Under the Maltese Skies

[Omi]

The news washed over Charlotte with no visible reaction at first, those deep brown eyes boring into Loyola's own all the while. Eventually, though, she withdrew her hand from beneath Enma's, her tone much lower than it had been previously.

"Don't touch me," she all but snapped, recoiling as if she'd been stung. She said nothing else for a few long seconds, her gaze slipping from Loyola's face to stare somewhere off into the distance, as if being ripped from reality into a nightmarish new daydream.

Defeated. The Royal Navy, of all things -- defeated. Her world was already threatening to crumble at the edges, the idea of coming to grips with a Kingdom pushed to its knees rising inside her like ice in her veins.

"How lost is 'lost', then?" asked Charlotte eventually, tension visible all throughout her frame. A thousand possibilities raced through her mind, distracting her from the here and now -- a stalemate in the Taus, a return to the status-quo; New Paris stormed by an anti-Gallic coalition force, Ile-du-Palais shelled from orbit; or even a continuing, bloody conflict that hadn't yet died down, with her homeland certain to lose but clinging to life. "Tell me!"

Her voice rose to a higher pitch at last, although in her heart of hearts she felt as if she already knew the answer. If the more outlandish possibilities were ruled out, she knew any loss on the Kingdom's part would likely have been a catastrophic one. She'd seen the battle lines firsthand, after all -- stretched taut and thin, almost to breaking point. The offensive had reached the borders of Liberty itself, yes, but the front had continued to elongate all while being pressured at every turn. If even the tip of the spear, inches from Bretonia's beating heart, had shattered on its final thrust, then there was no hope for the rest of it to have survived intact at all.

Despite the logical conclusion she'd come to, though, she still needed to hear it. As long as there was hope for some other outcome--

"Tell me!" she demanded again, having scarcely even waited for a response. She stormed to her feet, rising out of the chair in a sudden display of emotion, her gaze twisted in cold, disbelieving fury. "No-- no, you'll show me, or else I shan't believe it," she affirmed with a snarl, regarding her blonde-haired counterpart with a new wariness. "Give me access to the neural net, or some other form or proof, but I won't take you at your word." It was a final gambit on Charlotte's part -- a desperate doubling-down on the merest shred of the possibility of this insidious Maltese woman trying to feed her a pack of lies. She'd come to terms with her detention here long ago, even coming to regard the Maltese people and their way of life in a favourable light -- but even so, it was easier to hope that they were working against her in unison than it was to accept the possibility of-- of this. Eight centuries of the greatest Kingdom the galaxy had ever known, laid to waste...

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