eee wrote:As to Bud, that's GOT to be an intentional look. Unless she's been eating plutonium. But you have to wonder what sort of role she's playing in this society that walking around in mummy wrappings and glowing from eyes and mouth (but not nose, ears, or - I hope - any other orifice) is normal for her.
The Lanthian equivalent of an IRS tax auditor? Scary bodyguard for a high government or church official?
Or, perhaps, she was personally involved in the placing and activation of the Vimana cell at Kikai? This was clearly a very-high-energy event. It might be that Acacia's golem body was heated up to incandescence while she fiddled around in the caldera-go-boom and simply hasn't had time to cool down again. The "mummy wrappings" might just be a big roll of asbestos cloth that she wound around herself for modesty, as all of her regular outfits would be prone to burst into flame and she didn't have any
submarine pipes to wear that day.
davids4250 wrote:I find it interesting that Brandi and Acacia are desperately trying to save the remnants of the civilization they had previously destroyed.
I suspect that guilt has quite a bit to do with it. There's quite a distance between taking revenge on the priests and religious hierarchy which tortured and murdered you, and burning down the whole civilization to glassy bedrock. The priests (arguably) had it coming... but the Chimera also slaughtered an immense number of perfectly innocent Lanthians (children, uninvolved adults, and probably many other victims of the priests' tyranny).
We know that (in modern times) Bud finds her knowledge of her part in this genocide to be a heavy burden to bear, even though she knows that she had been deliberately deprived of free will and hadn't been able to choose a different path. Probably not a new thing... if (at this point in the story) she has her memories of the Chimera years, she probably feels a lot of guilt. Same for Brandi, I suspect.
Working to save "the best of what's left" may be a way of at least partially atoning for what they did (... were forced to do).
Timotheus: I appreciate your efforts in Confusion Corner to remedy what ales us... stout fellow!