The books get everything wrong, did you know that?

In the books, this is it! This is the meet-cute! This is the savage Ceronian who will be won by the guiles of the Azura temptress, and turn out to be not that bad, actually, and secretly kind and caring if treated right, and--

God, she's scared out of her mind. Is it weird to be concerned about her clothes right now? Like, she's dressed up to the nines, formal to her wits end, and--

And in the face of the savagery in front of her, it's like. It's like it all melts away. Like it's both right and also incredibly out of place. Like, just by existing in this space with her, she turns the space into her own space and now it is [i]they[/i] who are wrong.

Which, I mean. They're in orbit over her planet, and she's the Shogun, and--

She takes a deep breath, and then a second one.

"Tempting," she admits. "Truly, it is. I intend both to rebuild this ship and cast the Azura from the skies."

She takes another shuddering breath and meets the Shogun's eyes.

"But if you wanted to do that, you would have done it a century ago." 

Polite. Even. Not like she expects it to make a difference. This is not a court, this is not a place where manners can deflect. She's not being rude, not trying to offend, simply stating facts in as neutral a voice as her pounding heart will allow.

"If you wanted to govern, subdue, occupy, in the way it would take to fully kill the skies--to fully halt the inertia of self-running bureaucracies that keep it ticking along--you would not have built your planet in a way that lets you live forever in the moment of conquest. You want the glory, the thrill, the battle, the [i]next,[/i] and have set up your planet to provide exactly that in spades."