Guilded Age

I do regret that we didn’t work a bit harder with the captions here: they should have been in Syr’Nj’s usual green with maybe her darker musings fading to white-on-black, the better to match her dark mood.

Timon is not as enlightened as Byron or Gravedust, not by half. He’s kinda like, “I wish things could be better and I feel a little guilty that they’re not, but (sigh) THAT’S JUST THE WAY IT IS. I’m not gonna let myself believe I can do anything to improve this institutional racism, and as soon as you get out of here I’m gonna be a lot more comfortable in my once-again humans-only military unit.”

But that’s regret and sympathy, which, again, represent something other than the monolithic wall of hostility Syr’Nj has faced so far. Timon also has enough of a spine to admit that she’s the reason they won that battle, which means that some human somewhere respects actual facts. (He even flatteringly overestimates her a little bit, wrongly presuming her “log attack” wasn’t an accident.) And because he hits Syr’Nj with all this right here and now, before the sting of her dismissal has time to fester in her, it has a greater effect than he could have guessed.

For today, it’s enough.