#victim of the system/perpetrator of the system myself and i get the best monologues in a show that’s made up of 80% monologue by volume and

[cream-and-tea]

heyyy don’t mean to bother you but did you know that um. You, now - the ones listening to my idling progress from back home in Glottage - you’re telling yourselves; Val cannot possibly be growing angry over something like this. How dare she? The hypocrite. How can this thing, this monster, this battle-saint, possibly find any kind of righteous anger in her twisted and repurposed heart for the lives of the fallen foe? How does our terrible Val think she can justify any kind of anger at the sight of the flattened and buried corpses of enemy civilians and enemy children, when we’ve already been listening to her murder police officers, soldiers and townsfolk single-handedly in turn? How can she be furious when we’ve heard her butcher her way through the little old ladies of the CLS in the hopeless effort to murder her own faraway mother? (Mockingly) See? You can be sacred and yet self-aware. Yes, I am culpable. I am dreadful. I have been responsible for great atrocities and I will commit a great many more before I’m done. And still - I am growing furious, as I walk through the devastation of this town. Because the wound of Sutler’s Weald is not like any wound I would make. It’s clumsy, it’s crude. It’s thoughtless. I begin to tell myself, as I walk - I wouldn’t have murdered them like this. I would have been kinder. I would have killed them quickly or gracefully, and there would have been beauty and strangeness in the manner of it. And even that’s all deception, even if I had been cruel and slow and lingering in the massacre of these innocent people, upon my whim - I would at least have looked them in the eyes, and I would have borne the weight of my cruelty. If they’d asked me to, I could have killed this town beautifully. And I’d have borne witness to the horror, and I’d have rejoiced in it - and it would have been considerably less vile and ugly than this. The ones back home, the ones who are listening in, I don’t think they know what they’ve done here. The line of connection between the victim and the victimiser, the sacrifice and the god - it’s long, and tangled, and indistinct. A god should not be able to avert her eyes. What a terrible thing it must be, to be monstrous and not even know it. And even if all of this is lies, even if I am just as bad and just as careless as the people back home who did this to Sutler’s Weald… …well, then, let me hate them, pure and simply, for being just as bad as me, because people - -people should be kinder than the gods that eat them. The town square is largely intact. A few burning cars, a single shrine and statue to some goddess of victory, her snapped-off arm raised in imagined triumph. I sit down upon the pavement in the ruined heart of the town, and I tell the dead people of Sutler’s Weald beautiful lies. I tell them that they survived, in their hundreds - miraculously and inexplicably, dodging the bombs. Not a single victim, not one death. An act of divine mercy. When that doesn’t work, I tell them that they were buried properly, according to whatever rites or customs they happen to cherish. When that doesn’t work, I try and turn them into my mother again, in the hopes of making the dead people hateful to me. When that doesn’t work, I tell them that I’m sorry. I tell them I wish they still had ears to become all the wondrous imaginings I had in store for them. I tell them… …that all things considered, they deserved a better avenging and foreign god, a better tormentor, a better oblivion, than the one that was forced upon them. (With cold fury) I tell them- I will find a way to give them something better.