Priss

They're going to come after me soon. I know it. I have no intention of sticking around when they do.

Sure, Celia can track me with the mastimike transponder, but if I can avoid her for long enough, I'm gonna just get that thing burned in an implant parlor for cheap. Not ripped out – I'm not giving away a fancy quantum-dot commlink like that, as someone who shouldn't be able to afford stuff like that. Just burned out. Try an abusive boyfriend story or something. Then I'll – I'll find something. Homelessness in this city is probably worse now than it was before I met Celia, but what choice do I have?

I can't go back there. I'm not needed. What I want out of this whole thing isn't needed. She can have her legion of transhumans, but I know how that ends. I've had nightmares where the hardsuit doesn't come off, ever. Where I can't feel a goddamn thing. Where I raise that railgun, Celia doesn't even tell me to do it, and I point it right at the Nosferatu and I fire, and there's so much blood, the machine's pink innards spilling out, and she's there –

Ugh. Fuck. No matter where I turn, she's there. If I see any sort of pretty girl again I'll probably see her. Probably the best thing to do is go out to the country, where the air is clean and – no, I can't take Sho. I can't do that. I can't do anything.

Who am I kidding? I'm pathetic. I didn't even see the sex thing coming. I wanted to believe that every time Sylvie screamed my name it was because she wanted me. The same thing Kaufmann probably believed. That's what really gets me. I loved her, didn't I? Don't I? I should have been able to – I don't know. Pull back. Tell her things the right way. Make her understand what I was trying to do. But I didn't, because I couldn't, because she was made to fool people even when she never meant to do it, because Only Human Is Not Enough, so sayeth our fearless leader.

Yeah. What a line, right? Well, maybe she's right, but if that's the case then GENOM's already won, because if they can make imitations that are faster, stronger, meaner, how much longer before they make one that's smarter? Or better equipped to live the megacorporate-sociopathic ethos that they want out of all of us? That's always been the goal with GENOM, you know. Not just domination but extinction. Even Celia, ever the pragmatist, ever the perfect corporate subject, even she knows that. And now–

Well, and now here I am, on my futon, lights on, my nice clothes stripped off and piled off in a corner, trying to work up the courage to put my riding armor on and just go. It's been like this for I don't know how long. I can't do it. I can't do anything.

Fuck that. Fuck that line of thought. I'm Priss fucking Asagiri. Sylvie wants freedom? I'll show her what freedom means.

Come on. Get up. Get up. Get up ! Do something !

I roll over. Pull myself up. Listen to the icy rattle of the rain outside. Consider the bike that I barely packed. I'm not sure what to put in it besides clothes and a few just-add-water meals. I mean, I need to put my gun in there, need to wrap it in something so the cops don't find it if they pull me over – oh fuck, what if Nene decides to use ADP drones to dragnet me? What do I do then? How do I make this work?

No. Don't think about that. Unzip the duffel again, start shoving food and bottled water into it, grab that fake ID Nene got you as a joke birthday present (Kinuko Oomori? What, do I have a silky voice, or something?), leave the guitar, you don't have room, you don't have time – this has to work, it has to –

I stop. Look at the duffel again, my Member 2 topping the mass of junk inside it. It's a strange gun, but I like it. It's mine. I'll probably die with it in my hands, the way I thought I was gonna die back when I was a real bosozoku, back when every hour alive was something to celebrate.

Dammit. Here I go again, back down the memory hole. I can't let this happen. I – I'm becoming that person again. I don't have a choice.

Look what you did, Celia! Look what you–

Knocking on the trailer door. Sharp, staccato rapping. One-two-three. A pause. Four-five-six.

I ran out of time. Fuck. Okay. Fine then. Grab the Member, nothing else. Only one shot in the chamber. You don't really want to kill whoever it is, do you?

Seven-eight-nine. Ten-eleven-twelve. Raise the gun. Make it look casual, hold it one-handed and hope the recoil compensators keep your wrist intact. March over there. Pull the handle. Open the door–

It's her. Oh fuck me.

I thought for a moment she'd send Sylvie after me, try soft power instead of hard power, but here we are. She's wearing the same red suit with the black blouse and the ruby necklace she wore when we first met. The same wraparound shades. The same blood-colored lipstick in a perfect bow shape.

Only she's soaked. Freezing rain will do that to you. She's shivering, her coiffed hair flat and wet against her skull.

"Priss?" she says. "May I please come in? I want to talk to you."

"How long have you been out here?" I ask.

"A while," she says. Not very nonchalant about it, either. "Fifteen minutes at most. I've been trying to – work up the courage to speak to you."

What?

No, seriously. I mean, what the fuck. What the everloving fuck. Why would talking to me be hard?

"May I come in?" she repeats. "I have the Benz outside, and Sylvie's there, but she says… she says I need to do this alone."

Again, What?

"You're not going to drag me back to the Knight Sabers?" I say "You're not going to try to guilt-trip me into getting rigged?"

She sighs. "I don't know. There's something more important I need to do first."

My eyebrows raise. Of their own accord. A part of me wants to tell Celia to fuck off back to the Benz, but it's warm where I am, it's cold where she is, and I don't want her to get sick on my account, why do something like that for me, right? I mean –

"Okay," I say. "Fine. And you'll bring Sylvie in once this big mysterious message is all covered? Do we agree on that?"

"Yes."

I nod. "Well. What the hell, come on in. Dry yourself off under the kotatsu or something."

"Yes," she says, shivering slightly again. "I think I shall do just that."

Is it weird that I feel as though I should be more angry with her? Lying under my kotatsu, stripped to her blouse and her skirt, everything else just hung up and drying? I mean – how dare she, right? Barging into my home and demanding things of me isn't something I appreciate.

Only – it's something Celia doesn't do. Except back then. When Sylvie was almost going to die and Celia didn't trust her, I ran away. She came to me then in strength, saying she needed me, even though I knew she didn't. So what's this, then? Why does she keep looking at the ceiling?

"Do you need tea?" I ask finally, then think better of it. "'Cause I'm not going to-"

"I won't ask you for anything in your own home, Priss," she snaps. "I know I've been terrible to you and I'm trying to find a way to do better. So-"

I laugh. "Yeah, yeah, you sound like an American tech executive. 'Do better'? Come on. You used Sylvie against me, you drove her to say that shit, and now-"

"You know damn well she meant what she said, Priss," Celia says. "Yes, I hoped that if the pseudocortex functioned with her, without issues, then you would find it acceptable. That was why I focused so intently on her instead of worrying about what Lena or Nene or even Mackie would think."

"Mackie?" Huh? "What's Mackie got to do with anything? Does he need this thing jammed into him? You'd mutilate your own brother to beat GENOM, is that it?"

She freezes. Raises a hand. Lowers it.

"I think I know where to start, now, Priss," she says.

"'Bout fuckin' time."

"Oh, I completely agree. I – how to put this?" She nods solemnly. "I need you to just listen to me for a minute or two about two things. They lead into each other, so… yes. That should work."

"This is the big-"

"Yes. Priss, please. I need this from you. I-"

Her breath hitches.

"I need you to listen to me and not hate me for what I'm going to say."

I – what the hell is going on? She looks – she has that same sad look on her face she had after she shanked Mason. Her dark chocolate eyes are wide and lonely. And she's not really looking at me, just looking through me.

"Okay," I say, getting the sense that I've just condemned myself. "Shoot."

"Thank you." She leans back, then forward again.

"You know the story of my father and his work at Uizu, correct? How he pioneered cellular nanotechnology and by extension the technologies that made up the Boomer? How he led a team of brilliant minds, and was the most brilliant of them all? And how GENOM had Mason's father, Frederick J. Mason, kill him to maintain their grasp on the research secrets he threatened to make public?" She pauses.

"This all happened when I was around fifteen, mind you. But there was more that happened before that. Something I never told you about." She shuts her eyes tight. "Father had already gotten synthetic neurons, smaller and faster than actual neurons, masses of pure thought that could replace the microchip technologies lost when TSMC's factories were bombed by the Chinese. That alone made him a hero in the eyes of the world. But he and Mason, who were still friends at the time, wanted to do more for humanity. I don't know whose idea it was, but the core principle was taking neural interfaces to the next level – implanting masses of synthetic neurons in the brain to augment it, cores that were a thousand times smaller than regular neurons and could operate a million times faster."

"They knew, of course, that an adult brain would reject these implants, and wouldn't grow into them. So one needed a subject whose brain was still growing and still plastic enough to take in new inputs for complex problem-solving, memory retention, neural syncing, things like that. Certainly it already takes time for a human to adjust to a stemjack, so… They needed children. Not just random test subjects, but someone they could use without there being too many ethical issues."

"So on my eighth birthday, Father opened up my skull and put things inside it."

What.

"So you're a… Boomer. No, no, a transhuman."

No no no no. It makes too much sense. The way she'll stare out into space when considering a problem for a fraction of a second and then just have an answer when Nene asks her some complex question, the way she just knows shit, I mean how else can you be world-famous fashion designer, master martial artist, and super scientist at the same time how else do you—

I should have seen this coming. And yet I didn't. And yet the truth is out, here it is, and it's more fucked up than I could have ever imagined. "Who turns a little kid into a transhuman? Who does that?" I say, trying not to believe it. "Why-"

"He believed he was doing the right thing for his daughter," Celia says automatically. "Humanity crafts an ever more harsh living environment for it to struggle in, saturated with blazing streams of information and hypersonic weapons and billions of other humans struggling to get by. A transhuman can navigate all this effortlessly, as I have done. Moreover… Well, my father believed, as surely as the rest of GENOM did, that such beings would be purpose-built to lead humanity. To rule it as minds freed from the weaknesses of mere flesh." She waves her hand, opens her eyes. "I don't know if I'm a leader or not anymore. As you've doubtlessly noticed, I'm not very good at it."

A leader? Imagine that. All of humanity enslaved to corporate sociopaths smart enough to see any threat coming. Imagine Celia being one of them, or the forerunner to people like that. That's… repulsive. Disgusting.

I knew nothing about Celia's dad, you know, but the more she says, so casually, as if everything he did was right, as if she could never imagine any alternatives, the more I wanna be the one who shot him or whatever. I mean, to ask someone like her to just become some sort of cyber-dictator-god, or – no, who am I kidding, she'd be the predecessor to the real motherfuckers who would become demigods, the ones who wouldn't be much better than AI.

"Priss?"

"I'm listening." I want to tell her everything I'm feeling right now, but would she even listen? Fuck it. "That's sick. Who does that to their own daughter?"

"He was a great man," Celia says – again, almost automatically – "though he did things I can't defend. I don't know what Quincy believed, but I know my father believed he was creating a new generation of heroes. That was the word he used when we spoke, you know. Heroes."

"Okay," I nod. "Keep going." Heroes. I wouldn't even call myself that, even though I'm Saber Blue. Superheroism isn't heroism in the sense I think Celia's using, you know? I'm not sure, though.

"Yes. Well, I didn't die, didn't go insane, nothing like that. It took me years to become normal again, though. My life until that point vanished as Father taught me everything he could, and I absorbed all that information without hesitating. Sometimes it was hard to think, to stabilize my sense of self, but I managed. Mother left when I was twelve, just two years after Mackie was born, but I managed. Mackie was wired with a slower-integration augmentation system, one designed to work more naturally, and I helped Father ensure that it worked." She sucks in a breath. "I remember all this as if it was a dream. I know it happened, but nothing ever seemed real to me beyond the interlocking systems that make up the universe. I got expelled from school around that time, actually…"

She looks wistful. "There was a girl who said it would be better if I was dead, and most of the class believed her, even made a little shrine for me in my shoe locker, so one day when I was thirteen I took a rock I found outside school and brutalized her with it, because that was what I figured I was supposed to do as a heroic figure. It was pointless, anyway. School, I mean. Father and I both knew I was only there to be connected to other children."

I'm not sure if that makes me understand Celia more or less. The way she says it, it's as though it just happened . As if someone else hospitalized a girl for something stupid.

"So…" I try to say. Then I find the courage to say what I'm trying to say in its entirety. "So when Freddy Mason killed your dad, and your dad left you that drive with the hardsuit blueprints on it – what else was on it? You know, the part that you left out."

"Not much else," she says. "The technologies there – Father wanted me to sell them to a rival company, unlock the secrets of Boomers infinitely more advanced than GENOM's own. And a mental imprint of the mission. Destroy GENOM by any means necessary." She nods. "I believed everything he had done to me was something he had done for me, even as late as eighteen. Even when I disobeyed his wishes, by vowing to train myself and build out the Knight Sabers as a concept instead of running off to Arasaka or whoever, I told myself I was following the mission. But I never forgot. And so I returned to Megatokyo, tracked down my dearest friend Lena, a GENOM mole by the name of Nene, and followed a story I'd heard through my informants about a young woman who was the sole survivor of a bosozoku wiped out by Boomers…"

"And then you met me, and the rest is history?"

"No!" Celia gasps all of a sudden. "No, no it isn't. History itself is never past, never resolved, which is why that little aphorism doesn't make sense upon closer inspection. And what happened between you and I isn't over. Or at least I hope it isn't. Otherwise I don't know what I'll do for the Sabers, for myself, going forward."

I blink. She… actually sounds anxious.

"I met you, and I pitied you in that first moment. Look at her, I thought, another waste product of a city which eats human minds alive and spits out anything that doesn't obey the unspoken imperative of competing, however violently, for GENOM's favor. Poor thing, I wanted to say. But it was strange, because I couldn't. Maybe it was just because you were beautiful, even when you were malnourished and on the verge of martyrdom, but… you had integrity. I thought I had to control you absolutely, and you didn't let me do that, because I didn't need to."

"When I finally killed Mason, when our first crusade succeeded, I wanted to feel joy for what I'd done. But Father hadn't wired me to be a sadist. So when I finally jammed the blade into Mason's neck, and his face just slackened …" She shudders. "I went to elementary school with that little idiot. He was an awful child even then, but he was surprised. Even as he tried to strangle me with his own suit, he was amazed that I would do that to him. It was so strange."

I think back. Remember. "Yeah, you were pretty depressed after that. Wondering on the ride back what the point of killing him was if someone else would just take his place. But what does that have to do with anything?"

"Do you remember what you said to me? What you said to cheer me up? It was something I thought you could never say. Something even I could never say."

Fuck. What did I say? It wasn't that long ago, but maybe I said something I didn't believe and tried to forget? I look at Celia. She has these – puppy-dog eyes, big and brown and criminally easy to watch move. She expects something from me.

Back then, she looked empty. Like a little girl. As if everything Daddy had told her she would feel didn't play out. As if the joy she was promised hadn't come to her.

How did I not see this? How did I not at least try to predict this?

No. I remember what I said to her now. And I don't even – fuck.

"I said, 'if you're in this for revenge, you wouldn't have brought everyone else on board. Something else drives you.'" I think. "I think I was talking more about myself at that point, y'know. Or the person I wanted to be."

She slams her hands on the kotatsu hard enough to shake it. "But that meant something to me! That I could do this for my own beliefs, and not just Father's! That I could say that I wanted to protect peace and justice and rid the world of evil and mean it! You told me that was possible, Priss!" Her voice is shaking. "And I know that for every layer of denial and rage that you've put around your heart, you believe that."

I don't have a good answer for that. I want to be that person, yeah. I don't want to be a superhero who's like, a damn symbol , something people rely on as a shorthand for all the good in the universe. But – if I could go to Sho, or to Sylvie, or everyone, and tell people, "I commit acts of cyber-violence and corporate sabotage to save humanity from replacement by idiot machines," and believe that was why I did it – if I could be that sort of person – yeah. Yeah, I'd be happier with myself. But I'm not that person. Celia thinks I'm that person, and I think Celia's that sort of person.

We've been relying on each other as idols.

"What I'm trying to say," Celia says, her deep voice strangely small, "is I think I love you, Priss."

Oh.

Okay.

Yeah.

"You… think?" I say, which is kind of a stupid thing to say.

"I love you, Priss." She looks away. "Is that… is that better?"

"I mean…" What do you even say in a situation like this? I was the one who told Sylvie I loved her, and Kaori's confession of friendship was more 'I need you to help me get through the next few months please ' than anything else.

But Celia is – well, she's gorgeous. She's cold. She's driven. She knows the systems of power that lie at the heart of the world. I grew up all wrong but she's a proper adult.

"Priss?"

"Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry," I find myself saying. "This is just a lot to think about, you know? And the pseudocortex on top of all this…"

"Does it matter anymore? You won't accept it, will you? Nothing I can say will convince you that – I just wanted to protect you. To give you the means to protect yourself. So nothing can hurt you the way Largo did."

She looks at me again. Her eyes are bright. She's close to crying. I can't look at her. The fridge, full of nice rich Asahi, seems a continent away.

"Priss?"

I want to be angry so bad right now. Just tell her to fuck off, that I never asked for her admiration or her pity or her machines, but I can't do that, can I? Because the thing is that I asked for all three.

"Is your hesitation about Father's implants? Please, I only didn't tell you because I thought you would hate me, but that was the wrong thing to do, I know that now, I don't want to keep anything from you…"

"Are you trying to steal me from Sylvie?" I mutter. I'm not even sure why I say it. "Is that what this is really all about?"

She snaps back as if someone shot her. "No! She… she helped me do this. She's willing to share." Her face falls. "But if you aren't willing to do that, then I'm willing to… withdraw. I don't want to hurt you anymore."

Protection. Hurt. Huh. Look.

The Celia Stingray I know is a butterfly knife. Both words, separate, mixed into one. Elegant. Sleek. Graceful. Impossible to stop once she decides to do something. Always able to come up with a plan. Even if she can't set everything right, she will, in her own distant way, try .

I didn't even know this person existed. That underneath all those smooth edges was – well, not a human. But human enough . Someone who – needed me.

No, but I don't want to do this out of pity. I want to do this for my own sake. I will do it that way.

I won't let her go like this.

I look back at her. Meet her gaze eyeball-for-eyeball.

"Look," I say. "I don't know if I love you, Celia. I idolize you, I respect you, and sometimes, yeah, I do want you. I don't know if that adds up to love, though, 'cause – I don't really know you, do I? All this insanity with Boomer brain matter inside your head – It makes sense, but what it means is I don't really know who you are, now."

"Oh," she says. "I see. I-"

"But," I say, getting up, and walking over to her, "That doesn't mean I'm not willing to find out."

And just like that, I'm sitting next to her, and my head's on her shoulder. She's still a little cold, but she's warming up."Okay," I whisper. "I'm gonna go get Sylvie, and I'm gonna make things right with her, and then we're gonna all fuck untl the sun comes up. Got it?"

She blushes. It's a slight thing, but I can feel her warm up just a little. "Is that your first method of discovering a woman? Engaging with her body in a carnal fashion?"

"Call it an alternative path," I say. "I want to see you in a different light. I learned a lot about Sylvie after I crawled out of that coma and we made love. I think I'll learn a lot about you this way, too."

"I see," she says stiffly. "I haven't really done anything like that since Oxford, but I'm willing to try." A sharp inhale. "But please be gentle with me. And be gentle with Sylvie."

"Alright." I rise, suddenly want Celia's lukewarmth again.

Well. Not yet. It's time to face the music.

Sylvie's still got that song to sing.

We'll be finally free…

She sees me coming. The door of the Benz gullwings open, and she steps out.

She looks gorgeous, wearing her old riding suit, the blue-yellow-white one she wore when we first met. I smile to myself; she knows the effect a good riding armor has on me.

I walk up to her. The rain is freezing, I think it's bordering on hail, but if she wants to stay out here-

"Priss?" she says. "Is Celia okay?"

"Yeah," I say, distant from my own words, my own voice. "She's fine. Not great, but she's fine." I take a step toward her. I'd dogeza at this point were it not for the way the ground is mostly icy mud right now. So I just say the obvious thing. "I'm sorry."

She nods. She expected this. "For?"

"I kept things from you. Because I wanted you to be innocent, even though it's too late for that. Because I wanted you to believe I was a good person. I – I wanted you to love me in this way that I – I guess you can't. Or shouldn't, even."

She looks at me curiously. "I understood the first part of that. But who said you aren't a good person?" She shakes her head, runs her hand through her hair, tries to get the water out of her hair. "Why does that even matter?"

"Why wouldn't it matter? I mean-"

She shushes me, a lone finger not much more than a centimeter away from my lips.

"Let me try to say that again," she says. "I don't think you're a bad person. If I thought that I wouldn't be here." She inhales. "I still love you. You know that, right?"

"Yeah," I mumble. "Yeah."

Which – well, yeah. I know that. I don't believe it, though. I don't understand it.

But I know what I want from her, right? "Just… tell me what you need from me. I don't mean to beg, I just… I can tell you about Kaori. I can drag that up and deal with it. But the pseudocortex… I still don't know if I can do something like that."

"It's not just about that, Priss. We need to be more honest with each other going forward if this whole thing's going to work out, especially if Celia said what she wanted to say back in there."

"Um. About that. You're… okay with that? 'Cause I kind of proposed a threesome to her and I think she liked the idea."

Her eyes go wide. "Really? That was… fast."
"Yeah. Yeah. It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing. I couldn't tell you if I love her yet, but I wanna see if it's possible. And I figured, you know, you kind of set the whole thing up, and so I figured you wanted something like that…"

"I'm definitely not against it. I wish you'd told me first, but… yeah." All the tension in her body dissipates for a moment, tension I hadn't even realized was there in the first place. "See what I'm saying? Communication. That's all I want from you, Priss. So I can do right by you." A pause. "I'm sorry for what I said, love. I shouldn't have gotten so angry."

"Yeah." God, she's gorgeous like this, but if we stay out here much longer we're all gonna catch colds. "Come on in, Sylvie. Let's – let's stay with each other for a long time."

The words are awkward. Trip over themselves. But how else to put it? I do want to stay with Sylvie for a long time. I want to be there with her. I want to see her sprint to freedom, and then I want to run alongside her.

But she understands. She takes my hand in hers, brings it up – and embraces me. Holds me tight. Doesn't let go.

It takes a moment for me to reciprocate. But there we are, freezing to death and somehow more happy than we've been in the past few months. No lust, just love. Silent under the noise of the rain.

In the end, we fuck.

What? I'm not showing you it. Maybe later, maybe somewhere else. But we last all of five minutes trying to communicate the idea to Celia, and warming ourselves up, before we all start stripping down to the bare minimum of clothing and then start fondling, then really groping, and then Sylvie convinces me to eat Celia out and it's off to the races.

Sylvie

You know what the funny thing is? Priss is right, I did want this. I didn't just feel like I had to, or that I ought to, but it was my thing. I didn't do it strictly on my terms, but I did it close enough to that.

Well. Hell with it then, right? It's not just about lovemaking as part of a purpose. I know I was made for that, but always because someone else wanted it, and as I became more lucid I grew to hate that.

Celia

But in the end, isn't that the beauty of free will? You're allowed to want carnal things for yourself. Perhaps not to some extreme extent – goodness knows there are so many people who are convinced the only way they can be 'free' is if someone else is under them – but to a healthy extent. Freedom is useless without good relations with other free people. That's the whole point.

Priss

Healthy extent, by the way, being until I was pretty sure I was gonna die of dehydration. By the way.

Sylvie

Oh please, you were even more enthusiastic about it than I was. Once you got your hands on Celia I swear you were trying to make her addicted to you. Dominate her as subconscious revenge… really, Priss, you're quite the pervert.

Celia

I won't deny that. I think I was screaming your name more than Sylvie's that night, especially once you broke out that strap-on – what was it called?

Priss

The Okapi. After those big phallic Orbital Kinetic Penetrators the US has on their old killsats. What? You gave me the idea for the name when you told me about them.

Celia

I don't care if it was an okapi or a gazelle or a klipspringer, I couldn't think under the influence of that thing. I was this close to transcendence, I tell you. I wonder… might it be possible to deliver microdoses of hallucinogenic substances that way, to truly make the experience unforgettable? Really lean into serotonergic system magic. I'm certain someone's done that already, but…

Priss

I'm sorry, run that by me again?

Sylvie

Dildo-delivered drugs.

Priss

Yeah, okay, that's what I heard. Kinda gross and awesome at the same time. Not sure I'd want to try that out, but sure, look it up.

Celia

Not a single report on this! Clearly it's chemically possible, provided it's not done while the woman's ovulating, at which point you run the risk of prematurely killing an egg, but if one were to engineer organic phospholipid nanocapsules coded to the menstrual lining to allow for infiltration into the bloodstream it would be doable. You'd hardly have to change most contemporary drug delivery platforms to get something like that. But then there's the question of dosage, fat-soluble or water-soluble… Stingray Luxury Goods could stand to open a division to investigate this. Perhaps find a local biotech firm interested in contracting with a company that isn't Verdanse… yes, I quite like this idea.

Sylvie

Celia, are you sure you aren't getting a little ahead of yourself? The minute you rediscover the joys of sex, you're attempting to technologize the process into something even more wondrous than it already is?

Celia

Is there a problem with that?

Priss

You're getting in your head again, love. Slow down and enjoy the ride. 'Sides, the story's not over yet.

Celia

Oh, alright…