Ceronians, Summerkind, Pix, and all the people of Bitemark could start a war right now for all it mattered if Vesper was allowed to get even one more idea off the ground. But she couldn't help it. For all she knew it was pointless trying to out think an Ikarani Adept, the way that she talked things out made Bella feel it was important to at least grasp the edges of everything. 

Forget the difference in the ships for a minute. Why had the [i]Anemoi[/i] run so much smoother than her version of the [i]Plousios[/i]? That ship hadn't actually run any better to begin with either, if she was being honest. Her authority had all been fake from the start; the Kaeri operated under instructions fine but under the surface they had no delusions about what Bella's orders were for or who they were really from. The literal instant they were presented with Redana they tried to take over without a second thought, even though it should have been obvious to the most braindead slob that letting the Princess take over would just hijack their mission.

That part wasn't so different from Mosaic being 'in charge' of the Silver Divers. They followed orders if she gave them, but they didn't follow instructions at all. Their presumption of superiority superseded even being trapped on a hostile backwater planet without the support required to do more than petty raiding against a bunch of farmers and stoneworkers, and no matter how many of their alphas she dominated (or married) they were always testing the limits of what they could get away with. Every single Ceronian on the ship barring Ember gave off the impression of a temporarily embarrassed noblewoman. Bella would have to be blind not to see that the second the ship crossed into Shogunate territory they would try something. They'd been blatantly preparing since the moment the journey began. But she'd let it go on for the time being because...

Why? She'd have never tolerated that sort of belligerence out of the Kaeri, at least not after they'd fucked up the pirate raid so badly. What had made her think such a light touch would be better now? For an Empire to be strong, the Empress must be weak, but... that was just bullshit, wasn't it? Easy for Nero to say it, in a theater in a palace on the safest planet on either end of the galaxy. But Bella wasn't trying to build an empire. She wanted, she wanted--

"She wants to help. For everything that happened to her, she remembers me. Most of her life all her solutions involved mass death, but ever since we met she's bent over backwards to keep her hands clean. She just pulled off the stupidest thing I've ever seen her do and [i]nobody[/i] died for it. That's our advantage. She trusts me. So we don't need to reset her, we just need to cut her off long enough to pull her back down underneath the clouds. If she loses that perspective, nothing we try will ever work."

Fucking... no no no, what kind of stupid joke is this? She can't possibly be this stupid? What was the difference? Obvious. Bella you moron. You stupid, glazed eyed drooling [i]dipshit.[/i] The Lanterns trusted her. And they trusted her because she'd done things for them, and kept doing that until it stuck. Her motivation was irrelevant, she was strong and she used that to do something other than force her way onto things. By comparison, what the fuck had she done here?

She never talked to the Pix, not once. She and the people of Beri had beaten the Silver Divers but her relationship with Ember immediately recomplicated that dynamic, and even if that hadn't been true what vision of the future was she even offering? A Servitor could be more than they were made to be, but that would never happen without a clear alternative and a reason to go in for it. What had she done besides wear stupid outfits and fill out paperwork? She was a logistics manager sitting in a captain's chair and expecting nobody to be call her out on it. 

If Nero were in this situation she'd take control by leaning on Dyssia. And while she was putting out fire, Nero would make a swift demonstration of her own power by crushing a faction and playing the rest against each other to maintain a tenuous hold on a majority of power, and then make speeches to her enemies to blind them with her charms and keep them pointed away from her the entire time. The Empire would be strong. The Empress would be weak. But if anybody upset the balance she would call in her favors, flip that dynamic, and wipe the dissenting force off of her map. Her rule would be total, only playing loose enough to keep the lot of them growing stronger.

But Nero, and please forgive your former maid, Your Most High Imperial Majesty, had no fucking friends. A city didn't need an Empress. It needed a culture. It needed a goal that could pull people in, and maybe most importantly of all it needed to let people walk away from it if they needed to. She could do that. She could provide that goal, and she could be strong enough to hold up the mountain while everyone else climbed it.

She needed to tell them all. More important than that, she needed to [i]show[/i] them. But before any of that could happen she needed the ship to not fucking explode, please and thank you.

"We have time. Vesper is going to set up some kind of cosmic bomb that's going to open the path for this ship to cleanly get where it's going, but to do that she needs to play up the fighting going on high enough to bounce the gods off of it. I'm sure she sees how to get there already but I'm just as sure she doesn't have the tools yet. So while there's still room to think, tell me how we fix her. She's done everything for me, and I'm going to pay that back. What can we do to pull her away from Rampancy without erasing her?"