Faustite meant well, but his resolve didn't last. On patrols, he would find himself searching out isolated people — Lieutenant's prey — when he had only meant to scrape his quota out of Destiny City and return to the Citadel. Sometimes he would be thankful to get interrupted by the White Moon, who would see him so blessedly simply as a threat. Those times added to the strain on his resolve.

It was his rationalizations that outpaced his resolve — small assurances that, if he pulled a starseed in Destiny City, then a White Moon loyalist would chase him down and demand that he return it. If they were good enough, they could wrest it back from him and send the original owner on their way. That meant that pulling the starseed wasn't a crossed line, it was simply a step closer. In the Negaverse, the same idea applied — if he pulled an officer's starseed, there were leagues of other officers that would reclaim it from him, he would suffer any punishment expected from him, and his victim would be hale again. So long as he could resist the temptation to eat it, in those scant and precious seconds until help arrived, then no permanent damage was done. Thus, the problem wasn't the act of pulling a starseed.

The problem was his rationalizing. It wasn't that he set out thinking that he wanted to eat a starseed (which he always did, but at the same time, he never did). It was that he had mastered the idea of misleading himself with white lies and skewed assurances. He would tell himself that he was out on a longer patrol route because he wanted more energy, yet palmed a starseed out of it. He would deviate from the path, hunt down, and kill a basic senshi and tell himself that a Basic left alive would come back as an Eternal later, and so happened to score a starseed from the affair. It was the rationalizations that protected him by not protecting him at all.

And he hated it. Hated himself for all of it. Faustite's moods became perpetually sour, and he would grow more agitated the longer he went without a starseed. It was those times — when his hands would tremble and his skull throbbed like someone had taken a hammer to it — when he felt proudest of himself. Those were also the times when he was most avoided. Those were the times that he would inevitably end up with another starseed, because, somehow, the vice was the reward for abstaining from the vice.

It wasn't that Faustite valued people. Life for the sake of life held no intrinsic value to him. What he valued were Negaverse personnel and his boys, and so far, only Kamacite's life had been jeopardized. He'd since minded himself carefully around other officers, particularly their senshi, and left any meeting abruptly when he felt that the glitter of an exposed starseed, or the knowledge that one lay just beyond a few thin layers of fabric, had grown too dangerous for him to remain.

Still, he knew he couldn't live like this for long. He didn't want to find out what these rationalizations would do to him.