@okaycallmefred
Bored didn’t even begin to encapsulate the restlessness Pandora felt. Being voiceless, bodiless, dead, left her with little to do but cling on to her sense of self and sanity through sheer force of stubbornness.
Her telepathy was the only freedom she had left and even that was weak. It took years before she stretched her reach enough to call out to her heir, inserting herself into her dreams, whispering promises of greatness, showing her the future that could be hers, if only she’d come and see what was waiting in the Vaults.
Pandora had no doubt she would follow the directions of her dreams. Romana had the naivety of youth, the curiosity of a renegade and the childish need to be accepted by someone, which she certainly wasn’t going to get from anyone else at the Academy.
But she wasn’t there, not yet, and Pandora was far beyond patience. She was alone, in the deepest recesses of the Matrix, as far as she could get from the masses of dead minds, for fear of losing all individuality, becoming just another string of facts and histories in the greatest repository of knowledge in the Universe.
It had taken centuries of meddling until she’d been happy with the result, until she’d created the perfect vessel for her own ambitions and really, the worst of it was she wasn’t even able to see what she’d made, only feel the distant echoes of her mind and trust the plan would work.
She’d waited for millennia. She could wait for Romana the next Imperiatrix a little longer. She had to.