thinking of calling a pollutant "widow's breath" in the context of ludmilla waiting thousands of years at the door for someone to walk through, a mourning marya setting up a toy shop of the repurposed remnants of a war that exhausted itself into ending, the straka as a war machine repurposed from the corpses of a struggling people.
a poison turning hope into grief and grief into resentment and resentment into hatred and hatred into a self-perpetuating cycle. forever wars that would never have been waged, or never for so long, without an outside entity who has something to gain from the conflict and something to gain from the lifeless rubble.
a society that venerates unmitigated chaos and destruction with the money to fund their goals despite their senselessness. a colonial force that sees changes it enacts upon others as heroism without caring to look back at the suffering it has so carelessly wrought. rulers who step on the necks of their population and whose power corrupts all who seek it so the status quo remains unchanged. a real estate baron.
marya and ludmilla. the braid of zood and zern. untapped resources and a society in desperate need of them. something to steal and something to sell and someone to use. pointless suffering you never would have chosen for yourself and that you'd end if someone weren't taking your every hope away from you. portals turned into barriers and traps and weapons. invasion and pollution and discarding that which still has life.
grief and its corruption.
[I turn to the audience] The villain is capitalism.
[I do a full 360 back to the audience] The villain is also imperialism.
[I do jazz hands] The villain, coincidentally, is the war machine.
[I do a cool magic trick] The villain is the uNITED STA– [I am dragged kicking and screaming off the stage by a comically large hook]
