#I feel like she'd fit RIGHT in with all the Tural stuff

[elizabethrobertajones]

5 and 11 :)

How do they feel about Wuk Lamat looking up to them as a mentor figure? Did this attitude change as the story progressed?

Frog's ended up with a LOT of mentees over time, from one off moments being shadowed for an afternoon in one discipline or another, to realising she's sort of accidentally helped shaped the twins' entire personalities for better or worse (moooostly better).

Wuk Lamat showed up at a good time when there was room for her emotionally and also time to care about such things. I think Frog was already drilling her on axe technique while she was still loitering around Sharlayan.

She wasn't quite so certain about the political side of things because she knew so little about Tural and knows how wobbly politics can be even when you feel like you're on the right side, so she was holding off any judgement about how Wuk Lamat really fit into all that until they got out there and had a lay of the land, and also she was banning Alphy from pontificating too much on the situation before he knew more XD She seemed far more frightened than she was letting on, and Frog couldn't tell if that was just Being A Teenager And Untested, or if there was some great evil lurking at the heart of all this that Wuk Lamat couldn't face alone or mention and the situation was much more dire than anyone was saying (Erenville being unreadable was completely unhelpful).

Once she'd met Gulool Ja Ja, Frog understood things a lot better and knew she just needed to impart the WoL magic sauce to Wuk Lamat and was really impressed that in many early situations she already seemed to know the right answer even if she wasn't confident in it (since we started with the Laser Eye Bird Boat). That made it a lot easier to just relax into the contest and lead by example of having fun and being yourself, mostly to help Wuk Lamat get over the yips rather than teach her anything substantial, because it was clear to Frog she had the right path already and just needed to be pushed onto it when she was uncertain, and courage in her convictions.

What was their initial impression of Sphene? How did this change as the story progressed?

.... does anyone have a WoL who didn't immediately distrust her? Listen to Alisaie :P

Once Frog got to understand the Endless concept she was immediately suspicious that it was what Sphene was since she was behaving so inhumanly (walking about in the pouring rain in a little shiny dress) and unaccompanied when there were beafts out there. And she had no retainers or obvious second in command, whereas every leader Frog's ever met who was worth anything had a squad of guys with personalities following behind them, guarding them and both advising them and letting them bounce ideas off them, as well as enacting their whims for them. Like. Normal human need for other people.

Sphene was obviously involved in her people's lives but she was doing it all by herself, like, individual house visits? The way she was a single shining saintly figure was so incredibly suspicious. Frog was worrying the regulators were doing some sort of mass mind control to keep everyone complacent and besotted with their ruler, at first, and then once she realised she was an Endless, she knew it was more that she was a mascot and the face of a much larger, worse thing: a terrible system that had all the living humans in its grasp. Oh well! there's always a trial named after the expansion! :)

I think part of her post-MSQ to do list is to read up on the historical Sphene and get a better idea of who she had been before, because she wants to know more about the actual person who she only saw little glimpses of, and historical Alexandria is really interesting, especially after seeing so many recreations of it and glimpses of what it had been, compared to the society in Solution 9. It's all SO weird even after the cyberpunk stuff and high technology she's already seen.