Quoted By:
First: have you dealt with something like this before? Yes. Have you come out the other side? Yes. You have been Ramona Birdwell and Rudy Whatshisface and Claudia Fawkins- are still Claudia Fawkins, maybe. (Hopefully she's okay right now.) You have been Richard, or vice-versa. You have been, briefly, beetles. You have been an in retrospect suspicious number of large reptilian creatures, generally angry and hungry and of an end-the-world-type disposition, and you have by and large wrangled them down. Gil might have helped with one or two, but you wrangled them down. The only difference in the present moment, then, is that of scale, and it doesn't sound so bad put like that. Not when your little manse is expanding steadily. It could be a large room, now.
>[+3 ID: 10/14]
Second: have you dealt with something of this scale before? Have you surmounted anything equally insurmountable? Of course you have. Pat warned you to never, ever, ever mess with the Managers, or they'd surely torture-killnap you, and what did you do on your very first meeting? You banished them back to their stupid snake HQ without breaking a sweat. Pat (and Madrigal, and Eloise, and Richard, and Gil, and everybody) told you that nobody could ever blow up Headspace, that it was too big and scary and complicated and Management-filled, and it was all of those things. Except you made it all the way to the end without dying, while only being tortured a little, and you fooled dozens of Management, and you talked down annoying Ellery once and for all, and your brain was blasted with tens of thousands of cubic feet of solid Law, but you survived. You're almost there. Your miniature manse is nearly fully manse-size, though lacking in detail.
>[+3 ID: 13/14]
Third, do you deserve to win? Yes. You've never done anything wrong in your life. And more than that, you've done plenty of good things, too. Heroic things. You saved Pat's life, didn't you? You rescued Madrigal, didn't you? (Or got close enough?) You rescued Guppy, even, from the foul clutches of the Wind Court. You rescued Gil and then you got him a body and a place to stay and a fixed brain and a life back. A better one than what he had. He even agrees that it's better. And now you are going to save the actual lives of thousands of people, and end the tragic torment of thousands of others, for real. Actually for real, like a heroine would do. There is no future where this will not happen. It <span class="mu-i">will.</span>
>[+3 ID: 14/14]
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