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When she had finally been separated from Tiberius, Tanzanite returned to her place behind Alkaid, looming like some half-concealed guardian. She was no longer capable of guarding much of anything, but that didn't stop her attention from settling on Faustite as he turned his fiery gaze towards her senshi security blanket. Her expression was flat even as her focus roamed over his features, and Tanzanite tilted her head to one side as her eye narrowed slightly.

Another one.

Interesting.

“Is this what counts as bold nowadays?” she murmured quietly to Alkaid as the crowd slowly dispersed around them, keeping her single eye locked with the glowing cinders of the youma General.

Moving mouths caught attention when their words did not travel. Spoken from specter to wraith, like all the ghosts of the Negaverse coalesced there, in that hallway. They huddled their reputations about themselves like so much sound and fury. Like so much dead weight dragged on by their bodies. Did they want to escape those pasts?

The question remained a furrow in Faustite's brow. Flickering to Alkaid, ey spoke with a raspy mildness bordering solemnity. "You wear the ghost of Tanzanite on your shoulders and yet you're bored. How human." So many were. Pyrophanite, who kept to childish and somatic pursuits, emulating in every way the stereotypical teenager while lacking the body for it. Wolfeite, who suffered from the very human megalomania. Newly-turned Wolframite, too, who sought praise so voraciously that Faustite wondered if all the good parts of his mind cracked and broke away with a second corruption. Would Alkaid count among these? Would her companion, who while human and war-torn, wore patches of youma?

The shrug wasn't missed, fostering a twitch of the lip with all the sound it made. "The answer was better left off stage. The truth isn't glamorous or profound. It isn't satisfying." Faustite paced to the side of the hall, seemingly sick of eir own smell, but copper and salt and moondust clung to em irrespective of movement.

"The people in that room — they like being alive. They like coming home to hearths and family and dinners. They like following routines, having a job that fulfills them. They like the Negaverse as an outlet for their aggression — anonymous violence to keep them agreeable in their real lives, permission to make drained and dead strangers so they don't hit their bosses or kill their kids."

Faustite flourished eir hand while ey spoke. "Imagine how they'd react if I said my faith meant watching the end — watching Metallia eat all the life away and leave a second, bleaker Rift behind. How many of them do you think would purify if they heard answers to a question they didn't want to ask themselves?"

The words had been on the tip of her tongue, nearly a decade of experience ready to give voice, but it was Tanzanite that spoke first. The creature that she had become did not outrank her like this, not technically, but even without her ingrained power and raw strength screaming from every pore, Alkaid deferred to her as easily as the moon paled next to the sun. She watched the woman, digested the tone of her voice, and would have frowned if it had been worth the expenditure of energy.

"She is right."

The not-quite-woman straightened and settled into a position that was all rigid posture and mechanical lines, having abandoned her relaxed, lackadaisical posture since it seemed not to phase em if she bothered to play at it or not. Arms shifted until she could hook her fingers together at the small of her back, a position that was as close to comfort as she ever got. Alkaid cared not for what ey thought of her - human or not, she simply was. There was an air of hypocrisy in the way that ey looked out at her from that baby face and said the words like she was a disappointment when, only an hour before, she had watched em grovel for equality and recognition to those very same humans.

Though he echoed a sentiment that very nearly aligned with the one she had heard on Tanzanite's lips, the small difference had her remember how exhausting creatures other than herself were. Now, with Tanzanite her sudden charge, she had all the dramatic, impulsive, consuming nature that she could possibly withstand. There wasn't an ounce left to entertain another soul.

"Though it does beg the question - do you think she'll make of the world a great Rift? Do you think she'll consume all and leave your kind behind to inhabit it?" Her head shook, and all of her intertwined dreads swayed, inches above the floor. "Is that what all of this has been about, some need to assert your perceived superiority as her chosen people, the ones that can live in whatever she leaves behind?"

Her eyes slid to Tanzanite again, abandoning all that smoky, fiery light for the pale, weak thing that she had become instead. Alkaid had seen true rebirth, lived it, felt the power that Metallia held within her grasp like few others could even dream and that by itself was such a meager, fragile thing next to her true might. The ascendant had no real guess at what Metallia's plans were for Earth but she heard that distant voice in her head, the one that had plagued her for years, telling her that it belonged to no one - least of all humans.

"Or is this all some pointless farce as you wait to watch the world burn and you and yours with it?"

If she'd had the air, she would have sighed at em, as years of questions bubbled up without answers. Everything was a puzzle, every answer posed a new question, and she was exhausted even of her own mind and company. Ey did little with their emotion but everything with eir words.

"I don't care how they react. Metallia has those that will root out the traitors and bring them to justice, I have seen it. Perhaps it's time they all learned the lesson once more."

And it wasn't spoken for em, but for her. Alkaid watched her like she had the stars, in a way some might called enamored but in what she knew was simply loyalty. Staring at her, she felt anchored, and it was the only reason she resurfaced from the endless void of her thoughts and questions instead of sinking into the abyss that had existed within herself for what seemed an eternity. Her fingers gripped tighter behind her back and her eyes forced themselves back to the parahuman.

"You shouldn't discount the humans so easily - Faustite, was it? Some of them become greater things."

Tanzanite laughed.

Faustite had barely finished speaking before she let her head fall back with a cackling noise that shook her shoulders and took several moments to wind down into a grin of contained amusement.

“Alkaid,” she spoke clearly, resting her hand in the small of the shattered woman’s back, “Find me when you are done with this.”

With that said, she turned her back on the both of them and walked away, leaving a trail of barely concealed laughter behind her.

Ey weathered worse, Faustite told emself. Lived through eir guts boiling inside and sloughing out like mucus. Lived through Schörl and all the pain she so delighted in causing. Lived through the Rift, through Castor, through electrically stimulated paroxysms. Lived past eir family.

But as ey watched that retreating figure, ey did not feel eir fire. Known from years before Faustite's time was how she led, the kind of power she exuded over her charges to whip them into an inspired frenzy, to lead them out into the cold to hunt souls from men who didn't deserve them. She could make clear the delineation between us and them with far less struggle than Faustite, and with far more charisma than the youth could project. Eir gaze fell to the floor; words unsaid were left to cool on eir tongue. Useless to second-guess now.

That florid laughter echoed behind Alkaid, behind her words. Faustite looked to her.

Watching a person-shaped thing without personhood, watching her speak in that dull-dead-dreary way, Faustite endured a slow pitting of eir stomach like a weight settled in it. Like the words she laid out with no breath to speak them were instead made of mortar, shaped into bricks, and Faustite was their sole and proper trash receptacle. Ey could only be as much, Schörl taught. An incinerator for receipts and old pork rinds and report drafts and Alkaid's nothings. The youma seminar nothing but the doldrums of a youth with no direction and too much time to think. A practice of reshaping ranks in a manner that no one asked for.

Again her shoulders groaned. Faustite's brow ticked up. "You, who glosses over everything untouched. Bobbing and weaving through all these deadfromtheneckup subordinates. What do you do? What do you want?" Ey opened eir hands to invite an answer.

"What does she want?" Faustite finished with a nod toward the distance.