His smile was the wholly unpersuasive kind that only a professional diplomat could carve. Damned if there wasn’t some pretense of compassion in his v… - Adam-Troy Castro

All of this had seemed so obvious and vital to them once. But then it changed, in the timeless time since putting their vessel together; some might even say, they’d degenerated. They were no longer the beings who’d set themselves an impossible task and built themselves a miraculous vessel to help them accomplish it. In that time they had forgotten all of their arcane and hard-won knowledge and become passengers, instead of engineers. Now the bubble piloted itself, without their input; and the glorious mission that had once been the whole reason for their existence now seemed nothing but an ancient folly, too far gone to change.
They wouldn’t have understood Vietnam, but they would have sympathized.

Talent’s cheap…historically, one of the cheapest things you can buy. And considering the sheer amount of angst you carry around on your back, you need it. After all, angst from a Talented person is fascinating; angst from a Common Everyday Nobody is just an annoyance.

I could only read the delay as a dramatic pause. Theatrics. Or diplomacy; wise men throughout history had already noticed that sometimes there wasn’t much of a difference between the two.