pulled this out of tags and took the liberty of making minor edits for readability: 1. replaced all #s with ;s 2. removed any resulting ;s that ~spliced a clause 3. broke up into paragraphs 4. caught small typo. forgive me 🙏🏼
@graylibrary — with Leonide you have to remember she didn't actually know Murderbot was associated with Preservation; when she first meets it it's with Arada but ART has her pretending to be part of it's crew to the point that it says she's faculty at it's university and then when they meet in System Collapse the only one from Preservation with Murderbot is Ratthi; Iris and Tarik are from the university and doing a university mission;
so Leonide doesn't KNOW that Murderbot was originally associated with Preservation - now if she followed the GrayCris situation she could have suspected that it was the unit Mensah bought etc but given her situation after System Collapse it's hard to say how much time she had to research anything like that; so for her Murderbot is a university of Mahira and New Tideland asset and while the university teamed up with Preservation for that bit;
it doesn't actually follow that the university would a) send any help at all and b) that particular help; it comes down to that she apparently didn't do her research;
now BE as a whole is more complicated because they SHOULD have done their research which means they WOULD know that Mensah had bought a company SecUnit; though exactly how much after that they'd know is hard to say; but even with Leonide's reports that the university had a weird SecUnit around; it wasn't identified as a ROGUE then and of course we all know they think rogue means killing spree; so the weird university unit wouldn't have to be Mensah's rogue unit at ALL
and Preservation is almost certainly considered weak by the CR - that they go after Mensah at all is a bit weird; and suggests that they don't dare go after Mahira and New Tideland since the university is ACTUALLY who screwed them over by saving those people - Mensah was a mediator; but they kidnap her family to try to extort her because she's who they think they can get at;
so to me Leonide was expecting a Preservation security person or a hired/contracted retrieval agent (human); she had no idea Murderbot and Mensah are connected personally at alllll; (Eletra technically knew Murderbot was under contract in Preservation and associated with Amena's family but NOT who Amena was AND I doubt anyone asked her about that/believed anything she said given her confusion after the whole TargetControl using her brain as a taxi thing like she's not going to be considered a reliable witness to anything; and they would have asked her about basically everything except 'hey who owned the weird SecUnit');
and BE would have presumably assumed that if anyone sent a SecUnit they'd catch it on scan; because they don't understand what ART did OR what Murderbot can actually do; Arada got the blame for it hacking the BE ship to get them out without negotiating their release because Leonide notes that it's against CR standards to tell a SecUnit to hack proprietary systems and Arada basically tells her to fuck off
this belonged in the body of the post ;_;
kissing your beautiful head and begging you to speak louder
(begging all'a y'all to speak louder ;_; you're writing good stuff guys, say it with your chest)
SCREAMMMM!!!! you're SO RIGHT in making the connection that Leonide is under the impression MB is a PSUMNT secunit; i completely lost track of that detail!!
also....... your caps lock use reminds me so much of what i like to emphasize while writing meta that it felt uncanny, like i was reading something i'd written and forgot about. unprecedented experience!
wait, did B-E as a corporation have Farai & co. detained after all? that doesn't sound right
i got the impression that that's what Mensah/MB had thought when organizing this extraction; but that this theory went right out the window as soon as two events collided: 1. MB saw Leonide and interacted with her, and 2. B-E had Leonide killed. she'd organized the kidnapping on the dl from the corp specifically bc her family was already in danger. i'm going off of:
"Instead, I said, 'You’re the one who got them into that camp in the first place.'
She tried not to react but threat assessment caught it, just a faint tightening around the eyes. But more importantly, she didn’t deny it.
Now I knew I was right."
when this exchange happened, MB and the reader don't know yet that Leonide is at odds with B-E, so it seems like the revelation is that, as a respected member of B-E, Leonide volunteered to run point on this operation bc of a personal grudge, but if the purpose of the plan was to coerce someone into saving her family, sounds like she kept this as hush-hush as possible, obscuring Farai's presence/identity from anyone in B-E who might put two and two together.
that's also why it's a big deal to them to not be identified as the people who tried to save Leonide and succeeded in rescuing her children. the armed security teams after them are hoping to find them by identifying Janity and Tula, not Farai, Naja, or Sofi. as far as B-E is concerned, Farai doesn't exist (on this torus or anywhere), and possibly, they're only remotely aware of Mensah's existence