['Anything a mage might imagine.' It's terribly vague, and clearly a danger in the wrong hands, the wrong mind. She can see why Mages might become a group so easily feared. She can also see how treating them as subhuman could quickly create a pressure bomb needing only the slightest disturbance to explode.

As an ancillary, as a ship, she has no doubt it would have been her job to kill individuals like them as quickly as possible.]

Manipulating the flow of energy so neatly is the foundation of ridiculous dramas, in my experience.

[The corner of her mouth twitches again, the smile taking on a dagger's edge before dropping from her face.]

In proverb, it's a folk tale I heard once. [It had been a story the soldiers on that particular world had told to comfort themselves, in their fight against the Radchaai. Ultimately futile, but it had come to her now and again, in her twenty years of plotting to kill Anaander Mianaai.] More literally, the Radch itself. Calling it a great, lumbering beast isn't inaccurate.

[Technically more than that, but in a strange world, to a stranger, admitting regicide seems dangerous.]